Climate Change

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AP Newsbreak: Obama looks at climate engineering

 

Apr 8 10:55 AM US/Eastern

By SETH BORENSTEIN

AP Science Writer

 

 

CNN Meteorologist: Man-made Global Warming Theory "Arrogant"CNN Meteorologist: Man-made Global Warming Theory ‘Arrogant’

 

'Not Evil Just Wrong': Documentary Says 'Propaganda Fueling Global Warming Hysteria'

 

WASHINGTON (AP) - The president's new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth's air.

John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.

 

"It's got to be looked at," he said. "We don't have the luxury of taking any approach off the table."

 

Holdren outlined several "tipping points" involving global warming that could be fast approaching. Once such milestones are reached, such as complete loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it increases chances of "really intolerable consequences," he said.

 

Twice in a half-hour interview, Holdren compared global warming to being "in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog."

 

At first, Holdren characterized the potential need to technologically tinker with the climate as just his personal view. However, he went on to say he has raised it in administration discussions.

 

Holdren, a 65-year-old physicist, is far from alone in taking geoengineering more seriously. The National Academy of Science is making climate tinkering the subject of its first workshop in its new multidiscipline climate challenges program. The British parliament has also discussed the idea.

 

The American Meteorological Society is crafting a policy statement on geoengineering that says "it is prudent to consider geoengineering's potential, to understand its limits and to avoid rash deployment."

 

Last week, Princeton scientist Robert Socolow told the National Academy that geoengineering should be an available option in case climate worsens dramatically.

 

But Holdren noted that shooting particles into the air—making an artificial volcano as one Nobel laureate has suggested—could have grave side effects and would not completely solve all the problems from soaring greenhouse gas emissions. So such actions could not be taken lightly, he said.

 

Still, "we might get desperate enough to want to use it," he added.

 

Another geoengineering option he mentioned was the use of so-called artificial trees to suck carbon dioxide—the chief human-caused greenhouse gas—out of the air and store it. At first that seemed prohibitively expensive, but a re-examination of the approach shows it might be less costly, he said.

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April 11, 2009

A simpler solution?

Mark Roth

 

An Obama administration scientist thinks it is desirable to shoot pollutants into the earth's upper atmosphere in order to reduce the supposed effects of the sun's rays on global temperatures. It occured to me that a simpler solution was available. You might say it is Occam's Razor in action.

 

I can't believe that these genius scientists have so completely missed the obvious solution--remove pollution controls from automobiles.

 

This will accomplish a few things all at once:

 

1) put sulphur in the atmosphere;

 

2) reduce the cost of manufacture of cars;

 

3) reduce the sales price of cars;

 

4) increase the gas mileage and improve efficiency; thereby

 

5) reducing operating costs; not to mention,

 

6) reducing national oil and gas consumption; which, in turn,

 

7) reduces the costs of production and delivery of goods and services; which, among other things,

 

8) reduces the cost of food and electricity; which

 

9) allows for increased spending for travel and dining out, which....

 

We would save the costs of fueling and replacement of the ICBMs slated to launch debris into the atmosphere, thereby avoiding an increase in the defense budget for necessary replacements, although it could be argued that Obama, seeing no need for missile defense, would not regard replacement as necessary, so that saving would have to be deferred to a future administration.

 

 

I could go on, but you get the point.

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April 14, 2009

Al Gore Really is Stupid

Richard Baehr

 

Yesterday I attended the Cubs home opener, as I do most seasons. At scheduled game time of 1: 20, the temperature was in the mid 30s, windy, with a steady rain. The game start was delayed an hour, and the rain lasted through the first 3 or 4 innings. All in all, a perfect day for baseball in Chicago (the Cubs won 4-0, on a combined one hitter by starter Ted Lilly and three relievers). This late home opener -- April 13th, and the late start to the season on Sunday, April 5th, was a result of the World Baseball Classic, which pushed back the start of the Major League baseball season by a week.

 

If you were cold at Wrigley Field yesterday (so far the new owners have not renamed the park Ameritrade Stadium), there are warmer days ahead. Al Gore, speaking to a near empty theatre in Chicago a few weeks back, on a bitterly cold day of course (he seems to bring this weather with him everywhere he speaks) assured the few true believers willing to pony up to hear him that by mid century, as a result of global warming, the Cubs could be playing baseball in February.

 

Really? There are many people who have overrated Al Gore, but this level of stupidity needs to be examined. The February average temperature in Chicago is 33 high, 17 low. Even Al Gore's most hysterical model for temperature change by the year 2100, is for a 6 degrees centigrade shift, or 10 degrees Fahreneheit. So by mid century, take half of that increase, or 5 degrees fahrenheit. Would baseball be routinely played in an environment where the average high temperature was 38,and the average low was 22? These average temperatures, of course require swallowing Gore's whopper of a 6 degree centigrade increase in global temperatures by 2100. In the last 150 years, all that global warming we have been hearing about, has raised world temperatures by 0.44 degrees centigrade.

 

Al Gore grew up in Tennessee and Washington DC. His northern exposure was due to his "child of a famous person affirmative action" admission to Harvard (Gore's father was a US Senator). I doubt that Al Gore ever sat through an opening day at Wrigley Field or Fenway Park, when the weather was as it was in Chicago yesterday. And I will wager that neither his heirs nor anybody else will get to sit through baseball in Chicago in February 2050.

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Energy Secretary Offers Dire Global Warming Prediction

Speaking at the Summit of the Americas in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, Steven Chu says some islands could disappear if water levels rise as a result of greenhouse-gas induced climate change.

 

By Major Garrett

FOXNews.com

Sunday, April 19, 2009

 

PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago -- Caribbean nations face "very, very scary" rises in sea level and intensifying hurricanes, and Florida, Louisiana and even northern California could be overrun with rising water levels due to global warming triggered by carbon-based greenhouse gases, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Saturday.

 

Chu's comments followed meetings with environmental ministers attending the fifth Summit of the Americas. He did not shy away from the most perilous predictions about the potential effects of global warming.

 

He said global temperatures have already risen by 0.8 degree Centigrade, that another 1 degree increase was certain to occur and "there's a reasonable probability we can go above 4 degrees Centigrade to 5 and 6 more."

 

Chu painted a dire picture of the implications.

 

"So imagine a world 6 degrees warmer. It's not going to recognize geographical boundaries. It's not going to recognize anything. So agriculture regions today will be wiped out," Chu said.

 

"I think the Caribbean countries face rising oceans and they face increase in the severity of hurricanes. This is something that is very, very scary to all of us. The island states in the world represent -- I remember this number -- one-half of 1 percent of the carbon emissions in the world. And they will -- some of them will disappear," he added.

 

Chu said the United States would not be spared, either.

 

"Let me state what the official IPCC (the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) prediction is: It (sea levels) could go up as much as three-quarters of a meter in this century, but there is a reasonable probability it could be much higher than that," Chu said.

 

He said a rise in levels of one meter, coastal areas around Florida around Louisiana would move much farther inland.

 

"Lots of area in Florida will go under. New Orleans at three-meter height is in great peril. If you look at, you know, the Bay Area, where I came from, all three airports would be under water. So this is -- this is serious stuff. The impacts could be enormous," he said.

 

Conservative climate change skeptics immediately denounced Chu's assessment of the threat and potential consequences of global warming.

 

"Secretary Chu still seems to believe that computer model predictions decades or 100 years from now are some sort of 'evidence' of a looming climate catastrophe, said Marc Morano, executive editor of ClimateDepot.com and former top aide to global warming critic Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla.

 

"Secretary Chu's assertions on sea level rise and hurricanes are quite simply being proven wrong by the latest climate data. As the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute reported in December 12, 2008: There is 'no evidence for accelerated sea-level rise.'"

 

Morano said hurricane activity levels in both hemispheres of the globe are at 30 years lows and hurricane experts like MIT's Kerry Emanuel and Tom Knutson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration "are now backing off their previous dire predictions."

 

He said Chu is out of date on the science and is promoting unverified and alarming predictions that have already been proven contrary.

