In the 1980s I found myself traveling all over the United States in the employ of a corporation’s quarterly newsletter. I visited many cities and places, discovering the unfailing courtesy and good will of Americans everywhere I went. One of my favorite places was San Francisco. It is picturesque, sits beside a bay spanned by a marvel of engineering, and has great restaurants, hotels, and other attributes.
Every fall I pray for global warming to intensify. I realize it is supposed to mean the doom of the planet, but I keep thinking about all of the ways in which warm weather is so much more pleasant than the cold. I know that is short-sighted, but despite all of the warnings of disastrous warming, WHERE IS IT? There’s been no warming over the last decade. So what does the concept of “global warming” mean if there is no warming?
In fact, an increasing number of scientists are doubting the alarmist case. Some even–shudder!–doubt that CO2 is driving temperature changes. Writes Lorne Gunther of the National Post:
Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University, says, “It’s practically a slam dunk that we are in for about 30 years of global cooling,” as the sun enters a particularly inactive phase. His examination of warming and cooling trends over the past four centuries shows an “almost exact correlation” between climate fluctuations and solar energy received on Earth, while showing almost “no correlation at all with CO2.”
An analytical chemist who works in spectroscopy and atmospheric sensing, Michael J. Myers of Hilton Head, S. C., declared, “Man-made global warming is junk science,” explaining that worldwide manmade CO2 emission each year “equals about 0.0168% of the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration … This results in a 0.00064% increase in the absorption of the sun’s radiation. This is an insignificantly small number.”
Other international scientists have called the manmade warming theory a “hoax,” a “fraud” and simply “not credible.”
While not stooping to such name-calling, weather-satellite scientists David Douglass of the University of Rochester and John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville nonetheless dealt the True Believers a devastating blow last month.
For nearly 30 years, Professor Christy has been in charge of NASA’s eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily around the globe. In a paper co-written with Dr. Douglass, he concludes that while manmade emissions may be having a slight impact, “variations in global temperatures since 1978 … cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide.”
Moreover, while the chart below was not produced by Douglass and Christy, it was produced using their data and it clearly shows that in the past four years — the period corresponding to reduced solar activity — all of the rise in global temperatures since 1979 has disappeared.
It may be that more global warming doubters are surfacing because there just isn’t any global warming.
lgunter@shaw.ca
National Post
The House and Senate are planning to come back for a lame duck session the week of November 16th. What House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) decide to bring to the floor depends largely on how the elections turn out. There is a rumor that they may attempt quietly to insert a provision to overturn a recent federal court ruling on the Clean Air Act in order to make it easier to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. The U. S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in July overturned the EPA’s Clean Air Interstate Rule. One of the things the court ruled was not permissible under the Clean Air Act was the use of a cap-and-trade program to reduce air pollutants.
On the same day the court ruling was made, the EPA released an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (or ANPR) for regulating carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act. One of the key elements of their plans is to use cap-and-trade. But the court ruling prohibits the EPA from using cap-and-trade, unless of course the Congress changes the Clean Air Act. Hence talk of a little amendment slipped into one of the big omnibus bills that the Congress may pass during the lame duck session.
The public comment period for the ANPR ends on November 28th. People interested in commenting can find a wealth of information at several web sites. The U. S. Chamber of Commerce has a comprehensive one. There is another at the Heritage Foundation.The EPA has a site with all the official documents and a page for filing comments. My colleague, Marlo Lewis, is one of the leading experts on the issue. His recent testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee can be found here.
It will be up to the next President to decide whether to use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. As Marlo discussed in last week’s Digest, a key adviser for Senator Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) campaign recently said that an Obama Administration would use the Act to require emissions reductions. Senator John McCain’s (R-Az.) campaign advisers said that McCain has not decided whether to do so. Both candidates favor enactment of cap-and-trade legislation to reduce emissions by rationing use of coal, oil, and natural gas.
Because the cost will be arriving in electric bills. The amount is noticeably absent from a report released by the Governor's Action Team on Energy and Climate Change formed by Charlie Crist. It details a series of policies required to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions but never mentions paying for it.
Europe would have to rethink its energy policy if Russia, Iran and Qatar go ahead with an OPEC-style cartel on natural gas, the European Commission warned Wednesday.
Russia, Iran and Qatar held talks in Tehran yesterday about forming a cartel for natural gas that would resemble the OPEC cartel for oil. But the structure of the natural gas business makes it unlikely that a gas OPEC would get off the ground anytime soon.
For all the support that the presidential candidates are expressing for renewable energy, alternative energies like wind and solar are facing big new challenges because of the credit freeze and the plunge in oil and natural gas prices.
European climate diplomacy shifted dramatically yesterday when EU member states for the first time demanded that developing nations join the fight against climate change.
For 15 years, European countries insisted that any international climate treaty abide by the doctrine of “common but differentiated responsibilities,” or the principle that developing countries should be exempt from economically painful emissions reductions, because developed nations are largely responsible for the historical buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The United States has refused to accept the doctrine of “common but differentiated responsibilities. In 1998, by a vote of 95 to 0, the Senate voted in favor of the Byrd-Hagel resolution, which resolved that the U.S. should not sign any international agreement to set mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions that did not also set emissions limits on developing countries. The Senate acted on the belief that it made no sense to harm the U.S. economy, and perhaps even drive domestic industry abroad to strategic competitors, given that the developing world’s future emissions would drive up atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases past the “threshold” that scientists say would cause irreversible climate change, even if developed countries somehow managed to reduce emissions 100%.
The Bush administration has conducted its climate diplomacy largely in accordance with the logic of the Byrd-Hagel resolution, much to the chagrin of European nations, who have maintained that developed nations need to set an example before the developing nations should proceed.
That is, until now. Yesterday, the EU Environmental Council (a body of environmental ministers from EU member states) released a statement that developing countries "would have to reduce their emissions by 15 to 30% below business as usual" by 2020 in order for the EU to sign up to a global emissions reductions regime in Copenhagen in December 2009.”
Oil prices fell below $70 a barrel Wednesday as investors shrugged off a looming OPEC production cut after company forecasts suggested the U.S. may be headed for a severe economic slowdown that would crimp demand for crude.
To prevent a financial crisis from turning into an economic calamity, the European Union has pulled the emergency brake on green policies. At last week’s EU summit in Brussels, seven eastern and central European countries, together with Italy, threatened to veto the Union’s climate pact. The rebel governments claimed that the originally agreed goal of cutting the EU’s CO2 emissions by 20% by 2020 was too expensive; economic turmoil and rising unemployment meant that implementing the CO2 goal was no longer affordable.
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