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Today on Real Clear Politics, Jennifer Diggins, Public Affairs director for Nucor Energy and Chair of America’s Energy Advantage (AEA), urges the Department of Energy (DOE) to ‘slow-track’ applications to export domestically-produced liquefied natural gas (LNG). Other AEA members include Eastman, Huntsman, Celanese, Alcoa, and, most prominently, Dow Chemical.

The question is one of timing. Why now? AEA made a big splash back in March when Dow CEO Andrew Liveris decried “unfettered” LNG exports in testimony before the House Energy & Commerce Committee and on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. But during the past few months, Dow and AEA have not said much about curbing gas exports. Indeed, Dow recently posted a column on its blog extolling the benefits of free trade. There’s not a trace of Liveris’s mercantilist fervor in that column.

I suspect Diggins is responding to “This Gas Is Dow’s Gas,” a song and video produced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) lampooning Dow’s anti-gas export campaign as corporate welfare, rent seeking, and political plunder. See CEI’s press release for details and commentary by your humble servant.

To watch the video, click on This Gas Is Dow’s Gas.

Guest Post by Dave Juday

There is a debate ongoing about the efficacy of so-called e-15, i.e. motor gasoline blended with 15 percent ethanol.  The standard blend has always been 10 percent ethanol.  While the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) granted final approval for e-15 in June 2012 for use in late model cars and light duty trucks, the American Automobile Association has cautioned, “this new fuel entered the market without adequate protections to prevent misfuelings and despite remaining questions about potential vehicle damage, even for EPA-approved 2001 and newer vehicles.”

Such concerns are nonsense says the ethanol trade association Growth Energy.  The testing by EPA was “exhaustive,” there are misfueling labels required for pumps, and “additionally, NASCAR has run on … a fuel blended with 15 percent ethanol for over four million miles.”

This last point should give pause.  Are the engines used in the professional stock car racing circuit a fair proxy for the family auto?  For driving conditions?  Is it even really the same e-15 fuel?

The fuel is different.  NASCAR switched to e-15 in 2011 and uses a version that has a 98 octane rating.  Retail e-15 has an octane rating of 90.  Regular grade gasoline available commercially has an octane rating of 87; premium grade is 93.

Driving conditions, of course, are different.  NASCAR winners so far in the 2013 season have logged average speeds of 153 miles per hour at the Brickyard in Indianapolis, 144 miles per hour at Michigan International Speedway, and 129 miles per hour at Pocono Speedway.  Is that a model for the average morning stop-and-go, engine idling commute?

The engines are different.  Consider, the top selling model in the US for 2011 and 2012 was the Ford F-Series pick-up truck which come with V-6 or V-8 engines that range from 302 to 360 horsepower respectively.  For passenger cars, the top seller in 2012 was the Toyota Camry.  The Camry has two engine choices – a 2.5 liter four-cylinder which produces 178 horsepower, or a 3.5 liter that has 268 horsepower.  The average NASCAR engine makes about 750 horsepower. [click to continue…]

“The weather patterns that steered deadly Superstorm Sandy into the East Coast last year may be on the decrease, thanks to rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” states the press release for a study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The release continues:

While the atmospheric conditions that pushed Sandy into the New Jersey coast in October 2012 will still occur in the North Atlantic, a team of researchers led by Elizabeth Barnes, assistant professor in the Colorado State University Department of Atmospheric Science, has found that those conditions will occur less often, making it less likely that any future superstorms that form will be steered into the United States.

“Using state-of-the-art climate models, we project that there will be a decrease in the frequency and persistence of the westward flow that led to Sandy’s unprecedented track,” Barnes said. “That implies that future atmospheric conditions are less likely than at present to propel tropical storms westward into the coast.”

Two anomalous weather patterns slammed Sandy into the Northeast, according to Barnes. First, the jet stream shifted toward the south. Second, a “wave breaking” and blocking event in the upper atmosphere blocked the normal west-to-east wind, “causing the wind to blow back towards North America rather than out to sea.” When Sandy “met the block and the westward wind flow, it accelerated toward the New Jersey Coast with winds in excess of 80 miles per hour.” In the PNAS study, “the models show a lessening of the frequency of the breaking-and-blocking pattern with a poleward shift of the jet-stream in the future, and that this is found for the Southern Hemisphere as well.”

There may be no greater heresy in this enlightened age than the notion that global warming will avert weather disasters. But there’s evidence it has already begun.