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April 24, 2009

Global Warmists' Sly Polar Disorder

By Marc Sheppard

 

 

If there’s one thing climate alarmists have become quite good at, it’s retrofitting both their computer models and the climate phenomena those models predict whenever they fail to do so correctly. And whether projecting increases in temperature, sea levels or atmospheric carbon dioxide – that means often. But some of the most brazen intellectual corruption warmists have committed under fire concerns the sometimes polar opposite trends of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice.

 

Back in 2005, NASA attempted to excuse the failure of their climate models to predict continued southern ice expansion as an omission of the “snow-to-ice conversion” process in their programming. Once that algorithm was incorporated, they insisted, their models properly recognized the phenomena as completely consistent with warming predictions, and they offered this assurance:

 

“A new NASA-funded study finds that predicted increases in precipitation due to warmer air temperatures from greenhouse gas emissions may actually increase sea ice volume in the Antarctic’s Southern Ocean. This adds new evidence of potential asymmetry between the two poles, and may be an indication that climate change processes may have different impact on different areas of the globe.”

Two years later, alarmists everywhere were screaming about what horrors the opening of the Northwest Passage would portend. It seems the lowest level of Arctic ice since satellite measurements began nearly 30 years ago had actually created the fabled Arctic Ocean shipping lane that had eluded explorers from John Cabot in 1497 to Henry Hudson in 1609 and beyond. That could only mean one thing --- frightened pundits warned -- global warming of unprecedented magnitude was unquestionably upon us.

 

But as I pointed out then, while it was true that satellite photos had found an ice-free corridor along Canada, Alaska and Greenland and Northern Hemisphere ice at its lowest level since such images were taken in 1978, it was also true that Antarctic ice levels (Southern Hemisphere) were at record highs for that same period. And that fact was being completely ignored in the headlines.

 

Consequently -- all eyes were directed to the catastrophe looming in our northern waters.

 

Fortunately for realists, since the Northwest Passage hysteria of 2007, Arctic ice has made a rapid comeback, as you can see from this DMI Centre for Ocean and Ice graph, constructed from Ocean and Sea Ice, Satellite Application Facility data. In fact, the 2009 Arctic ice extent appears to be well on track to exceed the previous four years.

 

 

 

So why do we continue to hear warnings about receding Arctic ice? How is that possible when the extent is quickly approaching its 1979-2000 mean? Simple -- the rules have changed again. It’s no longer the area of the ice that counts, but rather the volume. You see, thicker winter ice is better able to survive the summer and in turn help cool the planet while reflecting sunlight back into space. And, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), “This year, ice older than two years accounted for less than 10% of the ice cover at the end of February.”

 

So there’s a new metric in town -- The ice that has been forming at a record pace since the 2007 record low simply doesn’t count because it’s not yet as thick and “effective” as older ice.

 

And that nonsense somehow gives cover to a mainstream media (MSM) that, despite continually expanding ice, dutifully repeat the retrofitted analysis in headlines the likes of Arctic ice is thinner than ever according to new evidence from explorers and Arctic ice continues to shrink and thin and of course Arctic will be ice-free within a decade.

 

Pretty slick, huh?

 

Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, ice area is nearly 30% above normal and last year managed to set another record maximum. Sounds like great news. But for some strange reason, the MSM have again all but ignored all that southern in favor of the northern ice.

 

Perhaps that’s about to change. You see, just as in 2005, the greenhouse gas crowd have come up with an explanation for global warming’s polar opposition. But this time, they’re not compelled to blame “snow-to-ice conversion” or any similar modeling oversight. And no perilous expeditions await intrepid green explorers in order to challenge the quality of the growing ice. No, this time warmists can blame the disparity entirely on their favorite villain -- mankind.

 

Now, you’re probably wondering just how even alarmist logic might reconcile mankind’s accountability for shrinking (even though it isn’t) ice in the North and simultaneous expanding ice in the South. Here’s how:

 

A study published Wednesday by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) confirms that Antarctic ice is indeed continuing to expand. But does that suggest there’s no global warming taking place? Quite the contrary, insists lead author John Turner. Actually, there’s another phenomenon that’s temporarily canceling out warming’s effects -- the hole in the ozone layer. That’s right, the “depletion of the protective ozone layer has altered wind patterns and caused temperatures in most of the southern continent to fall so that more cold air flows over the Southern Ocean, freezing the water.”

 

And according to the report, that accounts for every bit of southern hemisphere ocean ice cover increase over the past 30 years. Strangely, the report puts that growth at about 1% per decade, while the NSIDC calculates that rate at nearly 5%. But why quibble? I’m sure it must have been an honest mistake.

 

Anyway, here’s the real beauty of this new study.

 

As Dr. Turner explains:

"While there is increasing evidence that the loss of sea ice in the Arctic has occurred due to human activity, in the Antarctic, human influence through the ozone hole has had the reverse effect and resulted in more ice.”

 

Outstanding play, that.

 

Point One -- Our gas-guzzling SUVs and coal-fired power stations release CO2 into the atmosphere. Point Two -- According to more than a few scientists those additional molecules are wholly or partially to blame for the late 20th century warming period. Point Three -- Our air-conditioners, hairsprays and deodorants once released chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) into the atmosphere. Point Four -- Most scientists blame their stratospheric decomposition for depletion of the planet’s vital Ozone Layer and the Ozone hole in the polar vortex over Antarctica.

 

Conclusion -- The selfish actions that melt northern sea ice would do the same to southern sea ice were it not for yet another group of our selfish actions. What exquisite eco-perfection.

 

Mind you, BAS’s is not an entirely new theory. In April of last year, a joint study by the University of Colorado at Boulder, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA also predicted that “Ozone Hole recovery may reshape Southern Hemisphere Climate Change and amplify Antarctic warming.” But it would appear that somehow, the political potential of the ice extent correlation took a while to sink in.

 

Of course, as with all things which dare stall the symptoms of the impending global warming doom predicted by their infallible climate models, this one too will be conveniently short-lived and therefore depicted to in no way preclude immediate and extreme action. In 1987, CFCs were banned under an international treaty called the Montreal Protocol. As CFCs have rather long atmospheric lifetimes, scientists predict another 50 years before all those previously released fully dissipate from the stratosphere, allowing ozone concentrations, and the Ozone layer, to stabilize.

 

Says Turner: "We expect ozone levels to recover by the end of the century, and by then there is likely to be around one-third less Antarctic sea ice."

 

Of course there is, Doc.

 

And as soon as the already 9-year-old Modern Solar Minimum we’re evidently experiencing ends, normal sunspot activity will resume. And when the current 20-30 year cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation ends, Pacific Ocean surface temperature reduction will end with it.

 

And all that natural cooling will leave more substance frozen at both poles, and significantly less substance to the already gossamer anthropogenic global warming theory.

 

But in the meantime, I doubt we'll wait much longer for the MSM to suddenly discover Antarctica.

 

 

 

 

Marc Sheppard is the editor of AT’s forthcoming Environment Thinker.

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All of this global warming (conveniently now "climate change") hysteria started with Al Gore's movie. How is it that he will not debate the issue with anyone? What do you think that says about him and his theories?

 

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April 24, 2009

House Democrats shield Gore from debate on warming

Thomas Lifson

 

The scandalous refusal of Al Gore to debate his contentions on global warming continues today, as House Democrats reportedly shielded him from testifying alongside Lord Christopher Monckton in a high profile hearing today. Climate Depot has an exclusive report:

 

UK's Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claimed House Democrats have refused to allow him to appear alongside former Vice President Al Gore at high profile global warming hearing on Friday April 24, 2009 at 10am in Washington. Monckton told Climate Depot that the Democrats rescinded his scheduled joint appearance at the House Energy and Commerce hearing on Friday. Monckton said he was informed that he would not be allowed to testify alongside Gore when his plane landed from England Thursday afternoon.

 

Sooner or later, it will become obvious to most Americans that a case so weak it cannot be debated with an informed skeptic is not worth wrecking the economy for.

