September 2009

In today’s Politico, I take a look at one of the 397 new regulations in the House version of cap and trade legislation. If the bill passes, almost all homes for sale would be required to undergo an environmental inspection. The home cannot be sold until it is up to code.

One unintended consequence could be the end of fixer-upper homes.

Another would be lower home ownership rates. Which, of course, directly contradicts of decades of federal policy.

Yesterday, in State of Connecticut et al. v. American Electric Power et al., the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals decided that states and other plaintiffs have the right to sue five electric utilities – American Electric Power, Cinergy, Southern Co., Excel Energy, and the Tennessey Valley Authority – for creating a ”public nuisance” by emitting CO2 and, thus, contributing to global warming.

With regard to American Electric Power (AEP) and Cinergy, I am tempted to say, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys. These utilities for years have lobbied for carbon cap-and-trade schemes. Instead of opposing climate alarmism, they have helped promote it. Boys, you reap what you sow!  How are you going to deny plaintiffs’ allegations that your CO2 emissions are a public nuisance, when you have repeatedly stated on the record that man-made global warming is a big, big problem?

In the 139-page decision, Judges Joseph McClaughlin and Peter Hall (appointed by Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush respectively) rejected the lower court’s opinion (and the utilities’ argument) that the relief sought by plaintiffs — a gradually decreasing cap on the utilities’ CO2 emissions — raised “non-justificiable political questions.”

In a sane universe, the Appelate Court would have upheld the lower court’s decision. Energy policy is manifestly a political question — perhaps the most politicized issue to come down the pike in decades. If courts and litigators can dictate energy policy (actually, anti-energy policy) to the nation, then constitutional self-government is at an end.

The Court held that granting plaintiffs’ proposed remedy would not “decide overarching policy questions such as whether other industries or emission sources not before the court must also reduce emissions or determine how across-the board emissions reductions would affect the economy and national security.” Rather, the Court said, granting the remedy sought would only require the lower court to “resolve the particular nuisance issue before it” involving just the five utilities in the case (p. 30).

Who do Judges McClaughlin and Hall think they’re fooling? If plaintiffs sue the utilities and win, the precedent they establish would have enormous policy consequences. That’s the whole point. Setting the precedent for additional “public nuisance” litigation to restructure energy markets and the economy is what the case is all about.

Nobody seriously believes that capping the five utilites’ emissions would in itself provide any measurable relief from climate change, or any damages allegedly resulting from climate change. The litigation is either political grandstanding  and ambulance chasing, or it is designed to set the stage for a broader, policy-changing, litigation campaign. 

Once a court actually determines that CO2 emissions are a public nuisance, the same plaintiffs — or others — could argue that nothing less than eliminating AEP and Cinergy’s emissions is adequate to avoid dangerous “tipping points” and reduce “injuries” to the public (p. 8). Logically, if lower emissions is better, zero emissions is best.

Surely there is no shortage of eco-litigation groups willing to press the legal logic as far as it will go. The Center for Biological Diversity, for example, leads a coalition calling itself 350 or Bust. The idea is to use all available legal means to bring atmospheric CO2 concentrations down to 350 parts per million (today’s level is about 387 ppm). Accomplishing that goal would likely require a global depression over many decades. Pardon me if I view the alliance of climate alarmism and judicial activism as one of the biggest public nuisances we face.

It’s easy to suppose that public nuisance litigation will target only major emitters such as coal-burning utilities. But remember, utilities emit CO2 only in the process of serving customers who consume electricity. People powering their factories, lighting their homes, and running their laptops are ultimately to blame for destroying the planet, according to the “science” invoked by plaintiffs. In their worldview, everybody is injuring everybody else. So, shouldn’t everybody have the right sue everybody else?

I am reminded of the South Park Episode, Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow – a parody of the preachy, global warming, Sci-Fi disaster film, The Day After Tomorrow

Stan and Cartman crash a speed boat into the world’s largest beaver dam, flooding the people of Beaverton out of their homes. Later that night, Stan, feeling guilty, asks his parents what’s being done to rescue the flood victims. Stan’s father says that’s not as important as finding out who deserves the blame. Some in South Park accuse George Bush; others accuse Al Qaeda. Stan’s father and other Colorado scientists announce they have found the real culprit: global warming.

