GlobalWarming.org

Today, BP America, Conoco Phillips, and Caterpillar have dropped out of the U. S. Climate Action Partnership.  This is the first recognition by the many major corporations pushing energy-rationing legislation that cap-and-trade legislation is dead in the Congress and that the scientific case for global warming alarmism is collapsing rapidly.  We hope that other major corporations will soon see the light and drop their support for cap-and-trade and other similar policies.

While these announcements are most welcome, they do not mean that we can relax our efforts to defeat and roll back energy-rationing legislation and regulations.  Many policies and proposals that would raise energy prices through the roof for American consumers and destroy millions of jobs in energy-intensive industries still pose a huge threat.  These include:

the EPA’s decision to regulate greenhouse gas emissions using the Clean Air Act;
efforts by environmental pressure groups to use the Endangered Species Act to stop energy production and new power plants;

the higher fuel economy standards for new passenger vehicles enacted in 2007;
presidential executive orders;

and bills in Congress to require more renewable electricity, higher energy efficiency standards for buildings, and low carbon transportation fuel standards.

From the very top of the earth to the bottom, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just can’t get it right.

I recently wrote of how the panel’s latest (2007) report, the one that split the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, was finally caught on what was an obviously false statement: That the glaciers atop the Himalayas would be melted by 2035 because of global warming. It would take an incredible amount of sustained heat to do that. The only question was what source the panel used, and that proved to be an off-the-cuff assertion by a global warming activist as reprinted in an environmentalist journal – with a mathematical error to boot!

Now it’s been revealed that the panel grossly overstated how much of the Netherlands is below sea level.

Its latest report says 55 percent of the country is below sea level, leaving it highly prone to flooding along rivers that would ostensible rise with warming temperatures. But Netherlanders can take off their clogs and relax. According to the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, just 26 percent of the country is below sea level and 29 percent susceptible to river flooding. You can see a lot of pretty maps regarding the subject by the Dutch Ministry of Transport here.

The IPCC insists that it’s a minor point in a report 3,000 words long and doesn’t affect the core conclusions that human activities, led by burning fossil fuels, are warming the globe. Of course it doesn’t, any more than does the Himalayan nonsense.

But this latest wooden shoe to the butt again illustrates that this allegedly thoroughly documented reports by the allegedly top experts in world has a nasty tendency to simply include anything that will make its case seem stronger. Taken in light of the recent “Climategate” revelations that scientists who came to the “wrong” conclusions had their materially systematically excluded from the report and other IPCC documents, it shows just how shaky this house of cards is.

There has been no global warming for a long time, as I wrote recently in Forbes Online (”Show Me the Warming,” Nov. 30, 2009).

I noted that Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the warmist bible, the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report—told Congress two years ago that evidence for manmade warming is “unequivocal.” He claimed “the planet is running a ’fever’ and the prognosis is that it is apt to get much worse.” Yet in one of the released emails he admitted that data showed there was no warming “at the moment.” I then explained:

But Trenberth’s “lack of warming at the moment” has been going on at least a decade. “There has been no [surface-measured] warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995,” observes MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen. “According to satellite data, global warming stopped about 10 years ago and there’s no way to know whether it’s happening now,” says Roy Spencer, former NASA senior scientist for climate studies.

The atmospheric concentration of CO2 keeps going up, yet temperatures for the last decade have been flat

The importance of this is that during the past decade, we’ve belched so-called “greenhouse gases” (GHGs) into the atmosphere at ever greater rates, from 6,510 million metric tons in 1996 to 8,230 in 2006—a 26% increase. Atmospheric concentrations have also reached the highest levels ever observed.

Now Professor Phil Jones, director the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Center and the central figure in the ‘Climategate’ affair, has conceded there’s been no ‘statistically significant’ warming. Naturally he said it was a “blip” and not a trend, and he may well prove right. But that doesn’t eliminate the problem that this “blip” has been occurring with historic GHG emissions, therefore the grossly simplistic formula of GHG emissions = warming is false.