Edited April 24, 2009 by MC

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I was wondering about that too.

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Gore, gored.

 

It's 29 pages long (but very large print). It's Lord Monckton's answers to Gore's assertions.

 

I heard Lord Monckton on the radio the other day and he said that he was allowed to speak before Congress a few years ago, and he believes that the reason they won't let him come back is because they know he's correct. Imagine if the "global warming" or "climate change" had nothing to do with our gasoline, lightbulbs, or lifestyles? Then what? See? They NEED this to be true. Too many people are making billions off this "climate change" phenomenon. I know I'm a huge cynic, but I've lived through the eras of giving up paper bags for plastic bags - and now going back! I lived through the decade of the global cooling scare. This has just been more perfectly engineered and managed. And because of the internet - more people have access to this misinformation.

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May 04, 2009

Discovered: 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas

James Lewis

Good news for America undermines the green energy agenda. The Wall Street Journal reports a huge new discovery of natural gas --- a fossil fuel so clean even liberals can stand it.

 

"CADDO PARISH, La. -- A massive natural-gas discovery here in northern Louisiana heralds a big shift in the nation's energy landscape. After an era of declining production, the U.S. is now swimming in natural gas."

 

"Even conservative estimates suggest the Louisiana discovery -- known as the Haynesville Shale, for the dense rock formation that contains the gas -- could hold some 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. That's the equivalent of 33 billion barrels of oil, or 18 years' worth of current U.S. oil production. Some industry executives think the field could be several times that size.

 

... Huge new fields also have been found in Texas, Arkansas and Pennsylvania. One industry-backed study estimates the U.S. has more than 2,200 trillion cubic feet of gas waiting to be pumped, enough to satisfy nearly 100 years of current U.S. natural-gas demand."

 

Good news, right? It's good for consumers, it's good for the country and the economy, and it's good for the world's resources. It's a great compliment to those who have worked hard for the technical advances that made this discovery possible. It shows (again!) that better exploration techniques pay off in huge new discoveries. A dollar invested in natural gas exploration pays off a heck of a lot more than the same dollar in Green Fantasyland.

 

But ... it's bad for the Fear Industry ... it's bad for our media airheads, who have to think of whole new scare headlines ... it's bad for the Green Doom Brigade ... it's bad for that brilliant new all-electrical vehicle ... it's terrible for Governor Arnie's vision of a Hydrogen Economy for California ... and it's very upsetting to all the suckers who have fallen for the global warming scam.

 

Bottom line: Good for real people, bad for Greenophobiacs.

 

I'll take that tradeoff.

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May 13, 2009

The Coming Ice Age

By David Deming

 

Those who ignore the geologic perspective do so at great risk. In fall of 1985, geologists warned that a Columbian volcano, Nevado del Ruiz, was getting ready to erupt. But the volcano had been dormant for 150 years. So government officials and inhabitants of nearby towns did not take the warnings seriously. On the evening of November 13, Nevado del Ruiz erupted, triggering catastrophic mudslides. In the town of Armero, 23,000 people were buried alive in a matter of seconds.

 

For ninety percent of the last million years, the normal state of the Earth's climate has been an ice age. Ice ages last about 100,000 years, and are punctuated by short periods of warm climate, or interglacials. The last ice age started about 114,000 years ago. It began instantaneously. For a hundred-thousand years, temperatures fell and sheets of ice a mile thick grew to envelop much of North America, Europe and Asia. The ice age ended nearly as abruptly as it began. Between about 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, the temperature in Greenland rose more than 50 °F.

 

We don't know what causes ice ages to begin or end. In 1875, a janitor turned geologist, James Croll, proposed that small variations in Earth's orbit around the Sun were responsible for climate change. This idea enjoyed its greatest heyday during the 1970s, when ocean sediment cores appeared to confirm the theory. But in 1992, Ike Winograd and his colleagues at the US Geological Survey falsified the theory by demonstrating that its predictions were inconsistent with new, high-quality data.

 

The climate of the ice ages is documented in the ice layers of Greenland and Antarctica. We have cored these layers, extracted them, and studied them in the laboratory. Not only were ice ages colder than today, but the climates were considerably more variable. Compared to the norm of the last million years, our climate is remarkably warm, stable and benign. During the last ice age in Greenland abrupt climatic swings of 30 °F were common. Since the ice age ended, variations of 3 °F are uncommon.

 

For thousands of years, people have learned from experience that cold temperatures are detrimental for human welfare and warm temperatures are beneficial. From about 1300 to 1800 AD, the climate cooled slightly during a period known as the Little Ice Age. In Greenland, the temperature fell by about 4 °F. Although trivial, compared to an ice age cooling of 50 °F, this was nevertheless sufficient to wipe out the Viking colony there.

 

In northern Europe, the Little Ice Age kicked off with the Great Famine of 1315. Crops failed due to cold temperatures and incessant rain. Desperate and starving, parents ate their children, and people dug up corpses from graves for food. In jails, inmates instantly set upon new prisoners and ate them alive.

 

The Great Famine was followed by the Black Death, the greatest disaster ever to hit the human race. One-third of the human race died; terror and anarchy prevailed. Human civilization as we know it is only possible in a warm interglacial climate. Short of a catastrophic asteroid impact, the greatest threat to the human race is the onset of another ice age.

 

The oscillation between ice ages and interglacial periods is the dominant feature of Earth's climate for the last million years. But the computer models that predict significant global warming from carbon dioxide cannot reproduce these temperature changes. This failure to reproduce the most significant aspect of terrestrial climate reveals an incomplete understanding of the climate system, if not a nearly complete ignorance.

Global warming predictions by meteorologists are based on speculative, untested, and poorly constrained computer models. But our knowledge of ice ages is based on a wide variety of reliable data, including cores from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. In this case, it would be perspicacious to listen to the geologists, not the meteorologists. By reducing our production of carbon dioxide, we risk hastening the advent of the next ice age. Even more foolhardy and dangerous is the Obama administration's announcement that they may try to cool the planet through geoengineering. Such a move in the middle of a cooling trend could provoke the irreversible onset of an ice age. It is not hyperbole to state that such a climatic change would mean the end of human civilization as we know it.

 

Earth's climate is controlled by the Sun. In comparison, every other factor is trivial. The coldest part of the Little Ice Age during the latter half of the seventeenth century was marked by the nearly complete absence of sunspots. And the Sun now appears to be entering a new period of quiescence. August of 2008 was the first month since the year 1913 that no sunspots were observed. As I write, the sun remains quiet. We are in a cooling trend. The areal extent of global sea ice is above the twenty-year mean.

We have heard much of the dangers of global warming due to carbon dioxide. But the potential danger of any potential anthropogenic warming is trivial compared to the risk of entering a new ice age. Public policy decisions should be based on a realistic appraisal that takes both climate scenarios into consideration.

 

David Deming is a geophysicist and associate professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma.

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June 24, 2009

After Global Warming

By Larrey Anderson

 

Science and ideology don't mix. They never have and they never will. The house of cards that is the science behind "climate change" is collapsing at exactly the same time it is being imposed by the Obama administration and Congress as an ideological "truth." America is facing the perfect storm of an imploding scientific theory that will be enforced by the rule of law.

 

Make no mistake: the big bad wolf of truth is about to blow the straw house of global warming to bits. This is why there was a sudden shift, in the last nine months, from the use of "man made global warming" to "climate change" by the proponents of the theory.

 

The scientific tug of war over whether or not the planet is heating or cooling has been going on for over 100 years. The difference between the past and our current situation is that governments around the world are passing (or attempting to pass) draconian laws and enforcing (or attempting to enforce) authoritarian treaties in order to "regulate" the planet's temperature.

 

The predictions of impending doom are nothing new. Business and Media Institute published an article titled "Fire and Ice" that details the media's historical treatment of the debate. The article includes these two charts of historical time lines that say it all:

 

 

I predicted months ago (in a couple of different places), "Man made global warming" would be replaced with the new term "climate change." The reason for this shift: the proponents of man made global warming are having a tough time with the evidence.