Then comes the really bad news: Global warming will strike not the day after tomorrow, as scientists had previously thought, but two days before the day after tomorrow – today! There is panic in the streets, not just in South Park but all around the country. Fearing that global warming will shift the climate into an ice age, Stan’s father dons Arctic weather gear and nearly perishes in the summer heat. 

The Army rescues the Beaverton residents still stranded on their rooftops and ends the global warming panic — but only by blaming the flood on yet another bogeyman: Six-Legged, pincered, “Crab People.” Unable to live with the guilt any longer, Stan confesses to the people of South Park: ”I broke the dam.” One of the adults translates: “Don’t you see what this child is saying … we all broke the dam.” Another adult steps forward and says, “I broke the dam.” Then another and another.

We all emit CO2. We all consume electricity. Even if our utility generates juice from nukes or hydro, we drive CO2-emitting cars and consume goods and services made either directly or indirectly with CO2-emitting fossil energy. According to the “science” underpinning plaintiffs’ lawsuit, we’re all responsible for every damage and harm that anyone can plausibly (or implausibly) blame on global warming — every flood, every eroded beach, every summer dry spell, every tornado, and hurricane, etc. We have met the public nuisance, and it is us!

South Park explains the two-fold appeal of global warming hysteria. First, warmism feeds and legitimizes the desire to punish and blame. It justifies and focuses political indignation. It incites political and legal attack on coal-power plants and oil companies – key sources of our prosperity.

Second, warmism gratifies the need to feel connected to something really big and important, usually on the cheap. It feeds feelings of collective guilt (”we all broke the dam”) while offering a number of easy expiation rituals (”I recyle,” ”I voted for Obama,” “I support cap-and-trade”). 

In light of this, ahem, analysis, we should expect future common law CO2 litigation cases to (a) demand bigger penalties for major emitters and bigger cuts in their CO2 emissions than plaintiffs in State of Connecticut currently demand, and (b) target smaller and smaller entities as public nuisances.

Saluting Norman Borlaug’s scientific, agricultural and humanitarian legacy

“Since when did you become a global warming alarmist?” I kidded Norman midway into our telephone conversation a few weeks before this amazing scientist and humanitarian died.

“What are you talking about?” Dr. Borlaug retorted. “I’ve never believed that nonsense.”

I read a couple sentences from his July 29 Wall Street Journal article. “Within the next four decades, the world’s farmers will have to double production … on a shrinking land base and in the face of environmental demands caused by climate change. Indeed, [a recent Oxfam study concludes] that the multiple effects of climate change might reverse 50 years of work to end poverty.”

I mentioned that my own discussions of those issues typically emphasize how agricultural biotechnology, modern farming practices and other technological advances will make it easier to adapt to any climate changes, warmer or colder, whether caused by humans or by the same natural forces that brought countless climate shifts throughout Earth’s history.

“You’re right,” he said. “I should have been more careful. Next time, I’ll do that. And I’ll point out that the real disaster won’t be global warming. It’ll be global cooling, which would shorten growing seasons, and make entire regions less suitable for farming.”

I was amazed, as I was every time we talked. Here he was, 95 years old, “retired,” still writing articles for the Journal, and planning what he’d say in his next column.

The article we were discussing, “Farmers can feed the world,” noted Norman’s deep satisfaction that G-8 countries have pledged $20 billion to help poor farmers acquire better seeds and fertilizer. “For those of us who have spent our lives working in agriculture,” he said, “focusing on growing food versus giving it away is a giant step forward.”

Our previous conversations confirm that he would likewise have applauded the World Bank’s recent decision to subsidize new coal-fired power plants, to generate jobs and reduce poverty, by helping poor countries bring electricity to 1.5 billion people who still don’t have it. For many poor countries, a chief economist for the Bank observed, coal is the only option, and “it would be immoral at this stage to say, ‘We want to have clean hands. Therefore we are not going to touch coal.'” Norman would have agreed.

“Governments,” he argued,  “must make their decisions about access to new technologies … on the basis of science, and not to further political agendas.” That’s why he supported DDT to reduce malaria, biotechnology to fight hunger, and plentiful, reliable, affordable electricity to modernize China, India and other developing nations.

His humanitarian instincts and commitment to science and poverty eradication also drove his skepticism about catastrophic climate change.

