The House of Representatives has presumably learned that money cannot buy love or happiness. Now, it turns out it's not a sure solution to climate guilt, either.
The global temperature has been stable since 1998 according to Ole Humlum at the University of Oslo. In the largest paper in Norway, he is stating that this stabilization can mean one of three things:
1. We have achieved a stable temperature
2. We have reached a "plateu" and rise again in a bit
3. We have reached a top in the global temperature, and it will soon start sinking again.
As a true scientist, Prof. Humlum says we do not have the knowledge of which one of these three alternatives will come to pass, but considering the fact that we have had an increase in CO2 concentration without a warming the last decade, the greenhouse theory should be considered debunked by now.
The dogmatics in Norway is stating that Humlum cannot use the record year of 1998 as a benchmark year, although they have no problem using the cool 1970's as the benchmark to prove that its getting warmer. I am not sure how they can throw out a decade's worth of stable temperature as benchmark related though.
Even though media in Norway has shunned the climate skeptics in Norway for a long time, but their media climate is finally warming up. A push for less campaign journalism by the Norwegian trade publication for reporters on the week of the Nobel Prize gala in Oslo is slowly changing the debate. I talked to Prof. Humlum a few weeks before the Nobel award, and he had several tales of editors that told him that his research was not welcome on their pages, now he has a full page story on the biggest newspaper in the country.
When Alexander Cockburn, author of the forthcoming book A Short History of Fear, dared to question the climate change consensus, he was punished by a tsunami of self-righteous fury. It is time for a free and open ‘battle of ideas’, he says.
News Highlights
Steve Milloy, Fox News, 24 January 2008
David Shepardson, Detroit News, 24 January 2008
Jonathan Martin, The Politico, 25 january 2008
Simon Lauder, ABC News, 24 January 2008
Julian Glover, The Guardian, 24 January 2008
Alan Caruba, USA Daily, 23 January 2008
Ken Kay, Florida Sun-Sentinel, 22 January 2008
Leigh Phillips, EUObserver, 21 January 2008
This Week in Europe, the EU’s Climate Plan was Unveiled…
AFP, 21 January 2008
AFP, 23 January 2008
Hans-Jürgen Schlamp, Der Spiegel, 22 January 2008
Paul Taylor, Reuters, 22 January 2008
David Gow, The Guardian, 14 January 2008
News You Can Use
Energy Prices Go Through the Roof
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, energy prices in America went up an incredible 18.4 percent in 2007. But don’t look to Congress for relief. In December, 2007, Congress passed an anti-energy bill that will increase energy prices even further.
Inside the Beltway
CEI’s Myron Ebell
President George W. Bush is scheduled to give his last State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on January 28th. There has been speculation this week that one of the president’s annual, usually nasty, surprises would be to announce that he would sign a cap-and-trade bill if the Congress sent him an acceptable one, perhaps one that just covered electric utilities. It appears that this possibility has been headed off by calls from senior Republican members of Congress, but since cap-and-trade booster Josh Bolten is the president’s chief of staff I won’t say it’s dead until after the president finishes his speech.
After having been to hundreds of House and Senate hearings the past two decades, I feel that I am a pretty good judge of the theatrics. In the twelve years of Republican control, there were very few hearings that succeeded in making the intended point well. Indeed, with most hearings I attended chaired by a Republican, I often wasn’t sure what the point was. Things have improved a lot theatrically speaking since the Democrats regained control. But the attempt this week to grill EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson over an open fire at a Senate and Environment and Public Works Committee hearing fell flat. Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and her fellow Democrats wanted to grandstand, but they were just too dull and dreary to scare Johnson or excite the audience. The only exception was Senator Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialist from Vermont, who has some of the spark of Big Bill Haywood, the leader of the Wobblies in the early twentieth century.
For the substance of the hearing, see Marlo Lewis’ piece below.
The Most Important Story You Haven’t Heard
EPA Averts Resulatory Nightmare
CEI’s Marlo Lewis
On December 19, 2007, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) denied California a waiver, under the Clean Air Act, to set first-ever carbon dioxide (CO2) emission standards for new motor vehicles. On Thursday, January 24, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held a hearing on EPA’s denial of the California waiver.
Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) pilloried EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson as a betrayer of the Clean Air Act, the Planet, and the Children. Instead, she should thank him for averting an economically- and environmentally-debilitating regulatory morass.
If the EPA had granted the waiver, allowing California and other states to adopt CO2 emission standards for new motor vehicles, CO2 would become a pollutant “subject to regulation” under the Clean Air Act’s Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) program. That, in turn, would compel EPA and its state-level counterparts to regulate CO2 from hundreds of thousands of stationary sources, spawning a red-tape nightmare as detrimental to the environment as to the economy.