 

The original hypothesis foretold, and the computer models affirmed, an exponential increase in temperatures was being caused by the exponential increase in man made green house gases. The exponential increase in CO2 is, apparently, occurring; but the exponential increase in temperature (predicted as a result of the increase in CO2) is not.

 

The earth's overall temperature in the last several years has either remained steady or slightly decreased -- depending on which side of the issue is interpreting the data. No one is maintaining that the world is getting warmer and warmer every single year, which was the initial prediction.

 

Nevertheless, the current administration is risking America's economic future on "green" energy in an effort to solve an unproven crisis. The cap and trade legislation is moving ahead in spite of the fact that the United States is already one of the leading nations in curtailing CO2 output.

 

Other countries, which are rapidly expanding their manufacturing base, are doing exactly the opposite. China, for example, now uses more coal for producing power than the US, Europe, and Japan combined. President Obama, on the other hand, has openly called for the destruction of the coal industry in the United States.

 

Obama wants to build windmills instead:

 

We're going to have to, I think, invest heavily in clean energy. And if we have a cap and trade system, we can generate $150 billion over ten years to invest in solar and wind and biodiesel and train people to build windmills and build solar panels and make buildings more energy efficient. And make alternative fuels.

There are two problems with the President's approach. Windmills don't reduce the amount of CO2 (if that is really the issue) and windmills don't provide nearly the amount of energy promised.

 

The President has promised to pump billions of dollars into new "green" energy systems. Hundreds of companies will lay claim to the federal dollars and America will soon have a new Silicon Valley that produces windmills and solar panels. The problem with this strategy is that, absent subsidies and regulations, there is no real market anywhere in the world for these products.

 

So while America fails to provide inexpensive and reliable energy sources that would attract and hold real manufacturing in the United States, countries like, China, Japan, India (and even most countries in Europe) will move, full steam ahead, with fuels including nuclear, coal, and natural gas. These are far more efficient forms of energy production than wind or solar.

 

Look down the road America. In ten years, energy prices in the United States are going to go through the roof. China, by comparison, will have less expensive (and more abundant) energy, cheaper labor, and fewer regulations. Who, in his or her right mind, would start a new manufacturing company in the US when faced with such obstacles?

 

How much will this new cleaner energy cost the average citizen? CNN recently reported:

 

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that under a hypothetical cap and trade law, this would cost a household an average of $1,600 a year for the first ten years...

 

This means that every family in America will be paying more money for less reliable energy.

 

Obama's proposal is based on environmental ideology -- not on science. He has proposed a system that is guaranteed, in the long run, to provide fewer jobs and more expensive energy for all Americans.

 

That is a lot of change ... and no hope.

 

Larrey Anderson is a writer, a philosopher, and submissions editor for American Thinker. He is the author of The Order of the Beloved , and the new memoir , Underground: Life and Survival in the Russian Black Market.

[Hihomumio 168]

I wish that they would realize that since they aren't positive about what is going on with climate change they shouldn't take any drastic actions in any direction until they are positive that action will help, not harm us. My instincts say that we really do need to wait.

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I wish that they would realize that since they aren't positive about what is going on with climate change they shouldn't take any drastic actions in any direction until they are positive that action will help, not harm us. My instincts say that we really do need to wait.

Write to your Congressman. This isn't about saving the planet. This is about money. Al Gore got rich by having a stake in the companies that make this kind of new technology, then scaring the population into buying it. Or bullying people. I call them "environazis". Who can argue against harming the planet? Gore won't debate scientists, he just preaches chicken little stuff and escalates the alarm. It's easier to just go along with him and his cronies than it is to actually stand up and fight them. They're a huge lobby. One thing is for sure - if this passes, investing in the companies that get the business would seem to be a smart move.

 

I just wish our lawmakers would insist on either smaller "bills", or enough time to digest the information and discuss it.

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The Cap and Tax Fiction

Democrats off-loading economics to pass climate change bill.

 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has put cap-and-trade legislation on a forced march through the House, and the bill may get a full vote as early as Friday. It looks as if the Democrats will have to destroy the discipline of economics to get it done.

 

Despite House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman's many payoffs to Members, rural and Blue Dog Democrats remain wary of voting for a bill that will impose crushing costs on their home-district businesses and consumers. The leadership's solution to this problem is to simply claim the bill defies the laws of economics.

 

Their gambit got a boost this week, when the Congressional Budget Office did an analysis of what has come to be known as the Waxman-Markey bill. According to the CBO, the climate legislation would cost the average household only $175 a year by 2020. Edward Markey, Mr. Waxman's co-author, instantly set to crowing that the cost of upending the entire energy economy would be no more than a postage stamp a day for the average household. Amazing. A closer look at the CBO analysis finds that it contains so many caveats as to render it useless.

 

For starters, the CBO estimate is a one-year snapshot of taxes that will extend to infinity. Under a cap-and-trade system, government sets a cap on the total amount of carbon that can be emitted nationally; companies then buy or sell permits to emit CO2. The cap gets cranked down over time to reduce total carbon emissions.

 

To get support for his bill, Mr. Waxman was forced to water down the cap in early years to please rural Democrats, and then severely ratchet it up in later years to please liberal Democrats. The CBO's analysis looks solely at the year 2020, before most of the tough restrictions kick in. As the cap is tightened and companies are stripped of initial opportunities to "offset" their emissions, the price of permits will skyrocket beyond the CBO estimate of $28 per ton of carbon. The corporate costs of buying these expensive permits will be passed to consumers.

 

The biggest doozy in the CBO analysis was its extraordinary decision to look only at the day-to-day costs of operating a trading program, rather than the wider consequences energy restriction would have on the economy. The CBO acknowledges this in a footnote: "The resource cost does not indicate the potential decrease in gross domestic product (GDP) that could result from the cap."

 

The hit to GDP is the real threat in this bill. The whole point of cap and trade is to hike the price of electricity and gas so that Americans will use less. These higher prices will show up not just in electricity bills or at the gas station but in every manufactured good, from food to cars. Consumers will cut back on spending, which in turn will cut back on production, which results in fewer jobs created or higher unemployment. Some companies will instead move their operations overseas, with the same result.

When the Heritage Foundation did its analysis of Waxman-Markey, it broadly compared the economy with and without the carbon tax. Under this more comprehensive scenario, it found Waxman-Markey would cost the economy $161 billion in 2020, which is $1,870 for a family of four. As the bill's restrictions kick in, that number rises to $6,800 for a family of four by 2035.

 

Note also that the CBO analysis is an average for the country as a whole. It doesn't take into account the fact that certain regions and populations will be more severely hit than others -- manufacturing states more than service states; coal producing states more than states that rely on hydro or natural gas. Low-income Americans, who devote more of their disposable income to energy, have more to lose than high-income families.

 

Even as Democrats have promised that this cap-and-trade legislation won't pinch wallets, behind the scenes they've acknowledged the energy price tsunami that is coming. During the brief few days in which the bill was debated in the House Energy Committee, Republicans offered three amendments: one to suspend the program if gas hit $5 a gallon; one to suspend the program if electricity prices rose 10% over 2009; and one to suspend the program if unemployment rates hit 15%. Democrats defeated all of them.

 

The reality is that cost estimates for climate legislation are as unreliable as the models predicting climate change. What comes out of the computer is a function of what politicians type in. A better indicator might be what other countries are already experiencing. Britain's Taxpayer Alliance estimates the average family there is paying nearly $1,300 a year in green taxes for carbon-cutting programs in effect only a few years.

 

Americans should know that those Members who vote for this climate bill are voting for what is likely to be the biggest tax in American history. Even Democrats can't repeal that reality.

[Hihomumio 168]

I wish that they would realize that since they aren't positive about what is going on with climate change they shouldn't take any drastic actions in any direction until they are positive that action will help, not harm us. My instincts say that we really do need to wait.

