According to Patrick March, a University of Oklahoma student who is working to document this uncharacteristically snowy winter, Florida is the only state in America (including Hawaii!) without snow on the ground, but two to four inches of snow is forecasted today for some parts of the Sunshine State.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

Ad Attacks Launched against Murkowski’s Endangerment Resolution

The struggle is heating up on several fronts over Senator Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) resolution to disapprove the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare and therefore must be regulated using the Clean Air Act. MoveOn.org is running television and radio ads against the three Democratic co-sponsors of Murkowski’s resolution in Arkansas, Nebraska, and Louisiana. They are the most dishonest ads I can remember. My CEI colleague Marlo Lewis analyzes them here.

A number of other groups are starting to run ads opposing what they are calling the Dirty Air Act. Friends of the Earth and the National Wildlife Federation have already run broadcast ads in Alaska attacking Murkowski. A coalition of environmental and faith-based environmental pressure groups have announced radio ads targeting eight Senators. Friends of the Earth and CREDO Action are putting up a billboard in Arkansas that accuses Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) of trying to gut the Clean Air Act. Repower America-Al Gore’s group-is running ads in Maine, Indiana, Missouri, and Arkansas that call on Senators to stay committed to green jobs and energy-rationing legislation.

Senator Murkowski, the ranking Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, launched a broad attack on the Obama Administration’s energy and global warming budget requests in a speech Thursday on the Senate floor. She noted that President Obama’s expressed desire to compromise on these issues was not reflected his the FY 2011 budget submitted this week. For example, President Obama mentioned his support for new nuclear reactors and for more domestic offshore oil and gas production in his State of the Union address. Yet, his budget cancels the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility and withdraws from mineral entry one million acres of public land in Arizona with high uranium ore potential. On global warming policy, Murkowski said that it was inconsistent for the President to continue to support cap-and-trade legislation, while taking the issue away from Congress by asking for $56 million to begin regulating greenhouse gas emissions using the Clean Air Act.

Endangerment Deadline

February 16 is the deadline for filing legal responses to the EPA’s endangerment finding. I’ll try to have a review of the various petitions for administrative reconsideration or judicial review next week.

Inhofe’s Igloo
Senator James Inhofe’s (R-Okla.) daughter and her family couldn’t fly home as scheduled this week because the airports were closed by Washington’s big blizzard. So they spent some of their time building an igloo big enough for four people on a street near the U. S. Capitol. Then they put up a sign on it that says, “Al Gore’s new home,” and another sign across the street that says, “Honk if you love global warming.” Senator Inhofe was amused and posted a blog about it. The nasty and moronic teevee personality Keith Olbermann was not amused and named Senator Inhofe’s four grandchildren and his daughter and son-in-law to his list of the “worst people in the world.” Senator Inhofe responded in his unfailingly good-humored and gentlemanly manner on Fox News.

But it wasn’t all fun and games for Senator Inhofe during this week’s blizzard. He also gave a powerful speech on the Senate floor Thursday on the failings of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Across the States

Arizona

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R) last week issued an executive order that terminates the State’s participation in the Western Climate Initiative, a cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme being planned by 6 (formerly 7) western states and 4 Canadian provinces. According to the text of the executive order, Arizona will pull out of the WCI in order to avoid economic harm.

Utah

By a 56-17 vote, the Utah House passed H.J.R. 12, the Climate Change Joint Resolution, which questions the science behind global warming alarmism and demands that the Environmental Protection Agency abandon plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The vote was galvanized by the growing Climategate scandal, as well as the EPA’s expected decision this March to impose costly carbon controls under the Clean Air Act. CEI’s Marlo Lewis explains the EPA’s power grab here.

Also this week in the Utah House, the Committee on Public Utilities and Technology approved H.J.R. 21, a resolution calling on Governor Gary Herbert to remove Utah from the Western Climate Initiative. The resolution next will be considered by the full House.

California

There are conflicting accounts of a California ballot initiative that would suspend implementation of the State’s global warming law, AB 32, until unemployment decreases to 5.5% (it currently hovers at about 12%). Last Saturday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the leading proponent of the ballot initiative, Assemblyman Dan Logue (R) had $600,000 in the bank for gathering the requisite number of signatures needed to get the initiative before the voters. That report was quickly contradicted by a story from ClimateWire, which questioned the existence of the $600,000, and also claimed that the anti-AB 32 ballot initiative was foundering.

Around the World

Pachauri Watch

The Daily Telegraph reported this week that Rajendra K. Pachauri, head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, flew almost 500,000 miles between January 2007 and July 2008. The greenhouse gas emissions engendered by Pachauri’s jet-setting ways are equivalent to those produced by all activities of14 average Britons in the same time span.

UN Forms Finance Panel

The Guardian reported today that the United Nations has formed an Advisory Group on Climate Change Finance to design a mechanism for raising $100 billion annually by 2020, in order to pay for greenhouse gas emissions reductions in developing countries. The panel will be chaired by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and will include “heads of state, high-ranking government ministers, central bank administrators, and public finance and development experts,” although a list is not yet available.

Cooler Heads Digest 4 February 2010

by William Yeatman on February 4, 2010

in Cooler Heads Digest

In the News

Barton, Walden Ask EPA to Explain Reliance on Dubious Reports
House Energy and Commerce Committee Press Release, 4 February 2020

Putting the Ass in Assassin
Chris Horner, Planet Gore, 4 February 2010

Gov’t Report: UK Faces Power Outages
David Strahan, Telegraph, 4 February 2010

The Left Can Also Disown Cap-and-Trade
Robert Bradley, Jr., MasterResource.org, 3 February 2010

Hackers Steal Millions in Carbon Credits
Kim Zetter, Wired, 3 February 2010

The Global Warming Guerrillas
Matt Ridley, The Spectator, 3 February 2010

How Climate Change Fanatics Corrupted Science
Michael Barone, Washington Examiner, 3 February 2010

UK’s Power Bill Arrives
Ed Crooks, Financial Times, 3 February 2010

Negative Energy
Kate Sheppard, Mother Jones, 2 February 2010

Climategate Reveals Flaws in Peer Review
Fred Pearce, Guardian, 2 February 2010

How the CRU Manipulated Data
Fred Pearce, Guardian, 1 February 2010

Global Warming Alarmism Is Dead
Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest, 1 February 2010

Climategate Requires Resignations
George Monbiot, Guardian, 1 February 2010

Alarmists Don’t Have the Courage of Their Convictions
Kimberley Jo Simac, Pajamas Media, 30 January 2010

No More Global Warming Lawsuits
Laurence Tribe, Washington Legal Foundation, 30 January 2010

The Collapse of Alarmism
Philip Stott, The Clamour of the Times, 30 January 2010

News You Can Use

The Headline Says It All

UK Daily Express: “No One Believes Us, Admit Global Warming Scientists”

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

Al Gore: MIA?

Global warming alarmism is on its heels: COP-15 in Copenhagen was a flop, cap-and-trade legislation is dead in Congress, the Climategate scientific fraud scandal continues to grow, the chairman of the IPCC is more deranged than ever, an initiative is being launched in California to suspend AB 32, and public support for energy-rationing legislation continues to sink. These would seem to be desperate times for the forces of darkness. The only thing that might save the day is heroic action.