He was well aware that recent temperature data and observations of solar activity and sunspots indicate that the Earth could be entering a period of global cooling. He had a healthy distrust of climate models as a basis for energy and economic policy. And he knew most of Antarctica is gaining ice, and it would be simply impossible for Greenland or the South Pole region to melt under even the more extreme temperature projections from those questionable computer models.

He also commented that humans had adapted to climate changes in the past, and would continue to do so. They would also learn from those experiences, developing new technologies and practices that would serve humanity well into the future.

The Ice Ages doubtless encouraged people to unlock the secrets of fire and sew warm clothing. The Little Ice Age spawned changes in societal structure, housing design, heating systems and agriculture. The Dust Bowl gave rise to contour farming, crop rotation, terracing and other improved farming practices.

Norman’s dedication to science, keen powers of observation, dogged perseverance, and willingness to live for years with his family in Mexico, India and Pakistan resulted in the first Green Revolution. It vastly improved farming in many nations, saved countless lives, and converted Mexico and India from starving grain importers to self-sufficient exporters.

In his later years, he became a champion of biotechnology, as the foundation of a second Green Revolution, especially for small-holder farmers in remote parts of Africa. Paul Ehrlich and other environmentalists derided his ultimately successful attempt to defuse “The Population Bomb” through his initial agricultural advances, and attacked him for his commitment to biotechnology.

His response to the latter assaults was typically blunt. “There are 6.6 billion people on the planet today. With organic farming, we could only feed 4 billion of them. Which 2 billion would volunteer to die?”

The Atlantic Monthly estimated that Norman’s work saved a billion lives. Leon Hesser titled his biography of Borlaug The Man Who Fed the World. Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Greg Conko dubbed him a “modern Prometheus.” Science reporter Greg Easterbrook saluted him as the “forgotten benefactor of mankind.” And the magician-comedy-political team of Penn and Teller said he was “the greatest human being who ever lived.”

He deserved every award and accolade – and merited far more fame in the United States than he received, though he was well known in India, Mexico and Pakistan, where his work had made such a difference.

Norman was also a devoted family man and educator. He served as Distinguished Professor of International Agriculture at Texas A&M University into his nineties. A year and a half ago, he gladly spent 40 minutes on the telephone with my daughter, who interviewed him for a high school freshman English “true hero” paper – and did so just after returning from the hospital and on the one-year anniversary of his beloved wife Margaret’s death.

He told my daughter it was because of Margaret, “and her faith in me and what I was doing, that we were able to live in Mexico, under conditions that weren’t nearly as good as what we could have had in the United States, and I was able to do my work on wheat and other crops.”

I sent him occasional articles, and we talked every few months, about biotech, global warming, malaria eradication, some new scientific report one of us had seen, or some website he thought I should visit. As we wrapped up our early August chat, we promised to talk again soon. Sadly, he entered a hospice and passed away before that could happen.

His mind was “still as clear as ever,” his daughter Jeanie told me, but his body was giving out. To the very end, Norman was concerned about Africa and dedicated to the humanitarian and scientific principles that had guided his life and research, and earned him the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize.

Norman left us a remarkable legacy. But as he told my daughter, “There is no final answer. We have to keep doing research, if we are to keep growing more nutritious food for more people.”

The world, its climate and insect pathogens will continue to change. It is vital that we sustain the incredible agricultural revolution that Norman Borlaug began.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power ∙ Black death.

9/18/2009

Sounding more like Yes Men prankster than president, President Obama spoke of rising seas, floods, drought, and climate refugees. Yet his policies have been far from humorous.

His aim to double generating capacity from wind and other renewable resources sounds similar to President Bush’s goals. Yet to quote George Wallace of the American Bird Conservancy, “To meet (President Bush’s) request that 20 percent of the nation’s energy comes from renewable sources by 2030, the number of turbines would have to increase 30-fold. At current mortality rates, the wind industry would be killing between 900,000 and 1.8 million birds per year.” (Environment and Energy Daily, July 11, 2008)

Obama at least admits that these types of “clean energy” energy haven’t been profitable when he says that the “House of Representatives passed an energy and climate bill in June that would finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy for American businesses…” (emphasis mine). He and I differ on his “profitable” prediction, however. Wind and solar energy have been receiving government subsidies since the ’70s, now at the rate of $23 per megawatt hour. (Coal-fired power only costs around $25 per megawatt hour and receives a 44 cent per megawatt hour subsidy.) Yet renewables still aren’t profitable, as he admits. Gifts to corporations such as GE won’t change that.