Write to your Congressman. This isn't about saving the planet. This is about money. Al Gore got rich by having a stake in the companies that make this kind of new technology, then scaring the population into buying it. Or bullying people. I call them "environazis". Who can argue against harming the planet? Gore won't debate scientists, he just preaches chicken little stuff and escalates the alarm. It's easier to just go along with him and his cronies than it is to actually stand up and fight them. They're a huge lobby. One thing is for sure - if this passes, investing in the companies that get the business would seem to be a smart move.

 

I just wish our lawmakers would insist on either smaller "bills", or enough time to digest the information and discuss it.

 

 

I did it. And I also emailed Markey too.

Edited June 25, 2009 by Hihomumio

[MC 1]

 

A 309 page amendment was added to this bill at 3:09 a.m.!!

 

The "Bill of the Century" was passed UNREAD!

 

Isn't it about time we changed this sort of thing? We as the people can change this by voting out everyone who is in Washington to "play politics" instead of representing us!

 

Now it's time to write to your Senators. I'm sure the bill they get will be changed from the one that passed in the House. Maybe we can get them to read it?

[TubaGirl 7]

EPA May Have Suppressed Report Skeptical Of Global Warming

 

 

The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.

 

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."

 

The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message to a staff researcher on March 17: "The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward... and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision."

 

The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be a independent review process inside a federal agency -- and echoes criticisms of the EPA under the Bush administration, which was accused of suppressing a pro-climate change document.

 

Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, told CBSNews.com in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. "It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else," Carlin said. "That was obviously coming from higher levels."

 

E-mail messages released this week show that Carlin was ordered not to "have any direct communication" with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed that his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic.

 

"I was told for probably the first time in I don't know how many years exactly what I was to work on," said Carlin, a 38-year veteran of the EPA. "And it was not to work on climate change." One e-mail orders him to update a grants database instead.

 

For its part, the EPA sent CBSNews.com an e-mailed statement saying: "Claims that this individual’s opinions were not considered or studied are entirely false. This Administration and this EPA Administrator are fully committed to openness, transparency and science-based decision making. These principles were reflected throughout the development of the proposed endangerment finding, a process in which a broad array of voices were heard and an inter-agency review was conducted."

 

Carlin has an undergraduate degree in physics from CalTech and a PhD in economics from MIT. His Web site lists papers about the environment and public policy dating back to 1964, spanning topics from pollution control to environmentally-responsible energy pricing.

 

After reviewing the scientific literature that the EPA is relying on, Carlin said, he concluded that it was at least three years out of date and did not reflect the latest research. "My personal view is that there is not currently any reason to regulate (carbon dioxide)," he said. "There may be in the future. But global temperatures are roughly where they were in the mid-20th century. They're not going up, and if anything they're going down."

 

Carlin's report listed a number of recent developments he said the EPA did not consider, including that global temperatures have declined for 11 years; that new research predicts Atlantic hurricanes will be unaffected; that there's "little evidence" that Greenland is shedding ice at expected levels; and that solar radiation has the largest single effect on the earth's temperature.

 

If there is a need for the government to lower planetary temperatures, Carlin believes, other mechanisms would be cheaper and more effective than regulation of carbon dioxide. One paper he wrote says managing sea level rise or reducing solar radiation reaching the earth would be more cost-effective alternatives.

 

The EPA's possible suppression of Carlin's report, which lists the EPA's John Davidson as a co-author, could endanger any carbon dioxide regulations if they are eventually challenged in court.

 

"The big question is: there is this general rule that when an agency puts something out for public evidence and comment, it's supposed to have the evidence supporting it and the evidence the other way," said Sam Kazman, general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a non-partisan think tank in Washington, D.C. that has been skeptical of new laws or regulations relating to global warming.

 

Kazman's group obtained the documents -- both CEI and Carlin say he was not the source -- and released the e-mails on Tuesday and the report on Friday. As a result of the disclosure, CEI has asked the EPA to re-open the comment period on the greenhouse gas regulatory proceeding, which ended on Tuesday.

 

The EPA also said in its statement: "The individual in question is not a scientist and was not part of the working group dealing with this issue. Nevertheless the document he submitted was reviewed by his peers and agency scientists, and information from that report was submitted by his manager to those responsible for developing the proposed endangerment finding. In fact, some ideas from that document are included and addressed in the endangerment finding."

 

That appears to conflict with an e-mail from McGartland in March, who said to Carlin, the report's primary author: "I decided not to forward your comments... I can see only one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office." He also wrote to Carlin: "Please do not have any direct communication with anyone outside of (our group) on endangerment. There should be no meetings, e-mails, written statements, phone calls, etc."

 

One reason why the process might have been highly charged politically is the unusual speed of the regulatory process. Lisa Jackson, the new EPA administrator, had said that she wanted her agency to reach a decision about regulating carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act by April 2 -- the second anniversary of a related U.S. Supreme Court decision.

 

"All this goes back to a decision at a higher level that this was very urgent to get out, if possible yesterday," Carlin said. "In the case of an ordinary regulation, these things normally take a year or two. In this case, it was a few weeks to get it out for public comment." (Carlin said that he and other EPA staff members asked to respond to a draft only had four and a half days to do so.)

 

In the last few days, Republicans have begun to raise questions about the report and e-mail messages, but it was insufficient to derail the so-called cap and trade bill from being approved by the U.S. House of Representatives.

 

Rep. Joe Barton, the senior Republican on the Energy and Commerce committee, invoked Carlin's report in a floor speech during the debate on Friday. "The science is not there to back it up," Barton said. "An EPA report that has been suppressed... raises grave doubts about the endangerment finding. If you don't have an endangerment finding, you don't need this bill. We don't need this bill. And for some reason, the EPA saw fit not to include that in its decision." (The endangerment finding is the EPA's decision that carbon dioxide endangers the public health and welfare.)

 

"I'm sure it was very inconvenient for the EPA to consider a study that contradicted the findings it wanted to reach," Rep. James Sensenbrenner, the senior Republican on the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, said in a statement. "But the EPA is supposed to reach its findings based on evidence, not on political goals. The repression of this important study casts doubts on EPA's finding, and frankly, on other analysis EPA has conducted on climate issues."

 

The revelations could prove embarrassing to Jackson, the EPA administrator, who said in January: "I will ensure EPA’s efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and programs, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency." Similarly, Mr. Obama claimed that "the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over... To undermine scientific integrity is to undermine our democracy. It is contrary to our way of life."

 

"All this talk from the president and (EPA administrator) Lisa Jackson about integrity, transparency, and increased EPA protection for whistleblowers -- you've got a bouquet of ironies here," said Kazman, the CEI attorney.

 

 

 

(there's links in the article that didn't cut and past over)

[MC 1]

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July 02, 2009

 

Cap-and-Trade Means Regulate and Subsidize

By Brian Sussman

 

Last week, prior to voting for the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, House Republican Leader John Boehner spent the better part of an hour reading from the 1201-page bill and the associated 300-page addendum, which had been dumped on Congress' door at 3:09AM. He did so, he told The Hill, because he believed "people need to know what's in this pile of s-it."

 

Congressman Boehner was correct. There may be no better description of what's in this phony legislation, designed to supposedly halt global warming.

 

First, a couple quick facts:

 

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, it's a fertilizer. It accounts for a feeble .038 percent of the atmosphere. According to the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, a research wing of the Department of Energy, only 3.2 percent of that thin atmospheric component is created by anthropogenic emissions.

The earth's temperature has only risen 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 150 years, and most of that occurred prior to the 1940s. The Thirties was the hottest decade on record, with 22 of the current 50 states having established their all-time high temperatures during that sizzling ten years. There has been no warming of the earth's climate since 1998, and in the past 18-24 months there has been a slight cooling.

 

Anthropogenic global warming is a myth, and therefore there is no need for the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. Climate change is simply an excuse for another massive government attempt at control and giveaways.

 

For example, buried on pages 1014-1016 of the bill is the "Monthly Energy Refund." According to this plan, for those with a gross income that "does not exceed 150 percent of the poverty line...a direct deposit," of an undisclosed amount of money, will be sent "into the eligible household's designated bank account..."