So where has Al Gore gone? Why isn’t he leading the charge to save the day? Gore was in Copenhagen in December for COP-15, but cancelled his sold-out public speech. Since then, he has been silent. Internet news searches turn up an appearance this week at Apple Computer’s unveiling of its iPad, but nothing global warming-related.

My CEI colleague Chris Horner thinks Al Gore has disappeared from the public debate because his business partners in crime have finally realized that he is a liability that threatens their green investments and have therefore told him to shut up. I agree that Gore’s leadership of the forces of darkness is a great gift to our side (and have written about it in my December profile of Gore), so it’s a plausible explanation. What I don’t believe is that Gore would agree to follow that advice.

An alternative explanation is that Gore doesn’t want to have to defend the junk science he has been pedaling for years now that the imprimatur of the IPCC, the Climatic Research Unit, or NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies is no longer seen as a guarantee of quality. Another is that he’s lying low while preparing the counter-attack. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough where Al has gone and what he’s doing, but for now it’s a mystery.

Into the leadership vacuum created by Gore’s absence has stepped Osama bin Laden, even though he has also disappeared from public view. Bin Laden has long supported the Kyoto Protocol and blamed the United States for not signing it in his occasional audio and video tapes, but last week he stepped up his campaign to solve global warming by de-industrializing (and perhaps vaporizing) the United States. As we reported in last week’s Digest, the EPA is already working to implement bin Laden’s vision of a pastoral America. The mastermind of Al Qaeda’s terrorist war may turn out to be a better leader of the forces of darkness than Gore. Unlike Gore, bin Laden practices what he preaches. He has adopted a low carbon lifestyle, has given up air travel, reportedly lives in a cave, and has taken to heart Gore’s admonition in Earth in the Balance (1992) that what is needed to save the world is a “wrenching transformation of society.”

EPA’s Budget to Regulate is Up in the Air

The Obama Administration sent its proposed budget to Congress this week. Amid stupendous proposed increases in federal spending is a relatively modest additional $56 million for the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. If the Senate passes S. J. Res. 36, Senator Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) resolution to disapprove EPA’s endangerment finding, then I don’t think the Senate is going to go along with this request. It is more likely that a serious effort will be made in the Appropriations Committee or on the floor by Senator John Thune (R-SD) to prohibit EPA from spending any funds to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

For those who would like to tell their Senators that they support (or oppose) Murkowski’s disapproval resolution, Freedom Action is providing a convenient web page to compose and send e-mails. It takes a minute or two to fill out the form and click send.

House Democrats Getting Cold Feet

On the House side, Democrats worried about being re-elected are jumping ship. Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) has introduced a bill (H. R. 4396) very similar to Rep. Marsha Blackburn’s bill (H. R. 391) to strip EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions using the Clean Air Act. Representatives Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), and Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.) have introduced another bill that would do the same thing and provide some more government benefits for ethanol. Skelton and Peterson voted for the Waxman-Markey energy-rationing bill (H. R. 2454) last June and have been taking it in the neck from their constituents ever since. Their bill is attempts to make amends for their mistake. It is significant that Skelton and Peterson are in the House Democratic leadership. Skelton is Chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Peterson is Chairman of the Agriculture Committee and negotiated all sorts of special breaks for agriculture in the Waxman-Markey bill.

Across the States

California

Supporters of a California ballot initiative that would suspend implementation of AB 32, the State’s 2006 global warming law, wanted to label it the “California Jobs Initiative,” but according to the California constitution, naming initiatives is the responsibility of the Attorney General. Incumbent AG Jerry Brown has long been an environmental alarmist, so it’s unsurprising that he changed the suggested title of the initiative. What is surprising is the length to which Brown went to impose his environmentalist interpretation. According to the Los Angeles Times, Brown named the initiative, “Suspends air pollution control laws requiring major polluters to report and reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.” In fact, the initiative would bar the implementation of the Act, which is designed to make energy more expensive, until unemployment goes down to 5.5% (it currently stands at 11%). Cheaper energy, of course, is conducive to greater employment, so the original title was more accurate.

Around the World

Pachauri Unhinged

Rajendra K. Pachauri, the head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has had a tough winter. In late December, Richard North and Christopher Booker reported in the Telegraph on questionable investments made by Pachauri that seem to give him a financial stake in global warming alarmism. Then, in January, Pachauri was forced to acknowledge that the IPCC grossly overestimated the extent of Himalayan glacier melt. Other glaring errors and instances of shoddy science by the IPCC have since come to light, putting Pachauri further on the defensive. Even Greenpeace is now calling for him to step down.

It seems that all the bad press has unhinged the IPCC chief. In a bizarre interview with the Financial Times this week, Pachauri refused to resign and blamed his troubles on “well orchestrated” attack by unnamed perpetrators, “people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder.” He added, “I hope that they apply it to their faces every day.”

Climategate Update

As a result of Penn State University’s decision this week to start a formal investigation into allegations that PSU professor Michael Mann committed scientific misconduct, Representative Darrel Issa (R- California) has called on the Obama administration to freeze more than $500,000 of stimulus money earmarked to Mann for climate research. The PSU investigation of Mann was instigated by his involvement in the growing Climategate scandal. After a preliminary inquiry, PSU cleared Mann of 3 of 4 initial allegations of scientific malpractice, although Canadian climate analyst and blogger Steve McIntyre believes that the PSU preliminary investigation was a whitewash. McIntyre should know-in 2003, he debunked Michael Mann’s fraudulent “hockey stick” temperature record.

MoveOn Is Way-off

Julie Walsh, Freedom Action

MoveOn has launched an ad campaign against the three Democratic senators-Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Mary Landrieu (La.), and Ben Nelson (Neb.)-who are supporting the Resolution of Disapproval of EPA’s endangerment finding. In fact, MoveOn is running the most blatantly false television ad I’ve ever seen.

Where is Joe Wilson when you need him? Showing pictures of women in labor and babies smoking cigarettes, this ad now running in Nebraska, Louisiana and Arkansas implies that support for this Resolution will negate the Clean Air Act and cause all of us to breathe polluted air. “You lie!” Simply put, this Resolution will only keep EPA from controlling carbon dioxide producing energy in the name of a supposed coming catastrophe from “global warming.”

For those who disagree with this ad and would like to write their senators to support the Resolution of Disapproval of EPA you can click here.

The Cooler Heads Digest is the weekly e-mail publication of the Cooler Heads Coalition. For the latest news and commentary check out the Coalition’s website, www.globalwarming.org.

Cooler Heads Digest 29 January 2010

by William Yeatman on January 29, 2010

in Cooler Heads Digest

In the News

Obama’s Energy Muddle
Marlo Lewis, National Journal, 29 January 2010

The Scientific “Consensus”
Chip Knappenberger, MasterResource.org, 29 January 2010

Mandated Carbon Cuts Won’t Work
Bjorn Lomborg, Wall Street Journal, 29 January 2010

Insecurity and Change Commission
Wall Street Journal editorial, 29 January 2010

The Real Climate Confusion
Iain Murray, National Review Online, 28 January 2010

EPA Should Ground Carbon Regs for Good
Washington Examiner editorial, 28 January 2010

IPCC Newest Headache: Amazongate
Gene Koprowski, Fox News, 28 January 2010

EPA at Center of Coal Controversy
David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post, 27 January 2010

Floating Islands
Willis Eischenbach, WattsUpWithThat.com, 27 January 2010

Discredited IPCC Report Reveals Media Malpractice
Paul Chesser, GlobalWarming.org, 26 January 2010

James Hansen: Would You Buy a Used Temperature Data Set from This Man?
James Delingpole, Daily Telegraph, 22 January 2010

Why We Need Innovation, Not Insulation
Bill Gates, Huffington Post, 22 January 2010

News You Can Use

Pew Poll Ranks Global Warming Last

A new poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds that the American public ranks global warming last among twenty “domestic priorities.”

