Marlo Lewis

SkepticalScience.Com this week unveiled a downloadable app that supposedly shows how fast heat is building up in the Earth’s climate system due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The metric chosen is Hiroshima bombs. The Earth, according to SkS’s app, is warming at the rate of four Hiroshima bombs per second or 400,000 Hiroshima bombs per day.

I don’t know about you, but it sounds to me like someone is trying to tell us global warming could be the end of life as we know it.

SkS says the point of their Hiroshima bomb calculator is simply to explain in “ways that non-scientists can more easily relate to” how much heat anthropogenic greenhouse gases add to the climate system. It’s supposed to help us laymen understand the concept of radiative imbalance.

Let’s briefly examine that concept. Both incoming shortwave radiation (sunlight and ultraviolet light) and down-welling long-wave (infrared) radiation warm the planet. Conversely, reflected shortwave radiation and outgoing long-wave radiation cool the planet. Various observations (with varying degrees of uncertainty) indicate that incoming and down-welling energy exceed reflected and outgoing energy by 0.6 Watts per square meter (W/m2). That imbalance is attributed to mankind’s enhancement of the greenhouse effect. It is equivalent to the energy released by 400,000 Hiroshima bombs.

Today on WattsUpWithThat.Com, climate researcher Bob Tisdale posts a video commentary on SkS’s Hiroshima bomb calculator. To put 0.6 W/m2 into perspective, Tisdale references Stephens et al. (2012), a study of the Earth’s energy balance in Nature GeoScience.

Figure B1 from Stephens et al. illustrates six components (estimated from satellite and other data) of the Earth’s energy balance:

[click to continue…]

My colleague Will Yeatman reports some fantastic climate policy news in this week’s Cooler Heads Digest:

House GOP Outwits EPA on Carbon Pollution Standard

Leading members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee recently made the EPA look foolish by pointing out a glaring flaw in the agency’s proposed Carbon “Pollution” Standard.

The proposed regulation would require new coal-fired power plants to install carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). And yet, under the Clean Air Act, EPA cannot require a technology that isn’t commercially viable. On the one hand, industry claims that CCS isn’t market-ready, citing as proof the fact that there isn’t a single CCS system in operation. EPA, on the other hand, claims that CCS is adequately demonstrated. As evidence, the agency referenced three CCS pilot projects in the U.S. that are either in planning or under construction in Mississippi, California, and Texas.

Last week, leading members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee pulled the rug out from under EPA’s evidence. In a November 15th letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, Reps. Fred Upton (R-Michigan), Ed Whitfield (R-Kentucky), Joe Barton (R-Texas), and Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) brought to her attention a little-known provision of the 2005 Energy Policy Act that prohibits the agency from basing an “adequately demonstrated” determination on CCS projects that received subsidies pursuant to the law. As they helpfully note, each of the CCS projects in Mississippi, California, and Texas were beneficiaries of such subsidies, and are, therefore, inappropriate foundations for the Carbon Pollution Standard. The letter is available here.

Until I read the letter, I had been ignorant of this obscure provision of the 2005 Energy Policy Act. So, evidently, was EPA, which is quite rich.

Frankly, I’m impressed with these lawmakers. There’s a saying that Republicans are the stupid party. Not on this score. EPA’s Carbon Pollution Standard is the centerpiece of the Obama Administration’s climate agenda. EPA Administrator McCarthy, in a July speech, said that the Carbon Pollution Standard was the agency’s top priority, necessitating an “all hands on deck” approach.  And yet, despite this sense of urgency and a funneling of resources into the regulation, the agency stumbled into a tripwire set 8 years ago by four smart House Republicans. Bravo.

An old joke springs to mind.

Comedian: Go ahead, ask me, ‘What is the secret of great comedy?’

Audience member: What is the secret of. . .

Comedian: Timing!

Putting the kibosh on the “carbon pollution rule” would not have been nearly as funny had Upton, Whitfield, Barton and Scalise nipped this mischief in the bud when the EPA was only rumored to be proposing CCS as an “adequately demonstrated” basis for setting “carbon pollution” standards. Instead, the congressmen waited until the agency — and the Obama administration — inserted foot firmly in mouth. Bravo indeed! [click to continue…]

In a new report, Heritage Foundation analysts Kevin Dayaratna and David Kreutzer examine one of the three main computer models the EPA uses to calculate the social cost of carbon (SCC).

