2009

President Barack Obama’s speech on global warming to the United Nations today is based on fantasy.  Here are some quotes from the speech followed by the reality.

“…[T]he threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing.”  Reality: global mean temperatures increased slightly from 1977 to 2000.  Temperatures have been flat since then.

“Rising sea levels threaten every coastline.”  Reality: sea levels have been rising on and off since the end of the last ice age 13,000 years ago.  The rate of sea level rise has not increased in recent decades over the nineteenth and twentieth century average.

“More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.”  Reality: there is no upward global trend in storms or floods.

“More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict in places where hunger and conflict already thrive.”  Reality: there is no upward global trend in major droughts.  Reversals in large-scale cycles have meant that the southward march of the Sahara Desert into the Sahel has been reversed in recent years and the Sahara is now shrinking.

“On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees.”  Reality: some Pacific islanders may want to emigrate to New Zealand or Australia and are claiming that their islands are disappearing as the reason, but shrinkage has been minimal in recent decades because sea level rise has been minimal.

President Obama’s policy prescriptions are energy rationing and energy poverty disguised as growth and prosperity.  The emissions reductions that he promises the United States will make through cap-and-trade legislation are dead in the water in the U. S. Senate and would not survive a second vote in the U. S. House.  If enacted, cap-and-trade would consign the economy to perpetual stagnation and make the U. S. into a second-rate economic power.

His policy prescription for poor countries is to promise them massive “financial and technical assistance”.  The track record of paying off poor countries is that it has lined the pockets of corrupt leaders and bureaucracies with billions and tens of billions of dollars, but has done nothing to help those countries become prosperous.  What these countries need is free markets and abolishing barriers to trade.  The global warming policies advocated by the Obama Administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress would raise trade barriers and foster energy poverty throughout the world.  Energy rationing is not the way forward and is not a message of hope for the poorest people in the world, who lack access to electricity and modern transportation.

By Joe D’Aleo

Sharon Begley, after a five-year stint at the Wall Street Journal returned to greener pastures at Newsweek in 2007, where she started her career. It was just in time to take part in Newsweek’s embarrassing August 13, 2007 issue “Global Warming is a Hoax” edition.  

The cover story entitled, “The Truth About Denial” contained very little that could be considered ‘truth” by journalistic or scientific standards. In what could surely be considered one of the most one-sided coverage of any important issue in American journalism for decades, Sharon Begley with Eve Conant, Sam Stein, Eleanor Clift and Matthew Philips purported to examine the “well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry that they… created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change.”

The only problem was — Newsweek knew better. Eve Conant, who interviewed Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, was given all the latest data proving conclusively that it was the proponents of man-made global warming fears that enjoyed a monumental funding advantage over the skeptics (a whopping $50 billion to a paltry $19 million for the skeptics). Newsweek contributing editor Robert J. Samuelson, called the piece “fundamentally misleading” and “highly contrived.”

Begley’s next screed was “Climate Change Calculus” in the August 3, 2009 issue, subtitled “Why it’s even worse than we feared.” She begins: “Among the phrases you really, really do not want to hear from climate scientists are: “that really shocked us,” “we had no idea how bad it was,” and “reality is well ahead of the climate models.”[…] Although policymakers hoped climate models would prove to be alarmist, the opposite is true, particularly in the Arctic.”

What is the reality? Well the models are failing miserably, but in the wrong direction. Over the last eight years, the world has cooled in contrast with the forecast rise in all the IPCC scenarios. The Arctic ice extent as of September 20, 2009, climatologically close to the maximum melt date, is 25.6 % greater than the minimum in September 2007.

 JAXA Arctic Ice Extent

None of the models foresaw the cooling that has taken place the last 7 ½ years.