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

SEC’s Demand for Climate Disclosures Might Backfire

The Securities and Exchange Commission this week voted 3 to 2 to issue guidance that will require companies to disclose to investors the effects that climate change and climate change policies could have on the company’s performance. As Joel Kirkland reported in Climate Wire (reprinted on the New York Times web site), “The SEC public disclosure guidance on climate-related risks is seen as a major victory by an army of environmental groups and institutional investors that have pressed the issue since 2007.”

Well, maybe, but Tom Borelli pointed out in a National Center for Public Policy Research press release that the new rules will actually work against the promoters of energy-rationing policies. “Fully disclosing the business risk of cap-and-trade will embarrass many CEOs who are lobbying for emissions regulations. Shareholders will discover that these CEOs are pursuing legislation that will negatively impact their company.” We will discover, I think, that many CEOs have joined the U. S. Climate Action Partnership and other business coalitions that support cap-and-trade without doing adequate or indeed any analysis of what the effects of enacting such legislation could have on their companies’ profits. This violates their legal fiduciary duties to their shareholders.

Obama to Democrats: Jump off the Cliff

It’s been a busy week on global warming and energy-rationing policy for President Barack Obama and his Administration. In his State of the Union address to Congress on Wednesday night, the President re-iterated his support for cap-and-trade legislation. Here is the transcript: “And, yes, it means passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America. (Applause.) I am grateful to the House for passing such a bill last year. (Applause.) And this year I’m eager to help advance the bipartisan effort in the Senate. (Applause.) I know there have been questions about whether we can afford such changes in a tough economy. I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change. But here’s the thing — even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy-efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future — because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy. And America must be that nation. (Applause.)”

President Obama has thus fallen back on the argument first enunciated by then-Senator Timothy Wirth (D-Colo.) in 1988: even if global warming isn’t a problem, it will make us do the right thing. I’m pretty sure that there are a lot of Democrats in the House and Senate who wish that the President would stop beating his head against this particular political wall. Cap-and-trade is dead because it is a huge political liability going into November’s congressional elections. Many who voted for the Waxman-Markey bill in the House last June now regret it and would not vote for it again. Several Democrats who voted for it have decided to retire.

U.S. Makes Carbon Pledge To Comply with Copenhagen Accord

Todd Stern, the Administration’s top climate negotiator, on Thursday announced that the U. S.’s pledge under the Copenhagen Accord to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. This was the number that was unofficially announced before the fifteenth Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen in December, so it’s no surprise. What is slightly surprising is that Stern said that it’s conditional on Congress passing legislation and therefore could be subject to change. According to a list compiled by the U. S. Climate Action Network, 15 countries have now (as if Friday, 3 PM EST) submitted their pledges to the Copenhagen Accord and 14 more have announced that they are likely to do so. The 29 countries account for more than 72% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Obama Orders Feds To Curb Carbon Footprint

President Obama this week also ordered the federal government to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 28% below current levels by 2020. This order follows from Executive Order 13514, which the President signed last fall and which requires federal departments and agencies to set targets for cutting emissions. He has now set their target for them. The most practical way to meet this goal would be to shut down large parts of the federal government. Let’s hope President Obama seizes this opportunity and achieves the most drastic downsizing of government in history. The Administration claims that these emissions reductions will save from $8 to 11 billion dollars in energy costs, but the Institute for Energy points out the costs of achieving the reductions are not included and probably outweigh the savings. Ironically, according to a 2008 GAO report, the Environmental Protection Agency had the poorest record among federal departments and agencies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Across the States

Even Green Energy Isn’t Good Enough for Greens

A Maryland developer has agreed not to build 24 turbines and will abandon 31 proposed sites at a West Virginia wind farm, settling a lawsuit by environmental groups worried about potential harm to the endangered Indiana bat, according to a report from ABC News. In related news, California Senator Dianne Feinstein is pushing for federal legislation to block one million acres of the Mojave Desert from solar power development, so as to protect the endangered desert tortoise.

Around the World

The EPA Is Working on Bin-Laden’s Climate Solution

The AP reported this week that terrorist kingpin Osama bin Laden has released a new audio tape claiming that global warming must be stopped by bringing “the wheels of the American economy” to a halt. To learn more about how the Environmental Protection Agency is doing everything in its power to implement Bin Laden’s climate policy recommendation, click here.

Climategate Update

The United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has ruled that the University of East Anglia violated the Freedom of Information Act by withholding raw data requested by Stephen McIntyre, the Canadian statistician and businessman who earlier exposed Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” fraud. The ruling results from a complaint filed by David Holland, a retired engineer in England. The ICO also announced that they could not prosecute Professor Phil Jones, then-director of the university’s Climatic Research unit, and others implicated in the Climategate scandal because of a flaw in the statute, which they will now recommend be corrected by Parliament. However, others have suggested that the ICO is misinformed and that the six month statute of limitations does not begin when the violation occurs, but when it is discovered.

As an official British government enquiry into Climategate continues, the House of Commons announced this week that its science and technology committee will undertake their own investigation of the scandal. Roger Helmer, Member of the European Parliament for the UK, has already submitted his ideas for the enquiry. Finally, John Beddington, the British government’s chief science adviser, criticized the CRU in an interview with the Times of London this week, defended skepticism as an essential part of scientific enquiry, and advised climate scientists to be more honest about the uncertainties involved in their research.

Cooler Heads Digest 22 January 2010

by William Yeatman on January 22, 2010

in Cooler Heads Digest

In the News

Will Cass Sunstein Stand Up to EPA?
Marlo Lewis, Open Market, 22 January 2010

A New Path for the Sierra Club: Agitation
Carter Wood, Shop Floor, 21 January 2010

Michael Mann’s Climate Stimulus
Wall Street Journal editorial, 20 January 2010

An Environmental Tea Party Brewing against Wind Power?
Robert Bradley, MasterResource.org, 20 January 2010

How Many Taxpayer Dollars Does It Take To Change a Light Bulb?
Greg Pollowitz, Planet Gore, 20 January 2010

Climate Change and National Security
William Yeatman, Philadelphia Inquirer, 17 January 2010

With Dems Doomed, Why Not Address Climate Change?
The New Republic editorial, 16 January 2010

Global Warming and Wealth: Lessons from Haiti
Daren Bakst, GlobalWarming.org, 15 January 2010

Senator-elect Brown Opposes Energy-Rationing
Eric Moskowitz, Boston Globe, 17 December 2010

News You Can Use

Glacier-gate

The Sunday Times of London broke the news this week that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-the so-called “scientific consensus”-misled the world on the stability of the Himalayan glaciers in its Nobel-prize-winning Fourth Assessment Report. According to the Sunday Times, the IPCC claimed that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035, citing a World Wildlife Fund press release (which, in turn, cited a magazine article interview from six years prior). Glaciologists consider this claim “ludicrous,” yet it still passed through the IPCC’s supposedly rigorous peer review (and, if you believe the IPCC, was agreed to unanimously by thousands of top climate scientists). Then again, many of the IPCC’s authors and editors are key players in the ongoing Climategate scandal.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

Update on EPA Reform

On Thursday, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) introduced a resolution to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Thirty-eight Senators, including three Democrats, signed on as original co-sponsors. The Democrats are Senators Mary Landrieu (La.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), and Ben Nelson (Neb.).

