William Yeatman

According to an article in today’s North County Times (San Diego), California is considering a measure by which “California utilities would control the temperature of new homes and commercial buildings in emergencies with a radio-controlled thermostat…”

By “emergencies,” California regulators mean power crunches.

To recap the madcap, the State of California, has decided to dictate the room temperature of its citizens instead of increasing energy supply to meet increasing demand. What kind of energy policy is this?

Check out this great post from Reference Frame, a blog operated former Harvard Physics Professor Luboš Motl. Motl tallies the number of mainstream media outlets that had predicted that 2007 would be the warmest on record. The list includes America’s two most prominent dailies, USA Today and the New York Times, among other august news sources.

In fact, 2007 was the coldest year of our young century.

Everybody's got one.  The American Meteorological Society has one, too, having thrown its lot in with The Weather Channel, the UK’s Royal Society, and others in pursuing the “global warming” gravy train.  It recently issued its own updated, alarmist statement on the matter, widely touted as representing the views of its membership which actually was never asked its opinion or agreement (as is the case with the National Academies’ statement(s), that of the American Geophysical Union, and so on).  This caused no small amount of discomfort and objection among the AMS’s members who protested, in what one AMS Council member told me, were “record numbers”, to no avail, as Roger Pielke, Sr., detailed here and here.

I have recently had this AMS statement tossed at me by alarmists in tv debates, the intellectually sloppy “appeal to authority” as proof of the validity of an argument the individual is apparently unable to make.  That made it ever more odd that the alarmists dismissed the inclusion of meteorologists in the Sen.. Inhofe et al. compilation of more than 400 scientists (remember, they also assailed economists and engineers being included, who actually are among the more highly trained plurality of none other than the IPCC’s “two thousand leading scientists”).

To wit, notice the wonderful reply by Grist Magazine’s Dave “Nuremberg-style trials for these [deleted]s” once the alarmists take power, in a Hannity and Colmes hit we shared:

“if you want to know what climate scientists think, you should ask climate scientists, not weathermen. They don’t study climate science in meteorology, this school.”

Got it.  Yet one more alarmist says the IPCC is unqualified to speak to the matter.  Of course, James Hansen is an astronomer, former IPCC head Robert Watson an atmospheric chemist, the current IPCC head – “the UN’s chief climate scientist” according to the AP, NY Times and USA Today, is, ahem, an economist and engineer (but he did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night).  

I tend to agree about the IPCC, now that we see that among the world’s leading scientists are anthropology TAs.

As I have previously noted, every possible benchmark that can be applied to the European Union’s carbon cap-and-trade scheme is pointing downward. Still, supporters of imposing Kyoto-style cap-and-trade schemes in the U.S. insist, against all evidence, that after three years of operation “it is too early to call Europe’s ETS a failure.”

So what constitutes failure?

Maybe this. We now can add to the pile of evidence a remarkable report of how cap-and-trade is subject to rampant rent-seeking. According to the AP, well-heeled lobbying interests (much like those pushing for such a scheme here, come to think of it) have made tens of millions of dollars in pure windfall by working their pals in government and gaming the greenhouse gas regulatory regime.

From Orange Punch, the Orange County Register’s Liberty Blog

Today’s global warming quote comes from Czech-born U.S. climatologist Dr. George Kukla, a research scientist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.

“The only thing to worry about is the damage that can be done by worrying. Why are some scientists worried? Perhaps because they feel that to stop worrying may mean to stop being paid,” according to Kukla . “What I think is this: Man is responsible for a PART of global warming. MOST of it is still natural.”

Accelerating warming of the Earth isn’t caused by man, but by regularities of planets’ circulation around the Sun, he wrote last June in the Prague Monitor.

“The changes in the Earth’s circulation around the Sun are now extremely slow. Moreover, they are partially being compensated by the human impact on the climate. I think we will know more in about 50 years,” said Kukla, who is considered a pioneer in the study of solar forcing of climate changes.

European governments are paying close attention to negotiations in Abuja, Nigeria, where Russian officials are trying to access the host country’s sizeable natural gas reserves, a development that would tighten Moscow’s grip on Western Europe’s energy supplies.

Russia already provides about a quarter of the continent’s natural gas demand, and its energy market share is poised to increase as the European Union begins to phase out coal power in order to fight global warming. The prospect of energy dependence has elicited concern from many Western European government officials, feelings that were heightened after Moscow cut off energy supplies to Ukraine in December, 2005, in order to enforce a precipitous price hike in natural gas.

European leaders have been slow to heed calls for a diversification of the continent’s energy ssources. Meanwhile, Russia’s state-owned energy giant, Gazprom, has been consolidating control over the regional supply. In May, 2007, Russian and Central Asian leaders came to agreement about the transport of natural gas from the Caspian Sea on terms favorable to Moscow. Algeria, the second largest provider of natural gas to Europe, has talked with Gazprom about better coordination, which has stoked fears of a possible natural gas cartel, like OPEC. And now, Russia is making moves on Nigeria’s promising reserves.

There has been a subtle yet important shift in the rhetoric of some global warming alarmists, whose industry has thrived for years on a disciplined party line of “ignore the skeptics”. This has played out in many absurd ways including by insisting that only a dozen or so actually exist. The audience for their rhetoric has remained instead the public.

We see here what appears to be almost desperation, coming on the heels of widespread pickup given to a recent Inhofe, et al. compilation of more than 400 scientists – from both “soft” and “hard” disciplines, just as is true with the IPCC and alarmists, generally, though they conveniently forget this when attacking (see the series of exposés on this from the gang at Climate Resistance).

The icing on the cake is the rest of the instruction, to change the subject.

To borrow their phrase, that’s “climate progress”.

Yes, those declining global mean temperatures are a sure sign that global warming is getting worse.  Of course, the forecasters at the Met Office and the University of East Anglia could be wrong, again:

“LONDON (Reuters) – 2008 will be slightly cooler than recent years globally but will still be among the top 10 warmest years on record since 1850 and should not be seen as a sign global warming was on the wane, British forecasters said. The Met Office and experts at the University of East Anglia on Thursday said global average temperatures this year would be 0.37 of a degree Celsius above the long-term 1961-1990 average of 14 degrees and be the coolest since 2000.”

The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has gone up roughly four per cent since the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997.  This was followed by the hottest year on record, which was caused by a huge and prolonged El Nino in the southern Pacific Ocean.  The GMT then went down in 1999, and since then the annual global mean temperature has been flat.  When does a trend become statistically significant?  Well, when a paper was published that identified a three-year trend of an increased melting rate in Greenland, that was considered significant enough to publish in a scientific journal and to receive huge press coverage.  But nine years-and-counting of steady temperatures is evidence that global warming is booming along?