Nature magazine published an article this week by a team of researchers from Germany that tries to explain why the last decade has seen no increase in the global mean temperature. The authors have tweaked a computer model, so that it now predicts no warming since 1998. Isn’t that amazing? A global computer model can predict past temperatures accurately as soon as we know what those temperatures were! This model goes on to predict that the current lull in global warming will last until 2015, but then watch out—global warming will return with a vengeance.
Since no computer model predicted the last decade of flat temperatures before they occurred, I see no reason to put any trust in this new prediction. The modelers would be much safer to restrict their models to predicting the past.
So would former Vice President Al Gore. In his film fantasy, An Inconvenient Truth, Gore states categorically: “[T]here is one relationship that is more powerful than all the others, and it is this. When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer, because it traps more heat from the sun.” Well, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased more than four percent since 1997. As a CEI video asks, “Where’s the warming, Al?”
If this Nature article is part of a political strategy to keep the global warming bandwagon going when global warming has stopped, I think it can’t possibly succeed. Polls show that the public were resistant to paying any more for energy last week when we still had runaway warming, imminent catastrophic impacts, 150,000 already dying every year (I guess just because of being scared by the prospect of warming in the near future), and less than ten years to act or be doomed. I think most people will now–quite reasonably–say, Let's wait until 2020 and see if the temperatures have been going up rapidly for the past few years.
Cliff May begins his NRO column, “The Hunger,” by retelling an old joke about astronomers discovering a giant meteor hurtling towards Earth and the Washington Post running a headline: “World to end tomorrow: minorities and poor to suffer most.” While it is fine to make light of the media’s tendency to paint any change in market conditions as a class issue, in this case the joke doesn’t work. When we are talking about substantial food price inflation, it is the poor who suffer. Rampant food inflation also increases the number of poor people.
Has there ever been a more timely natural catastrophe than climate change? I mean, here we all are worrying about the future of the American economy—too much debt, jobs and industries moving overseas, new competitors in Asia and India—when what merrily comes along is a perceived civilizational challenge whose solution will not only create a better environment but also—talk about luck!—millions of those high-paying "green-collar" jobs and innovative new industries of the future that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been talking about. As Clinton said in one presidential debate, "This issue of energy and global warming has the promise of creating millions of new jobs in America. It can be a win-win, if we do it right."
It is, we are told, as inevitable and inexorable as night follows day that, as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere goes up, so too does the temperature of the world. Inconveniently for this axiomatic truth, however, while carbon dioxide has continued to increase the temperature of the planet has stayed flat over the past decade and even recently dropped like a stone. Never mind: man-made global warming turns out to be the most obliging of theories because now we are told that this inexorable process of heating is now to take a ten-year pause.
More than seven in 10 voters insist that they would not be willing to pay higher taxes in order to fund projects to combat climate change, according to a new poll.
A new study indicates alarmist concern and a need to explain away the lack of actual global warming. Researchers belonging to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, reported in Nature (May 1) that after adjusting their climate model to reflect actual sea surface temperatures of the last 50 years, "global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations … temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming."
What to do about oil? First it went from $60 to $80 a barrel, then from $80 to $100 and now to $120. Perhaps we can persuade OPEC to raise production, as some senators suggest; but this seems unlikely. The truth is that we're almost powerless to influence today's prices. We are because we didn't take sensible actions 10 or 20 years ago. If we persist, we will be even worse off in a decade or two. The first thing to do: Start drilling.
Forcing German industry and energy companies to buy permits for their greenhouse gas emissions from 2013 at auction will drive up energy prices and burden power customers, energy users' group VIK said on Tuesday.
I just received a hard copy of an opinion in San Francisco Chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute et al. v. EPA et al. The plaintiffs in this matter sought all sorts of things, all of which involved EPA continuing to do things that Congress is terrified of taking responsibility for expressly telling EPA, or any other agency, to do — regulate carbon dioxide. The requests included a writ of mandamus compelling EPA immediately to declare that CO2 emissions from autos pose an endangerment to public health and welfare, and to regulate it.
For beleaguered opponents of the global warming industry, the opinion is a must read. It comes from a fairly unexpected source, Federal District Judge Charles R. Breyer, a Ninth Circuit Clinton appointee and brother of SCOTUS’s Stephen Breyer, making it ever more refreshing. Although its precedential impact will be minimal simply by virtue of the nature of the requests and ruling, the federal mandamus and Administrative Procedure Act discussions are very instructive reads, given the persistence of ignorant if common claims such as the contention that the Court in Mass. v. EPA determined that CO2 was a pollutant posing an endangerment, and that EPA and the Bush Administration are now somehow in violation of the opinion, and so on. About these claims, specifically, the here court notes "The Supreme Court was careful not to place a time limit on the EPA, and indeed did not even reach the question whether an endangerment finding had to be made at all."
This court vigorously slapped such nonsense down and in no uncertain terms. Most rewarding is the pithy dismissal of the complaint itself, in the process of rejecting the request for Rule 11 sanctions (for filing frivolous claims), the latter which represent a course that our side is increasingly pondering in the face of the increasingly outrageous global warming litigation industry. "A close call" as the court said, at best, but pretty rough stuff from out in those parts against what was a fairly typical Ninth Circuit "environmental" plaintiff.
Sen. John McCain has reaffirmed his promise that, if elected president, he will veto any legislation containing "pork-barrel spending."
Meanwhile, I see a record developed over years as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation as a devoted adherent of the belief that the science of man-made global warming is "settled."
I see, too, that the federal taxpayer expenditure on climate-related research now approaches $6 billion — more than we send to the National Cancer Institute, and far more than we spend on AIDS. Seeking the cures for these diseases is even more "settled," no?
As such, the reasonable conclusion is that Sen. McCain would agree that, yes, billions of this is wasteful spending that can be trimmed from the budget or, at least, spent elsewhere (a good test for scientists spouting the same dogma, one might add). Or, at least, he will surely be the first candidate to clarify this contradiction.
It is, after all, a glaring contradiction. One that rivals McCain decrying high energy prices — calling for a gas tax holiday, even — and vowing that the worst thing for the economy right now is raising taxes, while at the same time adamantly supporting imposition of a CO2 cap-and-trade scheme that even the Congressional Budget Office recognizes is an energy tax — if a far more expensive one, due to its inefficiencies.
That is, if anyone were to ask such questions. We can always hope.
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