The resolution of disapproval would suspend EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare and therefore must be regulated under the Clean Air Act. It was introduced under the special rules of the Congressional Review Act (CRA), meaning Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) cannot block it coming to the floor for an up-or-down vote and that only a simple majority is required for passage.

It’s not clear when Murkowski will bring her resolution to the floor. Under the CRA, she has sixty legislative days after EPA transmitted the endangerment finding to Congress. That gives her to early May by my rough guess of the Senate schedule. I estimate the Senate will pass the disapproval resolution with around 55 votes. The House has no special CRA rules, so Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) can prevent it from coming to the floor for a vote. This means that Murkowski’s resolution isn’t going to be enacted this year. However, Senate passage would send a clear message to the Obama Administration and set up efforts later in the year to offer an amendment to the EPA appropriations bill to withhold funds for regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

The most revealing initial response was from Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Boxer was quoted in a Washington Post story by Juliet Eilperin that the resolution was “a direct assault on the health of the American people,” and that if the public had to wait for the Congress to pass climate legislation “that might not happen, in a year or two, or five or six or eight or ten.” This suggests that even the Senator from Fantasy-land now recognizes that cap-and-trade legislation is dead for this year and possibly for years to come.

Speaking of California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) and the majority and minority leaders of the California legislature brought their begging bowl to Washington this week. They were asking for a few billions from Congress to help bail them out of their continuing budget crisis. I think Members of Congress would be more sympathetic to this request if California’s leaders were taking serious steps to undo some of the policies that have put their State into economic freefall, including California’s global warming policies to ration energy.

Around the World

Solar Subsidies Slashed in Germany

The German government this week slashed taxpayer subsidies for solar power. The Federation of Renewable Energy, the leading lobby for solar power producers, said in a statement, “The proposed cut threatens the foundations of the German solar industry.”

UN Kicks the Climate Can down the Road

Under the Copenhagen Accord, signatory nations had until January 31^st to submit non-binding emissions-reductions commitments, but this week Yvo de Boer, the head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, called the deadline “soft” and “flexible,” which means it will be ignored, just like every prior deadline established by the UNFCCC.

Cooler Heads Digest 15 January 2010

by William Yeatman on January 15, 2010

in Cooler Heads Digest

In the News

EPA Sniffs Smog
Iain Murray & Roger Abbott, American Spectator, 14 January 2010

Don’t Like the Numbers? Change Them
Michael Boskin, Wall Street Journal, 14 January 2010

Secret Science from the CIA?
William Yeatman, Washington Times, 13 January 2010

Obama’s Green Jobs Fantasy
Vincent Carroll, Denver Post, 13 January 2010

Post Climategate, A Brave New World
Paul Chesser, GlobalWarming.org, 13 January 2010

We Need Much More Debate on Global Warming
Detroit News editorial, 13 January 2010

(Video) CEI’s Myron Ebell Debates Climate Change at Detroit Auto Show
Detroit News, 12 January 2010

Wisconsin’s Clean Energy Jobs Act Is a Mistake
William Yeatman, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 12 January 2010

CEI’s Horner Addresses American Farm Bureau Meeting
Farm Bureau News, 10 January 2010

Farm Bureau Declares Opposition to Climate “Power Grab”
Allison Winter, New York Times, 11 January 2010

Obama Regulates Away Jobs
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, RealClearMarkets.com, 11 January 2010

States Want Delay on Emissions Rules
Ian Talley & Stephen Power, Wall Street Journal, 11 January 2010

Houston’s Climategate Debate
Robert Bradley, MasterResource.org, 10 January 2010

News You Can Use

Cold Kills Citrus Crop

Orange juice is going to get a lot more expensive, thanks to record cold temperatures in Florida that threaten the Sunshine State’s citrus crop. According to the National Weather Service, Florida’s string of 12 consecutive sub-freezing days this January is the longest in a century. Must be the global warming.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

Murkowski Pushes EPA Reform in Senate

It now appears almost certain that Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) will offer a privileged motion under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to disapprove the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare and therefore must be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) cannot keep it off the floor, and it only requires a majority to pass. Murkowski has the votes, but the House is under no obligation to take it up. Still, a Senate vote against the endangerment finding will be a powerful rebuke to the Obama Administration, will put Senators on the record, and will lay the groundwork for an amendment to an appropriation bill cutting off funding for EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Under the CRA, Murkowski has sixty legislative days to offer the motion, so it could happen between now and around early May.

Senator Murkowski also secured an agreement with Majority Leader Reid just before Christmas that allows her to offer a climate-related amendment to the bill to raise the ceiling on the national debt. That bill is scheduled to come to the floor on 20th January. It’s not clear what that amendment might be. This week her staff floated the idea that she might demand a vote on the Kerry-Boxer energy-rationing bill, S. 1733. Supporters of Kerry-Boxer panicked. Here’s what Daniel Weiss of the Center for American Progress said to Robin Bravender of Environment and Energy News PM (subscription required):

“What she’s trying to do is force Democrats to vote against a bill that is clearly one that is not ripe to be brought to the Senate floor,” said Daniel Weiss, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, noting that the bill was intended to be combined with an energy bill aimed at lowering energy costs and spurring investments in technology.

“This is Lisa Murkowski giving the finger to those who believe we need to reduce global warming pollution because this is not a serious proposal,” Weiss said.

It’s interesting that Kerry-Boxer is not ready to go to the Senate floor. I wonder why the Environment and Public Works Committee marked it up and sent it to the Senate floor in November on a vote of 11 to 1. The no vote was from Democrat Max Baucus (D-Mont.), while the Republicans on the committee, led by ranking Republican James Inhofe (R-Okla.), boycotted the mark-up because-among other good reasons-they said the bill wasn’t ready to go to the Senate floor. I don’t recall Weiss agreeing with the Republicans then, but perhaps he has had time to reflect and realize the wisdom of their position.

I cannot imagine that Murkowski will actually offer the Kerry-Boxer bill as an amendment to the debt ceiling bill because it would be purely symbolic and would allow Democrats to provide cover for themselves by voting against it. Those who did so could then later vote for another version of the bill and argue that they voted against a bad cap-and-trade bill, which consequently had been so much improved (with more payoffs to big business special interests in their States) that they could now vote for it. My guess is that, failing to find a substantive amendment that can get sixty votes, she might not offer any amendment next week.

Climategate Update

Julie Walsh, Freedom Action

Mann-made Warming

You and I paid for furtherance of “climate science.” Yes, a half million dollars of the stimulus funds went to Michael Mann, a scientist from Penn State implicated in the climategate scandal. Cooler Heads Coalition member National Center for Public Policy Research is demanding that these funds be returned to the U.S. Treasury, pending the results of investigations into his actions. In fact, Mann and his colleagues received almost $6 million from us over the years.