Begley also addressed Greenland and sea level rises quoting David Carlson. “…Greenland… is losing about 52 cubic miles per year and that the melting is accelerating. So while the IPCC projected that sea level would rise 16 inches this century, “now a more likely figure is one meter [39 inches] at the least,” says Carlson. “Chest-high instead of knee-high, with half to two thirds of that due to Greenland.” Hence the “no idea how bad it was.””

Other scientists strongly disagree. Ettema et al. (2009) state that “considerably more mass accumulates on the Greenland Ice Sheet than previously thought… which suggests that the Northern Hemisphere’s largest ice sheet may well hang around a whole lot longer than many climate alarmists have been willing to admit.” A 2006 study by a team of scientists led by Petr Chylek of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Space and Remote Sensing Sciences found the rate of Greenland warming in 1920-1930 was about 50% higher than that in 1995-2005, suggesting carbon dioxide ‘could not be the cause’. And Ollier and Pain in August 2009, AIG paper “Why the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets are Not Collapsing” conclude “Variations in melting around the edges of ice sheets are no indication that they are collapsing. Indeed ‘collapse’ is impossible.”

And supporting this non-threat, sea levels have stopped rising in 2005 as the oceans have cooled and contracted, but why let facts get in the way of a good story?

Oceans and the Sun Not CO2

We have reported in earlier stories in this magazine on the importance of natural cycles on the sun and in the oceans in climate change and that these factors should support cooling for the net few decades. There is an increasing body of new peer review support for this.

Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, in New Scientist (2009) attributes much of the recent warming to naturally occurring ocean cycles.

“Little seems out of place in recent times except the predictions”, says Dr Syun Akasofu, Founding Director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and former director of the Geophysical Institute. Aksasofu says multi-decadal oscillations, discovered within the past decade, account for the variability.

Earlier this summer in a paper entitled “Has the climate recently shifted?” Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonsis, mathematicians at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, engaged with the problem that temperatures have failed to follow the predictions made by computer climate models. In the paper, Swanson and Tsonis correlated data from the El Niño/La Niña, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, and the North Pacific Index and found that synchronizations occurred four times: in 1910-20; 1938-45; 1956-60; and 1976-1981. When coupling between the systems was high, climate invariably changed. The recent cooling, which they suggest started in 2001, is an indicator of another phase shift with a cooling that will last for decades.

Alarmist solar scientists Lean and Rind have reluctantly attributed recent cooling to a quiet sun and foresee a repeat from 2014-2019 the minimum of the next cycle. They have not yet come around to the opinion of many solar scientists including those at NASA, that the sun, which has been quieter, longer than any time since the early 1800s, a period called the Dalton Minimum or mini-ice age, the time of Dickens and cold snowy winters in London, much as we saw last winter.

Begley would benefit from reading the widely praised NIPCC report, an ambitious peer review work the scale of the IPCC, coauthored by Craig Idso and Fred Singer, which shows why natural factors like the sun and the oceans, not man, control the climate.

Begley proves that she is not only scientifically but also politically illiterate in the third installment of her latest climate crisis coverage. On September 7, in a piece titled “China and India Will Pay,” she declares “A special place in climate hell is being reserved for India and China.” As CORE’s Paul Driessen put it “400 million Indians and 500 million Chinese still do not have electricity. No electricity means no refrigeration, to keep food and medicines from spoiling. It means no water purification, to reduce baby-killing intestinal diseases. No modern heating and air conditioning, to reduce hypothermia in winter, heat stroke in summer, and lung disease year-round. It means no lights or computers, no modern offices, factories, schools, shops, clinics or hospitals.”

Even the IPCC’s chair, Rajendra Pachauri, has defended India’s refusal to cut its emissions, noting that millions of Indians still lack electricity.

But to the technological elite in their ivory towers, the liberal elitist political leaders in Washington, and their adoring media, their loss is but a small price to pay to save the planet from an imagined crisis, one that offers such a golden opportunity to achieve their real goal as none other than Al Gore admitted “of one world governance.” In their journey there, they show more compassion for the white grizzly bear of the polar region and the snail darter than for the humans. They worry more about population than people.