The president also boasted of “investing billions to cut energy waste in our homes, buildings, and appliances – helping American families save money on energy bills in the process.” Yet, he has tied the hands of those same families from receiving money from efficiency gains when he has supported guaranteed utilities profits. Decoupled rates, for gas utility service, electric utility service, or both, as twenty states have, guarantee profit levels for utilities despite usage reductions.

The $7 trillion dollar federal debt that these policies are helping to create is definitely not “a future that is worthy of our children.”

Obama Speech to the UN: The Data

by Iain Murray on September 22, 2009

in Blog

Myron has already pointed out how most of what the President claimed were the threats from global warming are exaggerated.  Here’s the data to back that up.

“…[T]he threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing.”  Reality: global mean temperatures increased slightly from 1977 to 2000.  Temperatures have been flat since then.

“Rising sea levels threaten every coastline.”  Reality: sea levels have been rising on and off since the end of the last ice age 13,000 years ago.  The rate of sea level rise has not increased in recent decades over the nineteenth and twentieth century average.

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“More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.”  Reality: there is no upward global trend in storms or floods.

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“More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict in places where hunger and conflict already thrive.”  Reality: there is no upward global trend in major droughts.  Reversals in large-scale cycles have meant that the southward march of the Sahara Desert into the Sahel has been reversed in recent years and the Sahara is now shrinking.

“On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees.”  Reality: some Pacific islanders may want to emigrate to New Zealand or Australia and are claiming that their islands are disappearing as the reason, but shrinkage has been minimal in recent decades because sea level rise has been minimal.

droughts-atollsCharts from SPPI’s Monthly CO2 Reports and from Indur Goklany, “Death and Death Rates Due to Extreme Weather Events: Global and U.S. Trends, 1900–2006,” 2007.

State by State, Selling the Lie

by Joe D Aleo on September 22, 2009

in Science

By Joseph D’Aleo, Fellow of the American Meteorological Society

As part of a well thought out and executed plan to convince the public there is global warming despite the cold and snow records of the last two years, get state climate action plans approved, keep the grant gravy train rolling through the university systems, and get government legislation or carbon control legislation approved that will benefit Wall Street and the government at our expense is underway.

Detailed well produced reports are being dribbled out state by state warning of a ridiculously warm and severe climate future. They are based on the same climate models which have failed miserably in the first decade showing strong warming while the globe cooled, sea levels accelerating up while they have stopped rising and heat records increasing in frequency while we have had fewer heat records in any decade since the 1800s, and disappearing snow while all time snow records occurred in the last two years. But don’t confuse the issue with facts. These reports are timed to affect the decisions made by congress w/r to Cap-and Tax.

Dr. Anthony Lupo reported on one such story in Missouri last month here. He starts “In late July, a document was released by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) regarding the kind of future that Missouri faces as a result of global warming. This is part of a series of reports they’ve issued about climate change in the Midwest. Global warming is an issue that has gained more attention than usual within the last year, culminating in the late June passage by the US House of Representatives of the Waxman – Markey Clean Energy and Security Act. This has stimulated debate about combating climate change.

In the local newspaper, an alarmist scientist from the University of Illinois was quoted that we face a 14 degree Fahrenheit increase in summer temperatures as he relayed information from the UCS document “Confronting Climate Change in the US Midwest”. He stated this as if it were a done deal, especially if we continue emitting carbon dioxide at the same rate we are today. This kind of hyperbole then becomes accepted by the media as reality, and comes with the implication that things are worse than we thought. These exaggerated claims are no doubt behind subsequent alarmist editorials in other major newspapers advocating even more severe measures than Waxman – Markey.” Read more in Tony’s response.

And last week, while I enjoyed a college reunion at my alma mater in Madison, WI, two University of Wisconsin environmental professors published a story in the local newspaper, Study Reveals Dynamic Wisconsin Climate, Past and Future. They start “If the future scenarios being churned out by the world’s most sophisticated computer climate models are on the mark, big changes are in store for Wisconsin’s weather during the next century. Using a realistic estimate of future global carbon emissions, University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists are forecasting significantly warmer winters, altered patterns of precipitation and more severe weather events for the Badger state.” Those changes, according to the Wisconsin researchers, will be layered on a climate that, based on temperature and precipitation measurements from around the state over the past 60 years, has already warmed 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit, on average, and 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter.