Climategate Scandal Broadens

Certified consulting meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo of Icecap.us and a computer programmer from San Jose, Michael Smith, have written an expose of extensive manipulation of the temperature data by the federal government’s National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North Carolina and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York City. D’Aleo says in the report, “NOAA is seriously complicit in data manipulation and fraud…CRU’s Director at the time Phil Jones acknowledges that CRU mirrors the NOAA data. ‘Almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same as in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) archive used by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center.'”

John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, aired a special last night on KUSI-TV covering their discoveries: A 14-minute video segment is available here. The report’s four key revelations:

1. NCDC is no longer monitoring many actual temperature stations. Coleman explains, “In the transition to a computer averaging system, the National Data Climate Center deleted actual temperatures at thousands of locations throughout the world as it evolved to a system of global grid boxes. The number that goes into each grid box is determined by averaging the temperatures of two or more weather observation stations nearest that grid box.” This method is inaccurate according to D’Aleo because “temperatures are not linear over space, but instead vary enormously because of differences in terrain, elevation, vegetation, water versus land and urbanization.” It also makes an apples and oranges situation, comparing today’s averaged grid boxes to past actual station temperatures.

2. The number of weather stations NCDC uses was reduced 75%, from approximately 6,000 to 1,000 stations.

3. The vast majority of the stations cut from the record were from the cooler higher latitudes and altitudes. Smith says, “The more I looked, the more I found patterns of deletion that could not be accidental. Thermometers moved from cold mountains to warm beaches; from Siberian Arctic to more southerly locations and from pristine rural locations to jet airport tarmacs. The last remaining Arctic thermometer in Canada is in a place called ‘The Garden Spot of the Arctic,’ always moving away from the cold and toward the heat.”

4. Temperatures then were altered by “homogenization,” a process which always seemed to result in higher readings. According to the report,”the data centers then performed some final adjustments to the gathered data before final analysis. These adjustments are in some cases frequent and undocumented. Examining raw data versus processed final data shows numerous examples where the adjusted data shows a warming trend where the raw data had little change.”

Across the States

California’s Renewable Energy Failure
Gregg Morris, director of the Green Power Institute, believes there is “no chance” California will meet its legally-mandated renewable energy target this year, according to a report this week from GreenWire (subscription required). In 2006, the legislature passed a law requiring that investor-owned utilities generate 20 percent of California’s electricity from renewable sources by 2010. Four years ago, renewable energy accounted for 13.5% of the Golden State’s electricity, but Morris said that utilities “have actually fallen behind every single year since the program went into effect.” Despite this imminent failure, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger last year issued an executive order to increase the renewable energy target to 33% by 2020.

EPA Strikes Again in Arkansas
Energy and Environment News (subscription required) reported this week that the Environmental Protection Agency again has refused to permit a coal-fired power plant, this time in Arkansas, because it wasn’t a natural gas fired power plant. Specifically, the EPA told Arkansan regulators that they had not adequately considered “Best Available Control Technology” for greenhouse gases so as to comply with the Clean Air Act. In particular, the EPA determined that the state officials had failed to consider natural gas as the BACT for a coal plant. Using similar reasoning, the EPA refused to issue air permits for coal plants on the Navajo Nation reservation in the Four Corners region, as well as Kentucky. The EPA seized the power to dictate BACT technology early in the Obama administration, although the agency’s right to regulate carbon dioxide from stationary sources will not become final until March. To learn more about this regulatory morass, read posts (here and here) from CEI’s Marlo Lewis.

The Cooler Heads Digest is the weekly e-mail publication of the Cooler Heads Coalition. For the latest news and commentary check out the Coalition’s website, www.globalwarming.org.

Cooler Heads Digest 8 January 2010

by William Yeatman on January 8, 2010

in Cooler Heads Digest

Announcements

The Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) this week released a science-based critique of a recent film produced by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The SPPI paper is entitled Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification-A New Propaganda Film by the Natural Resources Defense Council Fails the Acid Test of Real World Data.

In the News

EPA’s Legacy of Absurd Results
Marlo Lewis, MasterResource.org, 8 January 2010

Clean Energy Sources: Sun, Wind and Subsidies
Jeffrey Ball, Wall Street Journal, 8 January 2010

Beware Greens Bearing Gifts
Steven Milloy, Washington Times, 7 January 2010

The Cool Down in Climate Polls
Terence Corcoran, National Post, 7 January 2010

Climate Change Debate
Henry Payne, Planet Gore, 7 January 2010

Beware: Waxman Still Optimistic on Climate Bill
Daniel Weiss, Grist, 7 January 2010

An Authoritarian Climate
Iain Murray, GlobalWarming.org, 6 January 2010

Copenhagen’s Dodged Bullet
Pete DuPont, Wall Street Journal, 5 January 2010

Copenhagen: Leftists Intelligentsia Dementia
J.T. Young, American Spectator, 5 January 2010

Time To Re-examine That Settled Science
Orange County Register editorial, 4 January 2010

Copenhagen: A Sad Waste of Money, Energy, and Passion
William Yeatman, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 3 January 2010

Climategate-You Should Be Steamed
Neil Frank, Houston Chronicle, 2 January 2010

News You Can Use

It Could Happen Here

Due to green taxes and high demand during an unusually cold winter, heating fuel in the United Kingdom is so expensive that many British pensioners have taken to buying books from thrift stores and then burning them in their fireplaces to keep warm, according to a report this week from the London Metro. The Guardian reported that National Grid had stopped natural gas supplies to nearly 100 factories because of high demand for heating houses. According to the Independent, temperatures in the United Kingdom are expected to remaining freezing for the next two weeks. No doubt the cold weather is due to global warming.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

Will Congress Block Endangerment Finding?

The EPA’s endangerment finding is spurring legislative activity, but not to pass cap-and-trade legislation. Just before Christmas, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) secured a promise (for whatever that’s worth) from Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to be allowed to offer an amendment to limit EPA regulation of greenhouse gases to the bill to raise the federal debt ceiling. The bill is scheduled to come to the Senate floor on January 20. It is a prime vehicle to which to attach an amendment because the debt ceiling must be raised again this month to avoid shutting down the federal government and therefore the House will not be able to avoid considering it.

There has been a bit of speculation in the press as to what form Murkowski’s amendment may take. As I see it, Murkowski will not necessarily offer her earlier proposal to put a one-year moratorium on EPA actions to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources. She could also offer language to disapprove the endangerment finding under the Congressional Review Act (CRA). Or she could offer something new to stymie or obstruct EPA’s regulations. Whatever is offered will require sixty votes and is subject to a second-degree amendment. I think this means that it is going to be difficult to propose anything that can attract sixty votes and that also has any teeth in it. Therefore, it seems unlikely to me that Murkowski will be able to offer a resolution to disapprove the endangerment finding under the CRA.

The CRA was enacted in 1996 and has only been used successfully once to block a proposed regulation. In 2001, the House and Senate voted to overturn a Labor Department rule promulgated at the end of the Clinton Administration that set ergonomic standards for home offices. The main obstacle to using the CRA is that no resolution of disapproval can be brought to the House floor without the agreement of the House majority leadership. In the Senate, such a resolution is privileged and can be brought to the floor and requires only a majority vote. Thus it is possible that Murkowski or some other Senator could bring such a resolution to the floor as a stand-alone measure. The problem is that if it passes, there is nothing to require a House vote, which Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) is sure to oppose. On the other hand, if Murkowski offers a disapproval resolution as an amendment to another bill, it is not privileged and therefore will require sixty votes (as now does anything controversial in the Senate).