China and India will make us pay as they take away our jobs and become the technological leaders as we model our government after the failed socialist experiments of an ever-declining Europe and even copy their alternative energy boondoggles that will prove to be the next bubble while we sit on huge rich fields of oil, gas and coal that, along with nuclear, could provide the power to revitalize our industries and put America back on top.

Begley authored the 2007 book “Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain.” I would argue she needs to instead re-train her brain and change her mind.

See post in the Energy Tribune September 15th, 2009 on-line.

The Associated Press is now chiding President Obama for falsely claiming that his proposed tax on uninsured people is not a tax.   It is a tax increase, the AP says, and it would be enforced by the IRS: “Memo to President Barack Obama: It’s a tax. Obama insisted this weekend on national television that requiring people to carry health insurance – and fining them if they don’t – isn’t the same thing as a tax increase. But the language of Democratic bills to revamp the nation’s health care system doesn’t quibble. Both the House bill and the Senate Finance Committee proposal clearly state that the fines would be a tax.”

The AP also notes that the Administration’s proposed health-care tax increases contradict “Obama’s campaign pledge on taxes”:  “”I can make a firm pledge,’ he said in Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12, 2008. ‘Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.’ He repeatedly promised ‘you will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime.’”

Obama earlier broke his promise not to raise taxes by signing into law a regressive SCHIP excise tax increase and backing a massive new cap-and-trade energy tax (supposedly to fight global warming)

It’s part of a long line of broken promises, such as Obama’s pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” which he broke with huge budgets that will explode the national debt through $9.3 trillion in massively increased deficit spending.

The costly cap-and-trade energy legislation passed by the House and supported by Obama would lead to big tax increases, Administration officials privately have conceded, even though they publicly claim otherwise.  “Officials at the Treasury Department think cap-and-trade legislation would cost taxpayers hundreds of billion in taxes, according to internal documents circulated within the agency and provided to The Washington Times” by CEI.  It could raise household taxes by $1761 per year, equivalent to a 15 percent tax increase.   It would also result in “loss of steel, paper, aluminum, chemical, and cement manufacturing jobs,” as jobs migrate overseas to countries which have fewer environmental protections than the U.S. does.

Obama earlier admitted that “under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket,” since its costs would be passed “on to consumers.”  Although cap-and-trade backers claim it will cut greenhouse gas emissions, it may perversely increase them and also result in dirtier air, as well as harming forests and water supplies.

Americans for Tax Reform summarizes the tax increases in ObamaCare: an individual mandate tax of $900 per individual or $3800 per family (if you don’t have health insurance); an employer mandate tax of $400 per employee if health coverage is not offered; an “excise tax on high-cost health plans”; a “medicine cabinet tax”; capping Flexible-Spending Accounts (FSA’s); abolishing most HSAs; and increasing tax penalties for HSAs.

All these tax increases won’t even pay for Obama’s massive spending binge.  He is relying on $2 trillion in imaginary savings to pay for his health-care plan.  Even Democratic governors have criticized its huge cost.

One of Obama’s economic advisers said his health-care plan would lead to “crippling deficits” and “higher taxes.”  The Congressional Budget Office also says it will increase the deficit.

In today’s E&E TV interview with Monica Trauzzi (http://www.eenews.net/tv/), UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer did not balk at Trauzzi’s statement that, “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has indicated that the Senate may not see floor action on climate until next year.” Nor did he bat an eye when she said that the Obama administration seems to have ”shifted to using the Clean Air Act to regulate emissions.” Like many observers, de Boer appears to have low expectations for the Waxman-Markey bill, at least for this year.

Nonetheless, de Boer spoke as if he expected President Obama to accomplish great things at Copenhagen climate conference in December: “From an international point of view, from the point of view of U.N. negotiations it’s not essential that this legislation be finalized, but that statement of political intent from the president — that’s the thing that really counts in the international arena.”