 

On pages 502-503 we find the "Low Income Community Energy Efficiency Program," whereby grants will be issued "to increase the flow of capital and benefits to low income communities, minority-owned and woman-owned businesses and entrepreneurs..."

 

Further proving this is actually a welfare scheme, on page 973 we discover that for workers who lose their manufacturing jobs because the caps on their companies are too repressive, and their employer either has to shut down, or move operations to the Third World to avoid regulation, the "adversely affected worker" shall receive 70 percent of their prior weekly wage, "payable for a period not longer than 156 weeks." In addition, on pages 986-987 we read the unemployed worker can submit up to $1,500 in job search reimbursements, and get another $1,500 to cover his moving expenses.

And then there are the new federally mandated building codes, which will supersede local rules and regulations. The new codes will be enforced by a green goon squad. On pages 319-324 we read the Secretary of Energy "shall enhance compliance by conducting training and education of builders and other professionals in the jurisdiction concerning the national energy efficiency building code." These EPA badge-wearing G-Men will be funded both through global warming revenues procured through the cap and trade scheme, as well as by $25 million designated annually from the Department of Energy "to provide necessary enforcement of a national energy efficiency building code..." (When I bought my current house, I was required to get an asbestos inspection. They found a tiny bit in the adhesive that was used to put down a floor I was ripping out. Up drives this guy in a BMW, expensive suit, nice shades. He says they have to do an "asbestos removal" required by the government. They took over my house for 3 days, put plastic up everywhere, put some sort of exhaust out the bathroom window (which didn't work and whatever they were pumping out into the AIR actually went down the bathtub drain and clogged my main sewer line), and then I got to pay them $800 (this was in 1996). I can only imagine that the inspectors will say we need to put in - new windows, new light fixtures, new switches, new everything to bring it up to code so we can sell a house (if this is passed). I agree with Boehner on this one. It's total BS!)

 

Oh, but there's more of the stinky stuff Mr. Boehner was referring to. A new office will be created at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the government's primary weather body. If this bill becomes law, NOAA will have a "Climate Service Office," as described on pages 1083-1087 of the document. This new office will "ensure a continuous level of high-quality data collected through a national observation and monitoring infrastructure..."

 

Question: shouldn't NOAA already be doing this? If not, perhaps the idiotic forecasts of gloom and doom from the government's chief global warming forecaster James Hansen, who supposedly relies on NOAA products for his scare tactics, have been incorrect after all, due to corrupt data?

 

Anyone can see through this charade -- the Climate Service Office will ensure that skeptics and deniers are silenced, and that all research will be controlled and monitored to ensure that global warming is the lie of the land.

 

In a further effort to perpetrate this fraud, on page 1102 we discover the "Summer Institutes Program and the Regional Climate Center." According to the bill: "The purpose of the program is to provide training and professional enrichment by providing opportunities for interaction between participants and climate scientists in a research and operational setting to-enable middle school and high school teachers to integrate weather and climate sciences into their curricula: and encourage undergraduate students to pursue further study and careers in weather and climate sciences."

 

This is nothing but government sponsored brainwashing, folks.

 

Thank you Mr. Boehner, for saying it like it is. You, sir, are a great American. Now let's place pressure on the Senate to keep this sucker bill from passing its stinky gas.

[TubaGirl 7]

VCO2-EOR and Carbon Geological Sequestration

 

by Michael Economides and Xina Xie

07/07/2009

 

 

The climate bill passed by Congress on June 26, 2009, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454), has a lot of curious and wishful provisions but none can match the requirement that U.S. reduces its carbon emissions in 2020 by 17% below 2005 levels and by 2050 by 83%. Let’s ignore the rather remote 2050 and look at the situation in the more foreseeable 2020.

 

The bill does not really say how these reductions are to be accomplished. One is the cap and trade, which in spite of its benign title is not really intended to reduce CO2. People and companies can continue business as usual as long as they pay some others who do not emit. Think of this as some sort of indulgence papers, the medieval way of gaining heaven by simply paying and allowed to be a sinner.

 

This will do nothing to remedy global warming. Because the likelihood of moving away from fossil fuels towards others that do not emit CO2 in such short period of time is negligible, the only way that the mandated CO2 reductions can be accomplished is through sequestration (storage.) The solution, proposed by many, is geological sequestration.

 

 

 

One suggestion is to use CO2 for enhanced oil recovery (EOR). It is important to put this idea in perspective in view of the recent legislation but also because of claims and efforts by certain universities and national laboratories to present the obviously overwhelming economic and industrial burden as an opportunity.

 

As of June 2009, the U.S. use of CO2 for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) was 3 billion standard cubic feet per day, equivalent to 63.5 million tons per year, of which 83% is from natural underground CO2 reservoirs. Only about 10.8 million tons come from industrial (anthropogenic) processes.

 

According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the U.S. emitted 6.55 billion tons of CO2 by fossil energy utilization in 2005 (the world figure was 30.53 billion tons in 2005). EIA also projected that the U.S. CO2 emission from fossil energy will be 7.65 billion tons in 2020. If Bill H.R. 2454 is to be complied we have calculated that a total of 13.353 billion tons of CO2 from 2010 to 2020 must be stored, assuming that CO2 will be stored starting from 2010, as shown in the following table.

 

 

[go to the link to see the table]

 

 

Take any arbitrary year, e.g. 2015 and therefore 1.222 billion tons must be stored somehow. The current EOR use of 63.5 million tons is about 5 percent of the 2015 mandated amount and most likely it will become smaller. By 2020, unless CO2 EOR projects pick up at an unprecedented pace, they will amount to less than 3 percent of the EOR to be stored.

 

In fact, with total (not annual) US oil reserves currently estimated by EIA at 21.5 billion barrels, if a huge part of 10% of this could be enhanced via carbon dioxide injection, the amount would represent on the order of 2 billion barrels, or about 250 million tons of CO2, about 20% of the mandated target for annual 2015 (not total) CO2 reduction.

 

This is the best possible scenario of CO2 use that would fit both the mandated sequestration and application as an opportunity for EOR. For true sequestration, injecting into a closed system, the problem is orders of magnitude more cumbersome. Our calculations suggest that sequestering the CO2 emitted from just one 500 MW coal power plant for a 30 year period would require a reservoir whose pore volume is larger than Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay field, the US largest. This will be a subject of future publications.

 

The irony is that much of the national debate and even discussions among some technical professionals have centered around the logistics and costs of capture, transmission and injection, ignoring the obvious: the physical impossibility to store the volumes of the mandated CO2 reduction. EOR applications cannot be the solution for any significant part of the total volume of CO2 that needs to be managed. More than 95% of the mandated volume to be sequestered simply cannot be done. So, the only way this bill can have any effect is by the witchcraft, feel-good of cap and trade.

 

The question is why Congress would enact legislation whose presumed provisions of reducing emissions that ostensibly cause global warming simply cannot be physically met at any cost. Studies such as the ones described here are elementary and can be done by young undergraduate engineering students.

 

Economides is a professor at the University of Houston and Xie is a research professor at the University of Wyoming

[MC 1]

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July 7, 2009

Al Gore invokes spirit of Churchill in battle against climate change

 

Ben Webster, Environment Editor and Robin Pagnamenta, Energy Editor

 

Al Gore invoked the spirit of Winston Churchill today by encouraging political leaders to follow the example of Britain’s wartime leader and unite their nations to fight climate change.

 

The former US vice-president accused politicians around the world of exploiting ignorance about the dangers of global warming. He said lack of awareness among voters allowed governments to avoid taking difficult decisions.

 

Speaking in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment , sponsored by The Times, Mr Gore said: “Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War II.” He added: “We have everything we need except political will but political will is a renewable resource.” Mr Gore admitted that it was difficult to persuade the public that the threat from climate change was as urgent as the threat during World War 2.

 

“The level of awareness and concern among populations has not crossed the threshhold where political leaders feel that they must change.