The SCC is an estimate of how much economic damage an incremental ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions allegedly does over time periods as long as 300 years. The model examined by the Heritage analysts is called Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy, or DICE. Dayaratna and Kreutzer find it to be “flawed beyond use for policymaking.” Fittingly, they title their report: Loaded DICE: An EPA Model Not Ready for the Big Game.

The SCC estimates generated by DICE “shift substantially” — that is, are much lower — when reasonable alternatives are substituted for just a few of the assumptions made by the EPA. Specifically:

• Using a discount rate (a measure of the time value of money) mandated by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that the EPA omitted reduces the 2020 estimate of SCC by more than 80 percent;
• An updated estimate of the equilibrium climate sensitivity distribution (ECS)—a measure of CO2’s temperature impact—reduces the 2020 estimate of SCC by more than 40 percent; and
• With an updated ECS distribution, a time horizon up to 2150,* and with the omitted discount rate, the 2020 estimate of SCC falls by nearly 90 percent, from $37.79 to $4.03.

The two Heritage analysts also note that the DICE and similar models’ damage functions are inherently speculative. No one today can forecast what humanity’s technological capabilities will be 50, 100, or 150 years hence. Which means no one knows how humanity’s adaptive capabilities will develop in a warming world. So even if scientists could accurately forecast future warming, projections of future damages would still be guesswork.

Dayaratna and Kreutzer conclude: [click to continue…]

For the first time in the history of the federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program, the Environmental Protection Agency today proposed to scale back the government’s overall biofuel blending target for the forthcoming year. Specifically, the EPA is proposing to cut the 2014 blending target from 18.15 billion gallons to 15.21 billion gallons.

Market realities forced the agency’s hand. Like all central planning schemes, there comes a point where even the commissar has to admit that it’s just not working.

Two factors compelled the EPA to make this adjustment. One is that the RFS requires obligated parties – refiners, blenders, and fuel importers – to sell 1.75 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol in 2014. However, despite years of research and taxpayer support, commercial production of cellulosic biofuel was only 20,000 gallons last year.

The second factor is the blend wall — the maximum quantity of ethanol that can be sold each year given legal or practical constraints on how much can be blended into each gallon of motor fuel. The most common blend today is E10 — motor fuel with up to 10% ethanol. Although the EPA approved the sale of E15 in October 2010, potentially increasing by 50% the total amount of ethanol sold annually, lack of appropriate fueling infrastructure, warranty and liability concerns, and consumer skepticism effectively limit the standard blend to E10.

The EPA’s proposal is a welcome step in the right direction but does not go nearly far enough. Nobody likes the RFS program except the special interest groups who directly profit from it. Even as environmental policy, the RFS is a bust, as an extensive AP investigation published this week confirms.

Even if the RFS did not inflate food prices, increase pain at the pump, exacerbate world hunger, expand aquatic dead zones, or contribute to habitat loss, Congress should still repeal it, because the RFS flouts the core constitutional principle of equality under law. [click to continue…]

In the protracted conflict over the Keystone XL Pipeline, too much attention is paid to peripheral issues and not enough to the core issues.

Peripheral issues include whether the pipeline will create many or few jobs, lower or raise Midwest gasoline prices, reduce or increase the risks of oil spills, reduce or increase incremental greenhouse gas emissions.

Why are those issues peripheral?

Let’s begin with oil spill risk and gas prices. Surely if Keystone is built, there will be incidents of leaks and spills. There will also be regional effects on gas prices. But look at the big picture. The State Department (ultimately, President Obama) is supposed to make a “national interest determination” about the pipeline. The U.S. already has more than 2.5 million miles of oil and gas pipelines.

Can anyone argue with a straight face that the U.S. national interest is harmed by those pipelines? That adding another 1,179 miles of pipeline will push America over some kind of national interest ‘tipping point’? That we would be better off shipping all oil and petroleum products by truck, train, and barge? Or that we’d be even better off if there were no oil companies?

Humanity has been there, done that. It’s called medieval squalor. [click to continue…]