Oh really — like President Bill Clinton’s statement of political intent when he signed the Kyoto Protocol in November 1998? Clinton’s signature proved to be worth little from ”the point of view of U.N. negotiations,” because Clinton dared not submit the treaty to the U.S. Senate for a debate and vote on ratification.

The House passed Waxman-Markey by a razor thin (219-212) margin. In the Senate, proponents will need to find a three-fifths (60-vote) super-majority to defeat a GOP filibuster.  To ratify Kyoto II, Obama would need to assemble a two-thirds super-majority. In the Copenhagen round, the EU is pushing for tougher emission reduction targets than those in Waxman-Markey.

If President Obama, Sen. Reid, and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) prove unable to assemble 60 votes to pass Waxman-Markey in the Senate, what are the odds that they could line up 67 votes to ratify Kyoto II?

Mr. de Boer is mistaken. The fate of Waxman-Markey largely foreshadows and determines the fate of Kyoto II.

Your host Richard Morrison welcomes globalwarming.org editor William Yeatman to the program for Episode 61 of the LibertyWeek podcast. Tune into the segment that starts around 7:00 and continues to 12:15, where we discuss the U.S. Treasury Department documents that reveal the true cost of cap-and-trade legislation.

Your host Richard Morrison welcomes returning guest co-host William Yeatman and special guest commenter Ryan Radia to the program for Episode 61 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with the FCC’s just-announced proposal for “net neutrality,” Treasury documents that reveal the true cost of cap-and-trade legislation and the plan for getting over California’s great depression. We then move on to the G20 Summit’s potential path to prosperity and the ever-expanding scandal that is ACORN.

Last week, on the free-market energy blog MasterResource.Org, I posted a two-part column on climate change and national security. In a nutshell, I argued that global warming is likely not an important geopolitical or military “threat multiplier,” and that the national security risks of climate change policies likely outweigh those of climate change itself.

One of the great things about “publishing” on the Internet is that readers can quickly and easily share other insights and information the author had not considered.

Climate scientist and fellow blogger Chip Knappenberger called my attention to a remarkable essay in Nature magazine by Wendy Barnaby, editor of People & Science, the journal of the British Science Association — and to Chip’s review of Barnaby’s essay on WorldClimateReport.Com.

One of the principal ways climate change supposedly acts as a “threat multiplier” is to intensify drought and water shortages, leading to crop failure, famine, and armed conflict within and among nations. Barnaby had written a book about biological warfare, and the publishers suggested she write a book about the coming century of “water wars.” 

At the outset, she assumed that water scarcity is a signifcant source of armed conflict in the world – a pervasive problem just waiting to be ‘threat multiplied’ by climate change. The book was to include a history of water wars, but, as she dug into her topic, she found there wasn’t much history to write about. ”Cooperation, in fact, is the dominant response to shared water resources,” she discovered. The data are overwhelming:

Between 1948 and 1999, cooperation over water, including the signing of treaties, far outweighed conflict over water and violent conflict in particular. Of 1,831 instances of interactions over international fresh water resources tallied over that time period (including everything from unofficial verbal exchanges to economic agreements or military action), 67% were cooperative, only 28% were conflictive, and the remaining 5% neutral or insignificant. In those five decades, there were no formal declarations of war over water (emphasis added).

It is true that many nations are water-stressed, but this has not meant that their people must either perish or go to war to seize another country’s water supplies. Usually, it means that countries cooperate and import “virtual water” in the form of agricultural produce. It takes lots more water to grow crops than it does to supply households with drinking water. So where water is scarce, people tend to substitute grain imports for home-grown produce. Israel, Jordan, and Egypt are a case in point:

Israel ran out of water in the 1950s: it has not since then produced enough water to meet all of its needs, including food production. Jordan had been in the same situation since the 1960s; Egypt since the 1970s.  Although it’s true that these countries have fought wars with each other, they have not fought over water. Instead, they all import grain. As [U.K. social scientist Tony] Allan points out, more ‘virtual’ water flows into the Middle East each year embedded in grain than flows down the Nile to Egyptian farmers.