 

“The only way politicians will act is if awareness raises to a level to make them feel that it’s a necessity.” Mr Gore, who brought the issues around climate change to a mass audience with the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, said the great hope for the future lay in the high level of environmental awareness among young people.

 

He said sceptics who refused to believe dramatic cuts in carbon emissions could be delivered should consider the example of the young scientists in the Nasa team which put a man on the moon on 1969.

 

“The average age of scientists in the space centre control room was 26, which means they were 18 when they heard President Kennedy say he wanted to put a man on the moon in 10 years. Neil Armstrong did it eight years and two months later.” He said future generations would put one of two questions to today’s adults.

 

“It will either be ’what were you thinking, didn’t you see the North Pole melting before your eyes, didn’t you hear what the scientists were saying?’ “Or they will ask ’how is it you were able to find the moral courage to solve the crisis which so many said couldn’t be solved?’.” Sir David King, the Government’s former chief scientist and now director of the Smith School, also berated politicians for failing to follow up their statements on climate change with a clear programme of action.

 

“I do think it’s relatively easy for a prime minister to make a speech on climate change which sounds committed and very much more difficult for that prime minister to persuade the Treasury to put the finance behind that commitment to make it a reality.

 

“There is a long distance in government between saying what you think needs to be said and then doing in terms of making budgets available.” Sir David expressed disappointment that no senior British politician had taken up his invitation to address a conference attended by the world’s top climate scientists, senior business leaders and the presidents of the Maldives and Rwanda.

 

“I tried to pull in a lot of IOUs. But where was the Lord Mandelson [the Business Secretary], where was Ed Miliband [the Energy and Climate Change Secretary]? Where was David Cameron? Where was William Hague?”

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July 09, 2009

In Search of an Intelligent Energy Policy

By Andrew Foy and Brenton Stransky

 

 

No responsible energy policy can go forward that is rooted in the belief that man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions significantly contribute to global warming or "climate change" as it is now called. This article will address data from the historical temperature record as well as climate models that refute the theory that: CO2 causes or to a large extend amplifies climate change.

 

Based on the following data it appears that the only thing consistent about the climate is that it is always changing. Unfortunately, the Waxman-Markey bill, recently passed by the House, sets the foundation for an energy policy guided by the premise that man-made CO2 emissions are causing climate change and must be reduced regardless of the economic consequences.

 

In the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" Al Gore presented data from the Vostok Ice-Core, which was a collaborative ice-drilling project between Russia, the United States, and France at the Russian Vostok station in East Antarctica. It yielded the deepest ice core ever recovered, reaching a depth of 3,623 meters. By careful analysis of this historic ice core, researchers reconstructed trends of temperature and CO2 concentrations over a period of 420,000 years.

 

The authors of the Vostok project concluded that during glacial inception (the beginning of a global cooling period) and termination (the start of a global warming period), temperature goes up or down first followed by an increase or decrease in CO2.1 The conclusions from the original Vostok report have been reproduced from other ice-core samples and it is now well accepted that during glacial inception and termination that atmospheric CO2 content lagged behind shifts in air temperature by 800 to 5,000 years!

 

The ice-core data is interesting on two accounts: one, it demonstrates that the simple cause and effect relationship presumed by the current man-made climate change hypothesis - "that changes in CO2 levels cause changes in the temperature" - is actually the other way around; two, it demonstrates that the earth has experienced significant warming periods in the past - much warmer than the current period at a time when man wasn't burning fossil fuels!

 

The following is a graph of CO2 (Green), temperature (Blue), and dust (Red) measured from the Vostok Ice-core as reported by Petit et al., 1999 - you can disregard the red graph for purposes of this discussion. It is clear from the graph that the current warming period (at time 0 on the horizontal axis) is the coolest and most stable warming period recorded - within this warming period, which began 10,000 years ago there have been several warmer periods all of which occurred before man started burning fossil fuels

 

Even over the last century where we have undisputedly experienced a warming trend, which is not unusual based on the historical temperature record - there has been two sustained periods where CO2 levels were increasing and yet the planet was cooling. The first period occurred roughly from 1940 to 1975 at which time many scientists were concerned about the prospects of an impending ice-age. The June 24, 1974 TIME Magazine cover read - The Cooling of America.

 

A Newsweek column from April 28, 1975 stated, "Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climate change [cooling], or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climate uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climate change once the results become grim reality." Enough said.

 

The second period of cooling is occurring now, represented by the graph from Joe D'Aleo - combining temperature data from NASA's Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) (Blue)and the UK's Hadley Climate Research Unit (Hadley CRUT3v) (Pink)with CO2 data from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii (Green).

 

The most recent cooling trend, displayed on the above graph, is well outside the predictions of the models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC (shown below). The IPCC has been the most influential body in driving energy policy in countries around the world and uses climate models like the current Waxmen-Markey bill to make projections regarding how much warming we can expect to save by cutting CO2 emissions to certain levels. The following graph from the Science and Public Policy Institute displays the real temperature trend from 2001-2009 versus the IPCC projections. This graph emphasizes that assumptions used by the IPCC models - that a certain level of CO2 causes a certain degree of warming - must be incorrect!

 

It would appear from the data that CO2 is unlikely to be the culprit responsible for precipitating or significantly contributing to climate change. The skeptical position can be summed up well by Professor William Happer's statement to the US Senate on February 25, 2009. Happer is the Cyrus Fogg Bracket Professor of Physics at Princeton University. He was also the Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy (DOE) from 1990-93, where he supervised all of DOE's work on climate change. His statement includes the following:

 

The climate is warming and CO2 is increasing. Doesn't this prove that CO2 is causing global warming through the greenhouse effect? No, the current warming period began about 1800 at the end of the little ice age, long before there was an appreciable increase of CO2. There have been similar and even larger warmings several times in the 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age. These earlier warmings clearly had nothing to do with the combustion of fossil fuels. The current warming also seems to be due mostly to natural causes, not to increasing levels of carbon dioxide. Over the past ten years there has been no global warming, and in fact a slight cooling. This is not at all what was predicted by the IPCC models.

 

Is there still a possibility that man-made CO2 could be significantly contributing to climate change? - yes, but this theory seems less and less likely given the recent data and the failure of the models to accurately predict temperature change. It's also important for the public to remember that the burden of proof is not on those skeptical of the man-made climate change theory but rather on the scientists and policymakers who believe an invisible gas - that humans exhale from their lungs with every breath - will cause a climate catastrophe. In the meantime, the one catastrophe we can be sure of is the growing national debt and this is why any responsible energy policy should focus on making use of all the natural resources here at home including oil, natural gas, and coal to grow our economy in this struggling time.

A recent study from EnergyTomorrow.org projected that the economic impacts of private sector spending in 2020 - if drilling bans were lifted on the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), Outer Continental Shelf (Pacific and Atlantic offshore and the Eastern Golf of Mexico), and the Rocky Mountains - would result in the creation of 110,000 - 160,000 jobs and 22 - 33 trillion dollars in revenue. Lifting these drilling bans would appear to be a reasonable place for an intelligent energy policy to begin.

 

Andrew Foy, M.D. and Brent Stransky are co-authors of the forthcoming book, "The Young Conservative's Field Guide: Facts, Charts and Figures to Convince Your Friends." They can be contacted through their website at www.aHardRight.com.

 

1. Petit, JR et al. Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antartica. Nature. 1999:399:429-436.

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July 11, 2009

Obama's Wrapping Paper

David Heath

Perhaps by accident, but more likely by design, President Obama may have very well found the new cover he can apply to the statist ambitions he has for America: "Saving the Planet." If Obama is somehow able to get his much desired Cap and Trade legislation, already passed by the House, through Senate, it would open the door for all sorts of new laws and regulations that would seriously compromise the way of life that American have been accustomed to.

 

The reality of the Cap and Trade bill is, that anything that uses ANY amount of energy, either in the item's production, or in the item's use, would be subject to regulations. As the "science of global warming" is based on unverifiable and unquantifiable data anyway, it opens the door for huge amounts of corruption, as anyone with an agenda can manipulate and skew any data to make it support any argument they want to put forth as truth. And because they are able to wrap it up in the feel-good "big green bow" of "saving the planet," many of us in this country will willingly eat it up without thought to what the real implications are.