It’s hard to tell how this may play out. Senator Murkowski seems quite determined to do something effective to stop EPA because she has decided that regulating greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources under the Clean Air Act will “wreck the economy.” CEI agrees. More Senators (and Representatives) are becoming noticeably nervous about letting EPA plow ahead. The question is whether January 20 is too early to win a vote.

Over in the House, Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) has collected 121 signatures on her discharge petition to send H. R. 391 to the floor. A majority of Members (218) are required for a discharge petition to be successful. H. R. 391 would remove greenhouse gases from the list of substances that EPA can regulate with the Clean Air Act. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) has announced that he intends to try to bring a CRA resolution of disapproval to the House floor. Unless Senator Murkowski is successful in attaching it to the bill to raise the debt ceiling, I don’t see how this can happen. But it’s definitely worth trying.

Across the States

California

Anti-alarmism is on the march in California. This week, former E-Bay CEO Meg Whitman affirmed that she intended to make opposition to the State’s 2006 global warming mitigation law, AB 32, a focal point of her campaign for the 2010 gubernatorial election. Whitman, who is vying for the Republican Party nomination, proposes to suspend AB 32 for a year while the costs are assessed. Similarly, California Assemblyman Dan Logue (R) announced that he is collecting signatures to put an initiative before the California electorate to suspend AB 32 until the State’s unemployment falls to 5.5%. It currently stands at almost 12%.

West Virginia

The Environmental Protection Agency’s war on coal has forced the West Virginia Department of Environmental Quality to cease processing water quality permits for surface coal mines, thereby jeopardizing thousands of mining jobs. Under President Barack Obama, who campaigned on a promise to bankrupt coal, the EPA is demanding that West Virginia coal companies re-engineer proposals for mining sites in order to mitigate their impact on mayflies. The EPA, however, has refused to detail exactly what mayfly protections they want, which has left coal companies in permitting limbo. They can’t mine without a permit, but they can’t get a permit because they don’t know what to ask for. Rather than try to conform to the EPA’s shifting standards, the West Virginia DEQ decided to abandon Clean Water Act permitting for surface coal mines. Layoffs in the mining industry are likely.

Kentucky

Representative Jim Gooch (D), chairman of the Kentucky Assembly’s environmental committee, introduced a bill this week that would ban in Kentucky all federal and state regulations predicated on climate change science. He was galvanized by the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent decision to use its powers under pending federal greenhouse gas regulations to reject a proposed coal-fired power plant in Kentucky. The EPA’s absurd explanation for dismissing the coal plant was that it wasn’t a natural gas plant. If this is the EPA’s criteria, then the coal industry, which employs 20,000 Kentuckians, is doomed. That’s why Rep. Gooch told the Louisville Courier-Journal that people in Kentucky “understand what’s at stake.”

Climategate

NASA FOIA

More than two years ago, CEI’s Chris Horner filed a Freedom of Information Act request with NASA for documentation that sheds light on how it manipulates its global temperature record (NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies operates one of three such data sets). NASA stonewalled, but the disclosure of the Climategate scandal last November gave impetus to Horner’s request, and he threatened to litigate. NASA has begun to comply, and the first two boxes of documents arrived this week. Stay tuned for updates.

Another Petition Filed to Block Endangerment

Southeastern Legal Foundation this week filed a Petition for Reconsideration with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), challenging the Endangerment Finding published earlier this month in light of the burgeoning Climategate scandal. CEI filed a similar Petition for Reconsideration in early December. These filings represent the first of what will be multiple legal and administrative actions challenging the flawed science and even more flawed policy of the Obama administration to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The Cooler Heads Digest is the weekly e-mail publication of the Cooler Heads Coalition. For the latest news and commentary check out the Coalition’s website, www.globalwarming.org.

Cooler Heads Digest 29 December 2009

by William Yeatman on December 29, 2009

in Cooler Heads Digest

In the News

To save the Earth, Encourage Economic Freedom
Terry Miller & Anthony Kim, FoxNews.com, 29 December 2009

Cap-and-Trade Would Strain Food Supply
Edward Felker, Washington Times, 29 December 2009

GW Alarmists Target Family Pets
Christopher Orlet, American Spectator, 29 December 2009

The New Climate Litigation
Wall Street Journal editorial, 28 December 2009

Biased Reporting on Climategate
Washington Times editorial, 28 December 2009

Copenhagen: A Historic Failure that Will Live in Infamy
Joss Garman, Independent, 27 December 2009

NYT: Copenhagen Outcome “Worth Savoring”
New York Times editorial, 21 December 2009

Senate Dems to Obama: Please Drop Cap-and-Trade
Lisa Lerer, Politico, 27 December 2009

Three Cheers for the Holiday Lights!
Robert Bradley, MasterResource.org, 25 December 2009

The Twelve Days of Global Warming
Edward John Craig, Planet Gore, 24 December 2009

Questions over Business Deals of UN Climate Guru
Christopher Booker & Richard North, Telegraph, 20 December 2009

EPA Delivers a Lump of Coal to Appalachia
William Yeatman, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 20 December 2009

News You Can Use

Let It Snow

According to WattsUpWithThat.com, 877 snowfall records were broken in the United States last week.

Around the World

Myron Ebell

COP-15 in Hopenchangen: Summary and Outcome

I wish I had more to report firsthand from the fifteenth Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP-15) in Copenhagen. Unfortunately, I didn’t arrive until the Tuesday of the second week, 15th December, attended one full day, Wednesday the 16th, and then was banned for the final two days of the conference. This, however, was a small price to pay for the banning of twenty-some thousand other registered NGO delegates, of whom all but a handful were in the alarmist camp. It turns out that the hundred-and-ten or so heads of state and prime ministers who arrived on Thursday didn’t want to have to put up with the riff-raff who drive the alarmist agenda.

The outcome was as good as could be imagined. It has been clear for many months that the Bali Action Plan would not be completed on schedule in Hopenchangen. But everyone expected that some agreement would be cobbled together that promised a final deal in the near future on a new treaty to follow the Kyoto Protocol. But at the end, everything went sour. President Barack Obama and the heads of China, India, Brazil, and South Africa signed a “Copenhagen Accord” which the whole conference noted, but did not endorse. The accord does not commit the countries signing it to much of anything. COP-15 ended with no promises about when a successor to Kyoto would be completed or what targets and timetables it would contain.

Instead of being the conclusion of two years of negotiations, President Obama described the accord as a good first step. My view is that COP-15 is not a step forward, but a large step back from COP-13 in Bali in 2007. It’s going to take months to repair the damage, let alone begin to make any progress in the negotiations. By then, the global warming bandwagon could be sliding back downhill.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

Cap-and-Trade Dead in 2010

The failure of COP-15 and the continuing Climategate fraud scandal have killed the already very small chance of enacting cap-and-trade legislation in 2010. A number of Senators said as much before leaving Washington for the Christmas recess.