Climate change-related drought would pose challenges to resource managers but should not lead to armed conflict where nations are free to cooperate and trade. (As noted in my MasterResource column, cap-and-trade treaties require carbon tariffs for enforcement — a recipe for conflict and trade war rather than cooperation and trade.)

Barnaby’s conclusion is worth reproducing in full:

Book or no book, it is still important that the popular myth of water wars somehow be dispelled once and for all. This will not only stop unsettling and incorrect predictions of international conflict over water. It will also discourage a certain public resignation that climate change will bring war, and focus attention on what politicians can do to avoid it: most importantly, improve the conditions of trade for developing countries to strengthen their economies. And it would help to convince water engineers and managers, who still tend to see water shortages in terms of local supply and demand, that the solutions to water scarcity and security lie outside the water sector in the water/food/trade/economic development sector. It would be great if we could unclog our stream of thought about misleading notions of ‘water wars.’

Waxman-Markey would increase U.S. dependence on petroleum product imports

As discussed in my column on MasterResource.Org, U.S. dependence on oil, including oil imports, is not a “crisis.” Nonetheless, many eco-warriers and defense hawks claim that it is. They also claim that Waxman-Markey would enhance U.S. energy security by inaugurating the transition to a “beyond petroleum” economy.

Well, another colleague sent me a report showing that Waxman-Markey would make us more dependent on petroleum product imports.

The report, prepared by EnSys Energy for the American Petroleum Institute, finds that by 2030, Waxman-Markey would:

• Significantly increase U.S. refining costs;
• Reduce U.S. refining volume by up to 4.4 million barrels per day (mbd);
• Reduce annual U.S. refining investments by up to $89.7 billion (up to an 88% decline in investment);
• Reduce refinery utilization rates from 83.3% to as low as 63.4%;
• Create competitive advantage for non-U.S. refineries; and, hence
• Increase U.S. reliance on petroleum product imports.

EnSys analyzed three scenarios: a “Base Case” (EIA’s reference case projection of future liquid fuels supply and demand without climate legislation); a “Basic Case” (EIA’s analysis of Waxman-Markey assuming timely development of key low-emission technologies and no severe policy constraints on the use of both domestic and international offsets); and a No International/Limited Case (EIA’s analysis of Waxman-Markey assuming limited access to international offsets, and no deployment of key technologies beyond EIA’s reference case).

Okay, now that we understand the terminology, let’s look at some graphs from the EnSys report. First, the impact of Waxman-Markey on U.S. refinery output:

Next, the impact on U.S. refining investments:

Next, the impact on petroleum product imports by volume:

Next, the impact on petroleum product imports by percent:

Finally, the impact of Waxman-Markey on U.S. refining global market share:

Bottom line for “energy security” mavens: Waxman-Markey grows foreign refining output at the expense of U.S. output, and increases U.S. dependence on petroleum product imports.

The EnSys report very likely understates the impact of Waxman-Markey on U.S. refining. A modeling study can only estimate how carbon constraints will affect refining via their impact on fuel prices. Models cannot estimate how carbon-constraints might affect refining via their impact on investor psychology.    

Investors can get spooked when government declares regulatory warfare on an industry, and the Waxman-Markey bill does just that. Consider the gross disparity between the refining industry’s share of covered emissions (43%) under Waxman-Markey and its share of emission allowances (2.5%).

Investors cannot be blamed if they view Waxman-Markey as the proverbial “writing on the wall” for the U.S. refining industry. From this I conclude that Waxman-Markey’s adverse impacts on U.S. refining – and thus on the volume and percent of petroleum product imports – could be substantially greater than those EnSys projects.

Conclusion

Waxman-Markey will not take us “beyond petroleum.” Instead, it will make gasoline more costly to consumers while making America more dependent on imported petroleum products.