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The enlarged image is here.

“Looking into the future, we are anticipating that by 2050 Wisconsin will have an annual mean warming of between 4 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit,” says Dan Vimont, a UW-Madison professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, who, along with colleagues Chris Kucharik, David Lorenz and Michael Notaro, developed estimates of the state’s future climate as well as a chart of climate change in Wisconsin’s recent past.”

Icecap Note: The map above shows the change since 1950, this is the same cherry picking trickery Phil Mote, formerly state climatologist in Washington State and now Oregon did while examining western United States and Canada did. Starting in 1950, a very cold and snowy year at the start of the cold PDO and ending at the warm and dry end of the warm PDO ensured a warming and reduction in western snowpack. When Oregon’s former state climatologist George Taylor pointed out that if he had started 50 years earlier, he would have seen cycles but no trend, George was attacked, when Assistant State Climatologist Mark Albright found the same, he was stripped of his title.

The same holds for Wisconsin, the cold PDO leads to more La Ninas, cold and snow in winter (exhibit A the last two years), spring flooding and severe weather and the warm PDO warmer, less snowy winters. With the 60 year PDO cycle, the temperatures can be seen to cycle up and down. You can see in the following NCDC plots for the North Central, cyclical variations – with some rise in January and July since 1950 but no measurable trends over the whole record.

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Larger image here.

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Larger image here.

The Milwaukee NWS also recently took a look at the long-term temperatures observed for Milwaukee, and calculated the number consecutive days with temperatures above 32F – that is, the minimum temperature for any calendar day had to be above the freezing mark of 32F.  In a rough sense, looking for the number of consecutive days each year that plants had a chance to grow or survive.  We found some interesting trends, but in general, there has been a lengthening of the growing season since the 1960s, but we haven’t exceeded what was observed in some of the years during the perod of 1900 to 1934.

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If your local newspapers have not reported such a story for your state yet, expect one to come soon. Rest assured they are not based on real science and can be dismissed as propoganda, much as the CCSP, a glossy well produced nonsense document full of lies and mistatements, an embarrassment to NOAA. NOAA is complicit in maintaining an issue by manipulating data (allowing 80% stations to drop out, removing urban adjustment and satellite ocean monitoring, allowing 90% of climate station to have poor siting resulting in an artifical warming of 0.75F for the United States and accounting for most of the warming the last century). All this to counter the emerging evidence the changes are natural and cyclical related to the sun and oceans. President Obama will be defending this man-made global warming nonsense and promising the US (that means you and your family) will go to great pain to deal with this non issue. Keep your cards and letters and phone calls coming to congress to urge them to resist taking unneccesary action.  See post and more here.

While this speech is mostly hogwash, I am surprised and delighted to be able to find one thing to praise in it:

Later this week, I will work with my colleagues at the G20 to phase out fossil fuel subsidies so that we can better address our climate challenge

This is the right thing to do, for reasons I explained in my recent paper co-written with Sterling Burnett of NCPA (extract follows jump).

While many governments of developed nations argue for a worldwide reduction in fossil fuel use in order to combat climate change, those same governments also subsidize energy use and production.

In 2001, the countries of the EU-15 (the “old Europe” nations in the European Union) spent $16.77 billion (in 2009 dollars) subsidizing coal and $11.23 billion subsidizing oil and gas.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that developing countries spend around $220 billion annually on subsidies for energy production and consumption, of which $170 billion subsidizes fossil fuels [see Figure I]. Including developed countries, subsidies for energy production and consumption worldwide amount to around $300 billion, the majority of which are for fossil fuels.

Such subsidies reduce energy prices below what the market would set, encouraging greater use and raising emissions levels. Direct subsidies include grants to producers and consumers, government investment in research or infrastructure and preferential loans or tax treatment. Indirect subsidies include trade restrictions, price caps and market regulations that guarantee sales volume and restrict competition.

Many signatories to Kyoto subsidize carbon-based fuel use and production. Such subsidies “tilt the playing field,” discouraging research expenditures by private energy companies in developing alternative energy sources. Producers and consumers of other energy sources then demand subsidies to “level the playing field.” Thus, government intervention causes significant distortions in energy markets.

