January 2008

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

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

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

Among the candidates for the biggest cock-and-bull story in 2007 must be NASA’s James Hansen with his work of creative genius on Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice sheets and his wannabes, who subsequently copied his imaginative tour de force.

Even the facts are no match for James Hansen and his incredible modeling machine! Though Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice rests in deep bowls, Hansen declares them inclined planes. Then despite ice cores that show little to no movement for the past 400,000 years (including the warm periods), he shamelessly states that these gigantic ice sheets are slip, slidin’ away and the world will be flooded.

The idea of “meltwater lakes on the surface finding their way down through cracks in the ice and lubricating the bottom of the glacier is not compatible with accumulation of undisturbed snow layers. It might conceivably work on valley glaciers but it tells us nothing of the ‘collapse’ of ice sheets,” according to Cliff Ollier, School of Earth and Geographical Science at the University of Western Australia, “Indeed ‘collapse’ is impossible.”

Alarmists have to be thrilled with the successfulness of Hansen’s 2007 con—without this lie there is no catastrophic flooding, and all they are left with is the IPCC’s non-eventful one-foot-in-a-century sea level rise.

I wonder if Hansen’s modeler can also make Everlasting Gobstoppers!

The Wall Street Journal’s Brian Carney takes on the energy bill’s de facto ban on incandescent light bulbs, especially its rent- seeking potential for manufacturers of fluorescent bulbs. (Brian’s bro Tim tackled the issue in his DC Examiner column last Friday.)

Whether it’s next week or next decade, you will one day walk into a hardware store looking for a 100-watt bulb–and there won’t be any. By 2014, the new efficiency standards [which traditional incandescent bulbs cannot meet] will apply to 75-watt, 60-watt and 40-watt bulbs too…

Representatives of Philips and General Electric, two of the biggest lightbulb makers, say there’s nothing to be concerned about.

Well, maybe not for them.

[I]f you’re GE or Philips or Sylvania, the demise of the plain vanilla lightbulb is less a threat than an opportunity–an opportunity, in particular, to replace a product that you can sell for 50 cents with one that sells for $3 or more…

Now it may be that those bulbs are worth more–because they last longer, etc. But some of those bulbs, like compact fluorescents and Philips’ new “Halogena-IR” bulb, are already available. Currently they command all of 5% of the lightbulb market. That means that, whatever value proposition GE and Philips are selling, consumers aren’t buying.

What we bulb buyers needed, it seemed, was a little nudge. Or, if you want to be cynical about it, the bulb business decided to migrate its customers to more-expensive–and presumably higher-margin–products by banning the low-cost competition.

The proposition of sextupling the price of a common household item is one that consumers should naturally resist. Some environmental activists may well argue that such a price is worth paying towards their vision of planetary salvation. Fine. But what they cannot then honestly say is that the costs of such enforced “green” consumption are minimal. (Why hurt your standard of living when all you need is a trip to Lowe’s?) Imagine what we’d end up paying when mandates like this are extended to other things we need at home.