He also made what may be the strongest admission by a major warmist that the earth could have been warmer during medieval times (about 800 – 1300) when mankind was emitting essentially no GHGs. (Viking ships did use sails, you may recall.) And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

Heretofore, warmists tried to dismiss this altogether or say it only applied to northern climes.

Nevertheless, “There is much debate over whether the MWP was global in extent or not,” Jones admitted, adding “The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.”

He said that, “For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere” and “There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.” Still, “If the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented.”

In that case, he should be informed of a Nature magazine study last year indicating water temperatures in the area of Indonesia were the same in the MWP as they are today.

You can read some of the specific questions and answers here with annotations by Indur Goklany.

Let’s salute Phil Jones’s honesty – even if he only came by it relatively late in life.

The Washington Post Sunday edition devotes a page to the discussion of what impact the current cold snap and immense amount of snow (a record in the nation’s capital) has and should have on the global warming debate generally and legislation specifically. Most of the space goes to the liberal but often thoughtful Dana Milbank, with snippets to others.

Score one for both science and humor when Milbank asserts “As a scientific proposition, claiming that heavy snow in the mid-Atlantic debunks global warming theory is about as valid as claiming that the existence of John Edwards debunks the theory of evolution.”

He’s right of course. For the zillionth time, weather and climate are two entirely different things. A hot year with a drought doesn’t prove the globe is heating up, much less than the alleged heating up is man-made. But the greens make such claims time and again. It’s no more valid for other to say a cold, snowy winter shows the opposite. That’s just the point Milbank goes on to make:

Still, there’s some rough justice in the conservatives’ cheap shots. In Washington’s blizzards, the greens were hoist by their own petard.

For years, climate-change activists have argued by anecdote to make their case. Gore, in his famous slide shows, ties human-caused global warming to increasing hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought and the spread of mosquitoes, pine beetles and disease. It’s not that Gore is wrong about these things. The problem is that his storm stories have conditioned people to expect an endless worldwide heat wave, when in fact the changes so far are subtle.

Other environmentalists have undermined the cause with claims bordering on the outlandish; they’ve blamed global warming for shrinking sheep in Scotland, more shark and cougar attacks, genetic changes in squirrels, an increase in kidney stones and even the crash of Air France Flight 447. [There’s a website that lists over 600 things that have allegedly been caused by global warming, from “acne” to “yellow fever.”] When climate activists make the dubious claim, as a Canadian environmental group did, that global warming is to blame for the lack of snow at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, then they invite similarly specious conclusions about Washington’s snow — such as the Virginia GOP ad urging people to call two Democratic congressmen “and tell them how much global warming you get this weekend.”

Says Milbank, “Argument-by-anecdote isn’t working.”

The Post then asked “political and environmental experts whether the record snowstorms buried climate change legislation this year.” Here are some excerpts:

CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN
Environmental Protection Agency administrator from 2001 to 2003; governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001; chair of the Republican Leadership Council

It shouldn’t, but it will. Among the reasons winter storms will make this issue more politically challenging are overreach and simplification – on both sides of the debate. “An Inconvenient Truth” brought the issue of climate change to the fore, but many of the charts implying that the world’s end is near were overly dramatic.

KENNETH P. GREEN AND STEVEN F. HAYWARD
Resident scholar and F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow, respectively, at the American Enterprise Institute

The corpus of climate legislation was already cooling before Snowmageddon. The cold wind that buried its chances this year didn’t come off the snow burying Washington: It came off horrific unemployment reports, lackluster economic growth, massive Tea Party rallies and vicious town hall meetings. After the breakdown in Copenhagen, the explosion of “Climategate” and the election of Scott Brown, the Democrats’ rapid pivot to focus on jobs was inevitable.

DAVID G. HAWKINS
Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate programs

Sorry, nothing worth excerpting!

DOUGLAS E. SCHOEN
Democratic pollster and author

The recent bout of wintry weather and the overall political climate have almost certainly killed climate-change legislation this year.