British Petroleum estimates that countries that subsidize transportation fuel use accounted for 96 percent of the increase in oil demand in 2007.13 Many of them are less-developed nations that subsidize both production and consumption of fuels. The IEA estimates that removing domestic price subsidies in China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Kazakhstan, South Africa and Venezuela would reduce global energy use 3.5 percent and reduce global CO2 emissions 4.6 percent.

U.S. Energy Subsidies.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) calculates that federal energy subsidies amount to $16 billion annually [see Table II]:

In 2007, the federal government spent approximately $5.5 billion on subsidies for the coal, oil and natural gas industries— principally tax breaks for investment — including $3 billion for coal and natural gas, and more than $2 billion for research and development of clean-coal technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal.

The government spent an additional $1.2 billion for electricity production and use (not fuel specific), and $2.8 billion to increase the energy efficiency of homes and businesses.

It spent an additional $5 billion for renewable energy production and use, mostly in the form of tax breaks.

Finally, $1.2 billion went to the nuclear industry.

The EIA found that subsidies doubled from 1999 to 2007, due mainly to expanded subsidies for renewable energy and clean-coal technology.

Policy Recommendations. There are a number of neutral energy policies that could be implemented at the national or international level to reduce subsidized production and use:

International trade talks should include eliminating subsidies for fossil fuel production and consumption.

National budgets should be reviewed with the goal of eliminating programs that encourage energy use.

Subsidies and tax breaks, or tax penalties, for specific energy technologies should be eliminated to remove price distortions in energy markets.

A neutral energy tax policy, for example, would include replacing the federal tax-depreciation schedule for investment in new capital stock with immediate expensing. New equipment almost always produces fewer emissions per unit of output than older equipment.

Changing the depreciation schedule so that new investments could be written off immediately would make it profitable to replace old equipment at a much quicker pace. This simple change could do more to increase energy efficiency throughout the economy than the current complicated expensing regime.

Unfortunately, given the President’s praise for loan guarantees and tax credits elsewhere in the speech, he is failing to pursue a neutral energy tax policy, but I’ll give him due credit for at least addressing half of the market distortion.

Obama Speech to the UN

by Myron Ebell on September 22, 2009

President Barack Obama’s speech on global warming to the United Nations today is based on fantasy.  Here are some quotes from the speech followed by the reality.

“…[T]he threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing.”  Reality: global mean temperatures increased slightly from 1977 to 2000.  Temperatures have been flat since then.

“Rising sea levels threaten every coastline.”  Reality: sea levels have been rising on and off since the end of the last ice age 13,000 years ago.  The rate of sea level rise has not increased in recent decades over the nineteenth and twentieth century average.

“More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.”  Reality: there is no upward global trend in storms or floods.

“More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict in places where hunger and conflict already thrive.”  Reality: there is no upward global trend in major droughts.  Reversals in large-scale cycles have meant that the southward march of the Sahara Desert into the Sahel has been reversed in recent years and the Sahara is now shrinking.

“On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees.”  Reality: some Pacific islanders may want to emigrate to New Zealand or Australia and are claiming that their islands are disappearing as the reason, but shrinkage has been minimal in recent decades because sea level rise has been minimal.

President Obama’s policy prescriptions are energy rationing and energy poverty disguised as growth and prosperity.  The emissions reductions that he promises the United States will make through cap-and-trade legislation are dead in the water in the U. S. Senate and would not survive a second vote in the U. S. House.  If enacted, cap-and-trade would consign the economy to perpetual stagnation and make the U. S. into a second-rate economic power.

His policy prescription for poor countries is to promise them massive “financial and technical assistance”.  The track record of paying off poor countries is that it has lined the pockets of corrupt leaders and bureaucracies with billions and tens of billions of dollars, but has done nothing to help those countries become prosperous.  What these countries need is free markets and abolishing barriers to trade.  The global warming policies advocated by the Obama Administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress would raise trade barriers and foster energy poverty throughout the world.  Energy rationing is not the way forward and is not a message of hope for the poorest people in the world, who lack access to electricity and modern transportation.

Sharon Begley, after a five-year stint at the Wall Street Journal returned to greener pastures at Newsweek in 2007, where she started her career. It was just in time to take part in Newsweek’s embarrassing August 13, 2007 issue “Global Warming is a Hoax” edition.  