Lisa Lerer reported in Politico that, “At a meeting about health care last month, moderates pushed to table climate legislation in favor of a jobs bill that would be an easier sell during the 2010 elections, according to Senate Democratic aides.” Lerer also quotes Democratic Senators Ben Nelson (Neb.), Kent Conrad (N. D.), Mary Landrieu (La.), and Evan Bayh (Ind.) advising the White House that they don’t want to vote on cap-and-trade next year. That’s more than enough political weight to keep the Kerry-Boxer or any similar cap-and-trade bill off the floor.

Climategate Continues to Heat Up

The Climategate fraud scandal continues to grow as more of the files are analyzed and publicized. It now appears that at least some of the modest global warming trend in the twentieth century is a result of data manipulation. The effect on the public debate is only going to get much bigger. This is not just my view. Several candid reactions from the alarmists have been reported. For example, here is the end of a long story, “Climategate: Anatomy of a Public Relations Disaster” by the well-known science writer Fred Pearce, which appeared on Yale Environment 360.

“I have been speaking to a PR operator for one of the world’s leading environmental organizations. Most unusually, he didn’t want to be quoted. But his message is clear. The facts of the e-mails barely matter any more. It has always been hard to persuade the public that invisible gases could somehow warm the planet, and that they had to make sacrifices to prevent that from happening. It seemed, on the verge of Copenhagen, as if that might be about to be achieved.

“But he says all that ended on Nov. 20. ‘The e-mails represented a seminal moment in the climate debate of the last five years, and it was a moment that broke decisively against us. I think the CRU leak is nothing less than catastrophic.'”

For good summaries or lists of the juicier bits that have been unearthed in the scandal so far, check here and here.

EPA Endangerment Finding Update

My CEI colleague Marlo Lewis has submitted a comment on the EPA’s proposed “tailoring rule” for regulating stationary sources of greenhouse gases.

Across the States

Louisiana

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported this week that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has launched a coordinated attack against the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. On Monday, Jindal and the secretaries of the Departments of Natural Resources and of Economic Development filed objections with EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson on economic grounds. According to CEI’s Marlo Lewis, the EPA’s endangerment finding triggers an economically ruinous “regulatory cascade” under the Clean Air Act.

The Cooler Heads Digest is the weekly e-mail publication of the Cooler Heads Coalition. For the latest news and commentary check out the Coalition’s website, www.globalwarming.org.

Cooler Heads Digest 18 December 2009

by William Yeatman on December 18, 2009

in Cooler Heads Digest

In the News

How To Manufacture a Climate Crisis
Pat Michaels, Wall Street Journal, 18 December 2009

Russian Temps Turn Heat Up on Warmers
Sean Higgins, Investors Business Daily, 18 December 2009

The Crack-Up in Copenhagen
Myron Ebell, FoxNews.com, 17 December 2009

Obama and the Senate in a Danish Standoff
Iain Murray, Science, 17 December 2009

Why Climategate Just Got Much Bigger
James Delingpole, Telegraph, 17 December 2009

A Green Woodstock
William Yeatman, Washington Times, 16 December 2009

Coping With Copenhagen
Jennifer Harper, Washington Times, 16 December 2009

Greenpeace Ambushed by Skeptics
Baltimore Examiner, 16 December 2009

Hide the Decline…and More
David Harsayni, Denver Post, 16 December 2009

Video: Skeptic Assaulted by Enviros at Copenhagen
Fox News, 15 December 2009

Beware Those Trying To Save Us
Ben Stein, American Spectator, 15 December 2009

Fire and Ice in the Global Warming Debate
Myron Ebell, Washington Post, 11 December 2009

Beyond Debate?
Martin Cohen, Times Higher Education, 10 December 2009

News You Can Use

Poll: Support for Obama’s Green Policies Is Plummeting

According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, only 45 percent of Americans approve of Obama’s work on the global warming issue, with 39 percent of respondents disapproving. Last April, 61% of Americans approved of Obama’s green policies.

Inside the Beltway

Julie Walsh

Opposition to Endangerment Gathers Steam in Congress

On Monday at 3:30pm Senator Lisa Murkowski will introduce a Disapproval Resolution to overturn EPA’s recently finalized “endangerment” finding on greenhouse gases. Then the Environment and Public Works Committee will have 20 calendar days to vote on it or it proceeds to the Senate floor, if Murkowski has 30 signatures to discharge it from the committee. Representative Joe Barton, ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, will also introduce a Disapproval Resolution in the House. Of course if it passes both houses, the President would veto it.

A frequently used reason to pass a cap and trade bill is that otherwise EPA will regulate. As Senator Kerry recently said to Congressional Quarterly, “Months ago, Lindsey Graham and I warned that if Congress does not pass legislation dealing with climate change, the administration will use the Environmental Protection Agency to impose new regulations.” However, Obama’s EPA still intends to regulate even if Congress does a pass a cap and trade bill. EPA’s Lisa Jackson recently said this: “I do not believe this is an ‘either-or’ proposition. I actually see this as a ‘both-and.’ I believe the Clean Air Act can complement legislative efforts.” This Disapproval Resolution therefore makes clear that “the EPA’s decision appears to allow members of Congress to deflect blame toward the administration. But this is a charade. In fact, by not acting to rescind the EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gases, Congress is completely responsible for whatever action EPA takes.”

Around the World

Myron Ebell (from Copenhagen)

Obama Cometh

For a moment it appeared that President Obama was bringing a dose of reality to Hopenchangen. He noted that the nations of the world have been negotiating on global warming for approaching twenty years and don’t have much to show for it. That is absolutely correct. But I didn’t hear the President draw the correct conclusions from that observation. The “process” keeps rolling along and promise after promise is made. But promises are cheap and actual reductions in emissions are proving much more expensive than forecast by the econometric models. At some point, some major leader is going to have to point that out. President Obama it appears is happy to join the EU fantasy club and be a jolly good fellow rather than spoil the party with some harsh truths.

As for what President Obama’s appearance might do to change the outcome of COP-15, I think it makes it puts pressure on ministers to reach some rough sketch of a deal on Saturday. What he said at the private meeting at a hotel with twenty-some leaders before his speech will have much more effect on the content of the deal agreed to than the vague platitudes in his speech. But what they come up with won’t be much different than earlier COPs, which as I wrote at the beginning of COP-15 always end in total triumph. Weary negotiators emerge after all night negotiations with tears in their eyes to announce that after immense efforts we have managed (barely–you can’t imagine how close we were to giving up) to pull the world back from the brink. They announce the deal: “We have all agreed that in the very near future we will all agree on all outstanding issues.” For whatever it’s worth, President Obama should take the credit.

To read more of Myron’s reports from Copenhagen, click here.

Cooler Heads Digest 30 November 2009 Special Climategate Issue

by William Yeatman on November 30, 2009

in Cooler Heads Digest

Announcements

Globalwarming.org, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Pajamas Media are now presenting a complete database of Climategate documents. The site invites reader comments and analysis.

For continuing coverage of the scandal, visit Climate Audit, Wattsupwiththat, Ice Cap, and GlobalWarming.org.