Attorneys Peter Glaser and John Cline provide an eye-popping analysis of the economic and administrative burdens that would be created by extending the PSD program to CO2 in a November 8, 2007 testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
To read more, click here.
The Environmental Protection Agency's chief defended before Congress today his decision to deny California and 15 other states the right to impose their own strict tailpipe emissions standards, calling it "common sense."
Taken from Prometheus: The Science Policy Blog
Have you ever heard anyone make the argument that we must take a certain course of action because the experts tell us we must? The issue might be the threat of another country or an environmental risk, but increasingly we see appeals to authority used as the basis for arguing for this or that action.
In a new book, David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith take the appeal to experts somewhat further and argue that in order to deal with climate change we need to replace liberal democracy with an authoritarianism of scientific expertise. They write in a recent op-ed:
“Liberal democracy is sweet and addictive and indeed in the most extreme case, the USA, unbridled individual liberty overwhelms many of the collective needs of the citizens. . .
There must be open minds to look critically at liberal democracy. Reform must involve the adoption of structures to act quickly regardless of some perceived liberties. . .
We are going to have to look how authoritarian decisions based on consensus science can be implemented to contain greenhouse emissions.”
On their book page they write:
“[T]he authors conclude that an authoritarian form of government is necessary, but this will be governance by experts and not by those who seek power.”
So whenever you hear (or invoke) an argument from expertise (i.e., "the experts tell us that we must …") ask if we should listen to the experts in just this one case, or if we should turn over all decisions to experts. If just this one case, why this one and not others? If a general prescription, should we do away with democracy in favor of an authoritarianism of expertise?
Iain Murray, CEI, posted on National Review Online
Jim Geraghty stirred up a minor hornet’s nest yesterday with this post on Republican tactics on global warming. After coming in for some pretty heavy criticism from none other than Rush Limbaugh, he posted again here and here. Roy Spencer, who advises Rush on the science, weighed in below, but to my mind the reason why the debate has become so fractious is because the left has been so successful at muddying the waters over global warming.
When people say that there’s a hoax about global warming, what do they mean? Do they mean that there is no evidence that temperatures are increasing? Probably not — no one I know disputes that fact, although there are serious question marks over the reliability of the surface temperature measurements. Yet the satellite record is clear that the world is warming.
No, what is objected to is the idea that global warming will be catastrophic unless we do something about it now that involves a complete abandonment of affordable energy and a return to central planning. As Margaret Thatcher, who was the first world leader to express concern about global warming, said, global warming is proving to be “a marvelous excuse for international socialism.” It’s that excuse angle that is the crux of the matter. Things are being exaggerated, as the British High Court found with Al Gore’s film, in the name of this realignment. That’s where conservatives see the penny disappearing in this particular game of three-card monty, and they need to call foul when they see it.
Moreover, as Jim concedes, the American public’s worries about global warming are skin deep. In point of fact, when you get a bunch of Americans together and the facts are explained to them, they tend to become more skeptical, as happened with even with the Manhattan elite at the IQ2 debate last year, where an audience that was going to vote against the motion “Global warming is not a crisis” voted for the motion after hearing the arguments. The swing was 30 points. So the evidence is against Jim’s contention that, “If you put the finest skeptical scientists and researchers from the Competitive Enterprise Institute and American Enterprise Institute into a room with a couple hundred Americans, and let them talk until they’re blue in the face, I’m not sure how much you would move the dials.” They quite clearly do move the dials, significantly, if the dials are measuring government action, which is all a Presidential candidate should be talking about. If National Review would like to sponsor such an event to test Jim’s contention I know Chris Horner for one is biting at the bit.
So if a generic candidate (Republican or Democrat) who is opposed to significant government action on global warming allows his or her opponent (Democrat or Republican) to say, “The world is heating up, we must cut emissions now,” then they must call them on it. They must call attention to the exaggerations and the hyperbole that surrounds the issue, cut through the PR fog and concentrate on the issue and what fast and deep emissions reductions really mean to Americans and the world: less growth, lower living standards, higher unemployment, more poverty, more death. Conceding that argument is, to my mind, not just bad politics but positively immoral.
Yes, there’s a good argument that technology will make the question moot in the end, but not in the short term, and that is where the battle is being fought right now. There are a host of no-regrets policies like those Jim Manzi has outlined that can help, but any concession to the idea that deep and fast emissions reduction is necessary is a concession to central control of the economy in the name of an exaggerated threat. Any candidate who does that deserves opprobrium.
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