The cover story entitled, “The Truth About Denial” contained very little that could be considered ‘truth” by journalistic or scientific standards. In what could surely be considered one of the most one-sided coverage of any important issue in American journalism for decades, Sharon Begley with Eve Conant, Sam Stein, Eleanor Clift and Matthew Philips purported to examine the “well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry that they… created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change.”

The only problem was — Newsweek knew better. Eve Conant, who interviewed Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, was given all the latest data proving conclusively that it was the proponents of man-made global warming fears that enjoyed a monumental funding advantage over the skeptics (a whopping $50 billion to a paltry $19 million for the skeptics). Newsweek contributing editor Robert J. Samuelson, called the piece “fundamentally misleading” and “highly contrived.”

Begley’s next screed was “Climate Change Calculus” in the August 3, 2009 issue, subtitled “Why it’s even worse than we feared.” She begins: “Among the phrases you really, really do not want to hear from climate scientists are: “that really shocked us,” “we had no idea how bad it was,” and “reality is well ahead of the climate models.”[…] Although policymakers hoped climate models would prove to be alarmist, the opposite is true, particularly in the Arctic.”

What is the reality? Well the models are failing miserably, but in the wrong direction. Over the last eight years, the world has cooled in contrast with the forecast rise in all the IPCC scenarios. The Arctic ice extent as of September 20, 2009, climatologically close to the maximum melt date, is 25.6 % greater than the minimum in September 2007.

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 JAXA Arctic Ice Extent

None of the models foresaw the cooling that has taken place the last 7 ½ years.

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Begley also addressed Greenland and sea level rises quoting David Carlson. “…Greenland… is losing about 52 cubic miles per year and that the melting is accelerating. So while the IPCC projected that sea level would rise 16 inches this century, “now a more likely figure is one meter [39 inches] at the least,” says Carlson. “Chest-high instead of knee-high, with half to two thirds of that due to Greenland.” Hence the “no idea how bad it was.””

Other scientists strongly disagree. Ettema et al. (2009) state that “considerably more mass accumulates on the Greenland Ice Sheet than previously thought… which suggests that the Northern Hemisphere’s largest ice sheet may well hang around a whole lot longer than many climate alarmists have been willing to admit.” A 2006 study by a team of scientists led by Petr Chylek of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Space and Remote Sensing Sciences found the rate of Greenland warming in 1920-1930 was about 50% higher than that in 1995-2005, suggesting carbon dioxide ‘could not be the cause’. And Ollier and Pain in August 2009, AIG paper “Why the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets are Not Collapsing” conclude “Variations in melting around the edges of ice sheets are no indication that they are collapsing. Indeed ‘collapse’ is impossible.”

And supporting this non-threat, sea levels have stopped rising in 2005 as the oceans have cooled and contracted, but why let facts get in the way of a good story?

Oceans and the Sun Not CO2

We have reported in earlier stories in this magazine on the importance of natural cycles on the sun and in the oceans in climate change and that these factors should support cooling for the net few decades. There is an increasing body of new peer review support for this.

Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, in New Scientist (2009) attributes much of the recent warming to naturally occurring ocean cycles.

“Little seems out of place in recent times except the predictions”, says Dr Syun Akasofu, Founding Director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and former director of the Geophysical Institute. Aksasofu says multi-decadal oscillations, discovered within the past decade, account for the variability.

Earlier this summer in a paper entitled “Has the climate recently shifted?” Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonsis, mathematicians at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, engaged with the problem that temperatures have failed to follow the predictions made by computer climate models. In the paper, Swanson and Tsonis correlated data from the El Niño/La Niña, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, and the North Pacific Index and found that synchronizations occurred four times: in 1910-20; 1938-45; 1956-60; and 1976-1981. When coupling between the systems was high, climate invariably changed. The recent cooling, which they suggest started in 2001, is an indicator of another phase shift with a cooling that will last for decades.

Alarmist solar scientists Lean and Rind have reluctantly attributed recent cooling to a quiet sun and foresee a repeat from 2014-2019 the minimum of the next cycle. They have not yet come around to the opinion of many solar scientists including those at NASA, that the sun, which has been quieter, longer than any time since the early 1800s, a period called the Dalton Minimum or mini-ice age, the time of Dickens and cold snowy winters in London, much as we saw last winter.

Begley would benefit from reading the widely praised NIPCC report, an ambitious peer review work the scale of the IPCC, coauthored by Craig Idso and Fred Singer, which shows why natural factors like the sun and the oceans, not man, control the climate.