In the News

Censoring Contradictions
Mark Steyn, Washington Times, 30 November 2009

Climate Change Emails Released by Whistleblower, Not Hacker
Chris Horner, Washington Examiner, 30 November 2009

Let the Great Global Warming Cover-up Begin!
Alan Caruba, Warning Signs, 29 November 2009

CRU Promises to Release Data
Robert Mendick, Telegraph, 29 November 2009

CRU Destroyed the Evidence
Jonathan Leake, The Times, 29 November 2009

The Worst Science Scandal of Our Generation
Christopher Booker, Telegraph, 29 November 2009

Rigging a Climate Consensus
Wall Street Journal, 27 November 2009

Cap-and-Trade is Dead
Kimberley Strassel, Wall Street Journal, 27 November 2009

Climategate-The Real War on Science?
Marlo Lewis, OpenMarket.org, 25 November 2009

Have They No Shame?
Myron Ebell, Pajamas Media, 25 November 2009

Video: Myron Ebell Debates Kevin Trenberth on Hacked Emails
FoxNews, 25 November 2009

Pretending the Leaked Emails Aren’t a Crisis Won’t Make Them Go Away
George Monbiot, Guardian, 25 November 2009

3 Things You Must Know about Climategate
Iain Murray, Pajamas Media, 24 November 2009

CRU’s Climate “Tricks”: Context Is Everything
Myron Ebell, National Post, 24 November 2009

Video: Hide the Decline
Minnesotans for Global Warming, 24 November 2009

Inhofe Calls for Investigation of Climategate
EPW Minority Press Blog, 23 November 2009

The Harry-Read-Me File
Devil’s Kitchen, 23 November 2009

The Code
Bishop Hill blog, 23 November 2009

Climategate: Final Nail in the Coffin for Alarmism?
James Delingpole, Telegraph, 20 November 2009

Cooler Heads Digest 20 November 2009

by William Yeatman on November 20, 2009

in Cooler Heads Digest

In the News

Is Old George Still Causing Trouble?
Myron Ebell, Wall Street Journal, 20 November 2009

The Decline of Climate Alarmism
Robert Bradley, MasterResource.org, 20 November 2009

Estimating the Cost of Cap-and-Trade
David Kreutzer, Heritage WebMemo, 19 November 2009

Climate Gasbags Want To Shame You
Greg Gutfeld, FoxNews, 19 November 2009

Revenge of the Climate Layman
Anne Jolis, Wall Street Journal, 18 November 2009

Pawlenty’s Flip-Flop
Paul Chesser, GlobalWarming.org, 17 November 2009

Kyoto II Climate Change Treaty; Implications for American Sovereignty
Steven Groves, Copenhagen Consequences, 17 November 2009

Obama’s Failure
Chris Horner, Planet Gore, 17 November 2009

News You Can Use

NASA: Sun Drives Climate

An major article in this week’s Spiegel Online, “Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out,” cited a recent study by NASA scientists in the journal Geophysical Research Letters showing that reduced solar activity is the most important cause of stagnating global warming.

Cap-and-Trade Poll

The Pew Research Center polled Americans with the question, “What does a cap-and-trade deal with?” Twenty-seven percent of Republicans, but only 15% of Democrats, knew that cap-and-trade is an environmental policy.

Obama’s 70-car Motorcade

President Barack Obama went to China this week to discuss a climate change policies, among other things. According to the Politico, Obama traveled in China with a 70-car motorcade.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

World Leaders Concede Failure in Copenhagen

World leaders and the United Nations’ top global warming officials have given up signing a big new international treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol at the fifteenth Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen next month. Instead, they are now talking about concluding such an agreement some time in 2010 and coming to a less ambitious agreement in Copenhagen. The latter might be a list of national commitments from all the major developed economies and most of the major developing countries.

For example, the Obama Administration might commit the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 14% or 17% below current levels by 2020. The Obama Administration may indeed do that, but what’s going on in the Senate makes such a commitment look unconvincing. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has now put off any consideration of the Kerry-Boxer cap-and-trade bills until this spring. He’s putting a polite gloss on the ugly (for the alarmists) reality: the Kerry-Boxer bill is dead in the Senate. Whether some other version of cap-and-trade surfaces and gains traction next spring is now the question.

Across the States

California

The California Energy Commission on Wednesday established energy efficiency standards for large screen televisions. To understand why this policy unnecessarily limits consumer choice, read this commentary by CEI’s William Yeatman in the Orange County Register. The Washington Times reports today that Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has sent a letter to the Department of Energy demanding similar television standards for the rest of the country.

Alaska

The AP reported this week that Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell (R) is suing the federal government to overturn the listing of the polar bear as a threatened species. The Governor noted that polar bear populations are at historical all-time highs, having increased to 25,000 from 10,000 in 1960.

Oregon

Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski (D) has ordered an immediate review of the state’s tax incentives for renewable energy after the Oregonian reported that state officials had deliberately low-balled cost estimates of the program by a factor of forty.

Around the World

Myron Ebell

Australia

Australia’s Labor Government has again passed cap-and-trade legislation through the House and sent it to the Senate. The Senate is closely divided, and seven votes from the opposition Liberal or National parties or from the small parties or independents are needed. Liberal Party Leader Malcolm Turnbull, who represents a very wealthy part of Sydney and is a global warming true believer, is pulling out all the stops to force some of his party’s Senators to go along. He is meeting strong public opposition from the Liberals’ Senate leader, Nick Minchin, and several other Liberal Senators including Cory Bernardi and Tony Abbott. The Senate will probably vote before the end of the parliamentary session on November 30th. While the outcome is still in doubt, it is clear that Turnbull is risking splitting his party in order to enact energy-rationing legislation. News reports and personal communications agree that opposition to the bill is growing stronger and broader among the Liberal Party’s Representatives and Senators and supporters among the electorate.

The Global Warming Establishment Uncovered

Julie Walsh

The electronic files of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, UK have been hacked and 61 MB worth of emails, approximately a thousand documents, have been posted on the internet on a Russian server. CRU is one of the few institutions in the world that compile and maintain the records of the world’s temperature data. In an interview with “Investigate” magazine, the director of CRU Professor Phil Jones said, “It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.” Anthony Watts has the evolving story at WattsUpWithThat.com.

Here are some of the most revealing and shocking email quotes unearthed so far (my emphases):

On Oct 14, 2009, at 5:57 PM, Tom Wigley wrote:

Mike (Mann),

The Figure you sent is very deceptive. As an example, historical runs with PCM look as though they match observations — but the match is a fluke. PCM has no indirect aerosol forcing and a low climate sensitivity — compensating errors. In my (perhaps too harsh) view, there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC. This is why I still use results from MAGICC to compare with observed temperatures. At least here I can assess how sensitive matches are to sensitivity and forcing assumptions/uncertainties.

From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxx.xx>

To: “Michael E. Mann” <mann@xxx.xx>

Subject: HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL

Date: Thu Jul 8 16:30:16 2004

The other paper by MM is just garbage – as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well – frequently as I see it. I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !

From: Kevin Trenberth

To: Michael Mann

Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate

Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.

From: Phil Jones

To: “Michael E. Mann”

Subject: IPCC & FOI

Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise. I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!

From: Ben Santer

To: P.Jones

Subject: Re: CEI formal petition to derail EPA GHG endangerment finding with charge that destruction of CRU raw data undermines integrity of global temperature record

Date: Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:07:56 -0700

I’m really sorry that you have to go through all this stuff, Phil. Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.

My colleague Chris Horner wrote a book published in 2008 on this exact subject, “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed“

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