 

The sky is potentially the limit with this one. Lawmakers, under the guise of saving the planet, could potentially do all sorts of things we never thought possible before. Certain anti-gun legislators have not been able to take arms away from the public due to the Second Amendment. However, swaddled in the wrapping paper of saving the planet, those same lawmakers could use their "environmental concerns" to perhaps illegalize, or at least highly regulate, the discharge of firearms, citing the emissions gunshots release, without a need to even touch the Second Amendment.

 

"Global Warming" wrapping paper will serve Obama for some time. In this paper, he will no doubt wrap every controversial and anti-American idea he has in store for us. Where we live, what we do for a living, what we eat, what we drive, whether we smoke or not... All of these things, and much more, could potentially fall under the regulation of a new climate protection bill. Unfortunately, a large potion of the American population will see their freedoms slowly disappearing, but will nonetheless cheer their Messiah for making the hard choices to save the climate, not realizing that his true intention, far from saving the environment, is to consolidate and retain his own power.

Edited July 13, 2009 by MC

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Gore: U.S. Climate Bill Will Help Bring About 'Global Governance'

Climate Depot Exclusive

Friday, July 10, 2009By Marc Morano – Climate Depot

 

Former Vice President Al Gore declared that the Congressional climate bill will help bring about “global governance.”

 

“I bring you good news from the U.S., “Gore said on July 7, 2009 in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment, sponsored by UK Times.

“Just two weeks ago, the House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey climate bill,” Gore said, noting it was “very much a step in the right direction.” President Obama has pushed for the passage of the bill in the Senate and attended a G8 summit this week where he agreed to attempt to keep the Earth's temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees C.

 

Gore touted the Congressional climate bill, claiming it “will dramatically increase the prospects for success” in combating what he sees as the “crisis” of man-made global warming.

“But it is the awareness itself that will drive the change and one of the ways it will drive the change is through global governance and global agreements.” (Editor's Note: Gore makes the “global governance” comment at the 1min. 10 sec. mark in this UK Times video.)

 

Gore's call for “global governance” echoes former French President Jacques Chirac's call in 2000.

On November 20, 2000, then French President Chirac said during a speech at The Hague that the UN's Kyoto Protocol represented "the first component of an authentic global governance."

“For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument of global governance,” Chirac explained. “From the very earliest age, we should make environmental awareness a major theme of education and a major theme of political debate, until respect for the environment comes to be as fundamental as safeguarding our rights and freedoms. By acting together, by building this unprecedented instrument, the first component of an authentic global governance, we are working for dialogue and peace,” Chirac added.

Former EU Environment Minister Margot Wallstrom said, "Kyoto is about the economy, about leveling the playing field for big businesses worldwide." Canadian Prime Minster Stephen Harper once dismissed UN's Kyoto Protocol as a “socialist scheme.”

 

'Global Carbon Tax' Urged at UN Meeting

 

In addition, calls for a global carbon tax have been urged at recent UN global warming conferences. In December 2007, the UN climate conference in Bali, urged the adoption of a global carbon tax that would represent “a global burden sharing system, fair, with solidarity, and legally binding to all nations.”

“Finally someone will pay for these [climate related] costs,” Othmar Schwank, a global tax advocate, said at the 2007 UN conference after a panel titled “A Global CO2 Tax.”

Schwank noted that wealthy nations like the U.S. would bear the biggest burden based on the “polluters pay principle.” The U.S. and other wealthy nations need to “contribute significantly more to this global fund,” Schwank explained. He also added, “It is very essential to tax coal.”

The 2007 UN conference was presented with a report from the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment titled “Global Solidarity in Financing Adaptation.” The report stated there was an “urgent need” for a global tax in order for “damages [from climate change] to be kept from growing to truly catastrophic levels, especially in vulnerable countries of the developing world.”

 

The tens of billions of dollars per year generated by a global tax would “flow into a global Multilateral Adaptation Fund” to help nations cope with global warming, according to the report.

Schwank said a global carbon dioxide tax is an idea long overdue that is urgently needed to establish “a funding scheme which generates the resources required to address the dimension of challenge with regard to climate change costs.”

'Redistribution of wealth'

 

The environmental group Friends of the Earth advocated the transfer of money from rich to poor nations during the 2007 UN climate conference.

"A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources,” said Emma Brindal, a climate justice campaigner coordinator for Friends of the Earth.

 

[Editor's Note: Many critics have often charged that proposed climate tax and regulatory “solutions” were more important to the promoters of man-made climate fears than the accuracy of their science. Former Colorado Senator Tim Wirth reportedly said, "We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing — in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.]

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SATURDAY, JULY 11, 2009

Skeptics From Around the Globe-APS Letter

UNITED STATES

 

An Open Letter to the Council of the American Physical Society

 

As physicists who are familiar with the science issues, and as current and past members of the American Physical Society, we the undersigned urge the Council to revise its current statement on climate change as follows, so as to more accurately represent the current state of the science:

 

Greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, accompany human industrial and agricultural activity. While substantial concern has been expressed that emissions may cause significant climate change, measured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20th -21st century changes are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today. In addition, there is an extensive scientific literature that examines beneficial effects of increased levels of carbon dioxide for both plants and animals.

 

Studies of a variety of natural processes, including ocean cycles and solar variability, indicate that they can account for variations in the Earth’s climate on the time scale of decades and centuries. Current climate models appear insufficiently reliable to properly account for natural and anthropogenic contributions to past climate change, much less project future climate.

 

The APS supports an objective scientific effort to understand the effects of all processes – natural and human -- on the Earth’s climate and the biosphere’s response to climate change, and promotes technological options for meeting challenges of future climate changes, regardless of cause.

 

Dr. Salvatore Torquato

Professor of Chemistry and the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, Materials Institute and Applied & Computational Mathematics, Princeton University, Fellow APS; 2009 APS David Alder Lectureship Award in the Field of Material Physics

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Another Meteorologist Dissents: 'Does carbon dioxide drive the climate? The answer is no!'

Friday, July 10, 2009By Marc Morano – Climate Depot

 

Chief Meteorologist David Paul, a holder of the AMS (American Meteorological Society) Seal of Approval and the upgraded AMS CBM (Certified Broadcast Meteorologist) holds a degree in meteorology and is currently at Louisiana's KLFY TV10, dissented from man-made global warming fears in July 2009.

 

“Is there a climate crisis? I say, absolutely not!” Paul wrote in a July 8, 2009 article on KLFY TV 10's website. “Does carbon dioxide drive the climate? The answer is no! Natural cycles play a much bigger role with the sun at the top of the list,” Paul explained. “There's much more driving the climate than carbon dioxide. There are so many variables at work, known and unknown, that not a single person, or computer model, can predict the future climate for sure,” Paul wrote.

“Then there's El Nino Southern Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation, the Arctic Oscillation, the Pacific-North American Teleconnection, Milankovitch forcing, ocean variations, and so on and so forth. Is there any way to model all these variables? Again, the answer is no! The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, has tried and failed!” Paul added.

 

"Just know this; climate change has occurred in the past, is occurring now, and will occur in the future. Trying to pinpoint that change on carbon emissions and human activities...is really a stretch," Paul wrote.

“Since before the industrial revolution the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been rising, up to around 385 parts per million by volume today. That amounts to a miniscule 0.0385% of the atmosphere. Increased CO2 levels are beneficial to plants since they require carbon dioxide to grow. In this experiment, plants exposed to CO2 levels of 1,090 parts per million by volume by far exhibited the most growth,” Paul wrote.

 

“As a forecaster I'll tell you this. Forecasting in the short-term is fairly accurate compared to forecasting long-term. So if these climate models are so far off already, there's really little chance of them being right further out.

For Paul's full article and scientific citations go here or here.

Related Link:

March 2009 U.S. Senate Report: 700 Plus Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Warming Claims.