The science that supports the causes and effects of global warming has become increasingly open to doubt and question. The weather this winter, particularly in the past week or so, makes it more difficult to argue that global warming is an imminent danger and suggests that global warming may well not be as inexorable a force as some believe.

Further, the political downside to supporting the legislation is unambiguous. Americans are primarily concerned with jobs and the economy. Any significant effort spent on other legislation will reignite charges, originally hurled during the lengthy and unsuccessful health-care debate, that the White House and Democrats in Congress are out of touch with voters’ needs.

EMILY FIGDOR
Federal global warming program director of Environment America

The snowstorms that ground the nation’s capital to a halt only underscored the need for bold action to fight global warming. Heavier, more frequent snowstorms are just what scientists predict in a warming world, as extreme weather events – whether blizzards or heat waves – become more common.

Well! I guess there’s something to be said for predictability!

ED ROGERS
White House staffer to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush; chairman of BGR Group

There is global climate science and then there is the Global Warming Movement. The movement hijacked the science a long time ago, and it has had its share of setbacks lately. Its leaders have tried to stiff-arm their way past errors, lies, fraud, pointless tax increase proposals and some really peculiar posing in Copenhagen.

Now they have suffered a coup de grace: public ridicule brought on by a record-breaking blizzard blasting their East Coast home base. The movement was already dead in Congress for 2010 (its climate-change bill has been sidelined), but Snowmageddon buried it. How could it be that heat waves evidenced global warming, but so did a cold wave? The public isn’t buying it anymore.

In November, the public will give a cold shoulder to a bunch of intellectually frozen hypocrites who demand economic sacrifice to solve a problem that voters don’t see or feel. At least for a while, the left will have to think up a new way to dictate a lifestyle for the rest of us. Maybe now the science can continue without the clumsy overreaching of the movement’s priestly class.

And finally, on a different page, uber-environmentalist Bill McKibben argues that, yes, the cold weather and blizzards are the result of global warming. So it goes.

Moveon.Org is running a series of TV ads accusing Senators Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Ben Nelson (D-NB), and Mary Landrieu (D-LA) of “working to roll back the Clean Air Act.” The ads tell the Senators to “Leave it [the Clean Air Act] alone,” because “Many Americans are already smoking the equivalent of a pack a day just from breathing the air.”

As I show here, Moveon’s attack ads are a triple whopper, piling falsehood upon falsehood upon falsehood.

(1) The Senators are not working to roll back the Clean Air Act. Rather, they are working to stop non-elected bureaucrats, trial lawyers, and activist judges from ‘enacting’ climate policies not authorized by the people’s elected representatives. It is the Senators’ defense of regulatory accountability — of democracy — that Moveon vilifies.

(2) Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions do not form smog or soot, history demonstrates that we don’t need CO2 controls to clean the air, and EPA currently does not regulate CO2 emissions. Hence, it’s complete bunk that stopping EPA from setting climate policy for the nation ‘rolls back’ the Clean Air Act.  

(3) No American smokes the equivalent of a pack a day, or even one cigarette a day, just from breathing the air. Pope et al. (2009), a study published by the American Heart Association, finds that a pack-a-day smoker gets a daily dose of 140 to 240 milligrams of fine particulate matter (PM2.5), whereas a non-smoker living in a city with high PM2.5 levels inhales 0.44 to 0.56 milligrams per day. The pack-a-day smoker’s dose is hundreds of times greater. In fact, smoking just one cigarette delivers roughly 12 to 27 times as much PM2.5 into the lungs as does breathing the air in a city with high PM2.5 levels.

Moveon should promptly do three things: (1) Apologize to Sens. Lincoln, Nelson, and Landrieu for subjecting them to a smear campaign. (2) Apologize to their members for peddling disinformation. (3) Return every penny to anyone whom the ads angered or frightened into making a financial contribution.

(Revised Feb. 10, 2010. My conclusion was rushed, because I wanted to leave the office before the snowstorm suspended bus service from D.C.-area metro stops. Revisions below are in italics.)