Begley proves that she is not only scientifically but also politically illiterate in the third installment of her latest climate crisis coverage. On September 7, in a piece titled “China and India Will Pay,” she declares “A special place in climate hell is being reserved for India and China.” As CORE’s Paul Driessen put it “400 million Indians and 500 million Chinese still do not have electricity. No electricity means no refrigeration, to keep food and medicines from spoiling. It means no water purification, to reduce baby-killing intestinal diseases. No modern heating and air conditioning, to reduce hypothermia in winter, heat stroke in summer, and lung disease year-round. It means no lights or computers, no modern offices, factories, schools, shops, clinics or hospitals.”

Even the IPCC’s chair, Rajendra Pachauri, has defended India’s refusal to cut its emissions, noting that millions of Indians still lack electricity.

But to the technological elite in their ivory towers, the liberal elitist political leaders in Washington, and their adoring media, their loss is but a small price to pay to save the planet from an imagined crisis, one that offers such a golden opportunity to achieve their real goal as none other than Al Gore admitted “of one world governance.” In their journey there, they show more compassion for the white grizzly bear of the polar region and the snail darter than for the humans. They worry more about population than people.

China and India will make us pay as they take away our jobs and become the technological leaders as we model our government after the failed socialist experiments of an ever-declining Europe and even copy their alternative energy boondoggles that will prove to be the next bubble while we sit on huge rich fields of oil, gas and coal that, along with nuclear, could provide the power to revitalize our industries and put America back on top.

Begley authored the 2007 book “Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain.” I would argue she needs to instead re-train her brain and change her mind.

See post in the Energy Tribune September 15th, 2009 on-line.

The Associated Press is now chiding President Obama for falsely claiming that his proposed tax on uninsured people is not a tax.   It is a tax increase, the AP says, and it would be enforced by the IRS: “Memo to President Barack Obama: It’s a tax. Obama insisted this weekend on national television that requiring people to carry health insurance – and fining them if they don’t – isn’t the same thing as a tax increase. But the language of Democratic bills to revamp the nation’s health care system doesn’t quibble. Both the House bill and the Senate Finance Committee proposal clearly state that the fines would be a tax.”

The AP also notes that the Administration’s proposed health-care tax increases contradict “Obama’s campaign pledge on taxes”:  “”I can make a firm pledge,’ he said in Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12, 2008. ‘Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.’ He repeatedly promised ‘you will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime.’”

Obama earlier broke his promise not to raise taxes by signing into law a regressive SCHIP excise tax increase and backing a massive new cap-and-trade energy tax (supposedly to fight global warming)

It’s part of a long line of broken promises, such as Obama’s pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” which he broke with huge budgets that will explode the national debt through $9.3 trillion in massively increased deficit spending.

The costly cap-and-trade energy legislation passed by the House and supported by Obama would lead to big tax increases, Administration officials privately have conceded, even though they publicly claim otherwise.  “Officials at the Treasury Department think cap-and-trade legislation would cost taxpayers hundreds of billion in taxes, according to internal documents circulated within the agency and provided to The Washington Times” by CEI.  It could raise household taxes by $1761 per year, equivalent to a 15 percent tax increase.   It would also result in “loss of steel, paper, aluminum, chemical, and cement manufacturing jobs,” as jobs migrate overseas to countries which have fewer environmental protections than the U.S. does.

Obama earlier admitted that “under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket,” since its costs would be passed “on to consumers.”  Although cap-and-trade backers claim it will cut greenhouse gas emissions, it may perversely increase them and also result in dirtier air, as well as harming forests and water supplies.

Americans for Tax Reform summarizes the tax increases in ObamaCare: an individual mandate tax of $900 per individual or $3800 per family (if you don’t have health insurance); an employer mandate tax of $400 per employee if health coverage is not offered; an “excise tax on high-cost health plans”; a “medicine cabinet tax”; capping Flexible-Spending Accounts (FSA’s); abolishing most HSAs; and increasing tax penalties for HSAs.

All these tax increases won’t even pay for Obama’s massive spending binge.  He is relying on $2 trillion in imaginary savings to pay for his health-care plan.  Even Democratic governors have criticized its huge cost.

One of Obama’s economic advisers said his health-care plan would lead to “crippling deficits” and “higher taxes.”  The Congressional Budget Office also says it will increase the deficit.