If you missed it Sunday, the Audi Super Bowl ad is on Youtube, and it’s a hoot. The ad promotes the Audi A3 TDI clean diesel. The main selling point, surprisingly, is not that this car, which won a “Green Car of the Year” award, is good for the planet, but that if you drive it, you won’t be hassled, bullied, and jailed by the “green police.”

The ad tries to work both sides of the street. It attempts to appeal to those who believe SUVs are destroying the planet – and those who resent eco-elitists and busybodies telling them how to live.

The hilarious South Park episode, “Smug Alert” (Season 10), frames the issue with which the Audi ad execs seem to be wrestling.

In the episode, clouds of smug from ”Toyonda Pious” sales in South Park, George Clooney’s acceptance speech at the 78th Academy Awards, and San Francisco’s pretensions as a progressive city all coverge, creating a “perfect smug storm” that threatens to destroy everything in its path. The citizens of South Park scrap their hybrids just in time to avoid annihilation, although thousands of homes are destroyed. However, it is too late to save San Francisco, which “disappears up its own @!*hole.”

At the end of the episode, Kyle, echoing the famous NRA slogan (”Guns don’t kill people, people do”), argues that hybrids are a good thing, it’s only when hybrid owners become smug and act like they’re better than everybody else that the danger arises. However, like the liberals who don’t want a gun in the house, fearing they might use it, the people of South Park decide they are not ready to own hybrids without becoming  smug — “it’s simply asking too much.”

The Audi ad tells preening, greener-than-thou progressives ‘here is the car for you.’ At the same time, it lampoons the authoritarianism of green busybodies, allowing the rest of us to admire the car’s mpg rating without feeling we have to identify with Al Gore or the Sierra Club.

Or, at least, I think that’s the objective. Another way to put is the Audi folks want to have their cake and eat it. They want to be both green and independent of green.

My suspicion is it doesn’t work. Eco-activists are likely offended by the ad, whether because it mocks them or because it comes too near the mark of what life would be like in a society that heeds Al Gore’s injunction to make “rescue of the environment” the “central organizing principle for civilization.” On the other hand, people who resent officious bureaucrats may remember little about the ad except that Audi has something to do with “green police.”

Lastly, Audi is foolish if it expects to prosper under a green police state. The Audi A3 TDI gets above 40 mpg, but its fuel still comes from Big Oil. The Gorethodox won’t be satisfied until cars are all-electric, and the electricity comes from solar panels and wind turbines. Even if levened by tongue-in-cheek, greener-than-thou feeds the perception that global warming is a “planetary emergency” and government must restrict our liberties to save us from ourselves.

What do you think? Watch the Audi ad, and post a comment!

A sampling of stories (thanks to Climate Depot), since the Climategate story broke in November, that discredit “consensus” global warming science and the UN IPCC — many from British media:

Greenpeace cited as ‘sole source’ for ‘coral reef degradation’ claims

UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article

‘Researchers are still grappling to understand the balance of feedback loops’

UN IPCC’s Global Warming Report Under Fresh Attack for Rainforest Claims

Analysis: NASA GISS Rural US Sites Show No Temperature Increase Since 1900

BBC: Temperature and CO2 feedback loop ‘weaker than thought’

UN’s Amazongate’: ‘Made false predictions’ on Amazon rainforest, referenced non-peer-reviewed paper produced by WWF

Study: ‘Carbon dioxide appears to play a very limited role in setting interglacial temperature’

IPCC cited multiple Master’s Students in AR4, some unpublished

Chinese Scientist Qian Weihong of Beijing University: ‘Expects global temperatures will decrease continuously until 2030’

And that just scratches the surface, as they say. But what do the intrepid Society of Environmentalist Journalist template-followers at USA Today report about today? Butterflies, in another one of those “scientists say” articles:

A study of beleaguered butterflies in California provides some of the best clues yet as to how other animals may react to climate change, scientists say.

The unprecedented, 35-year analysis of butterfly populations in the Sierra Nevada details how several species are fleeing to higher elevations to escape warming temperatures.

Formerly mainstream American enviro-media sure know how to sniff out a scandal, don’t they?