In June, Cato Institute climatologist Chip Knappenberger, in a column on MasterResource.Org, described several “Billion Dollar Weather Events Averted by Global Warming.” Not unlike the Barnes PNAS study, Knappenberger found that wind patterns “consistent with” global warming prevented two tropical storms from developing into full-blown hurricanes and prevented two others from hitting the U.S. East Coast. Here’s an excerpt: [click to continue…]

In case you missed it, I want to call your attention to an important essay by Werner Brozek posted last week on Anthony Watts’s blog, Watts Up with That (WAWT).

NASA supports two main satellite-based global temperature monitoring systems: the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) program headed by John Christy and Roy Spencer, and the Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) program headed by Frank Wentz.

Climate activists have generally been boosterish about RSS and negative about UAH. The RSS found a mid-troposphere warming trend from the start of its satellite record in July 1987 whereas the UAH found a cooling trend from 1979 through 1995.

In 1998, Wentz published a study in Nature arguing that uncorrected instrument error associated with satellite orbital decay injected a spurious cooling bias into the UAH dataset. Spencer and Christy accepted the criticism, made the adjustment, and since 1998 their dataset has shown a long-term warming trend. However, at least through 2004, the UAH record showed less warming (0.09°C/decade) than the RSS record (0.12°C). So activists continued to take potshots at Spencer and Christy, implying (or asserting) that their political biases accounted for the discrepancy.

Ah, but how quickly the wheel turns! During the 2000s, the divergence began to go the other way as the RSS record showed less warming than the UAH record.

Which brings us back to Brozek and his post in WUWT.  Brozek shows there has been no warming in the RSS data from Dec. 1996 through July 2013 — a 200 month warming pause.

Figure explanation: “The graphic above shows 3 lines. The long line shows that RSS has been flat from December 1996 to July 2013, which is a period of 16 years and 8 months or 200 months. The other slightly higher flat line in the middle is the latest complete decade of 120 months from January 2001 to December 2010. The other slightly downward sloping line is the latest 120 months prior from present. It very clearly shows it has been cooling lately, however this cooling is not statistically significant.” [click to continue…]

Congress is in the middle of its August recess, so it was up to Al Gore to provide a little light relief in Washington this week.  He didn’t disappoint.  The Washington Post’s soft lefty blogger Ezra Klein asked the former Vice President some easy questions last week, and once again Mr. Gore made it clear why he’s seldom let out of his box without adult supervision. He claimed that “in quite a few countries in the world and some parts of the United States we’ve crossed that threshold” where electricity produced by windmills and solar panels is cheaper than from coal.  (Which is, I guess, why President Obama wants to make wind and solar tax subsidies permanent.)

Mr. Gore sees a number of signs and portents that the global warming debate is shifting in favor of the alarmists’ energy-rationing agenda.  For one thing, “The appearance of more extreme and more frequent weather events has had a very profound impact on public opinion in countries throughout the world.”

That may be true, but Mr. Gore doesn’t stop there.  He goes on to claim: “There has been a 100-fold increase in the number of extreme, high-temperature events around the world in the distribution curve.  And people have noticed for themselves — the rain storms are bigger, the droughts are deeper and the fires are more destructive…. Every night on the news, it’s like a nature hike through the book of revelations. Eleven states today are fighting 35 major fires!”

According to Mr. Gore, the “leading scientists” now agree that “every extreme weather event now has a component of global warming in it.”  Furthermore: “The extreme events are more extreme. The hurricane scale used to be 1-5 and now they’re adding a 6. The fingerprint of man-made global warming is all over these storms and extreme weather events.”

Even the Union of Concerned Scientists saw that “adding a 6” to the hurricane scale was making the fantasy a little too specific and thus open to contradiction by a simple fact check.  So UCS’s Gretchen Goldman gently corrected the former Vice President’s little mis-statement, while adding that “the rest of the interview included accurate and important information and it’s unfortunate that this blip made its way in.”

For the record, rather than a “100-fold increase” there has been no upward trend in hurricanes or other extreme weather events. The increased number of catastrophic fires in the West is due almost entirely to criminally negligent federal mismanagement of our National Forests.  See my CEI colleague Marlo Lewis’s recent summary of current climate science to see how very far from reality are Mr. Gore’s claims.

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Earlier today I received an email out of the blue from a Russian journalist inquiring what the impact on the Chinese economy might have been if, at the Kyoto climate conference of Nov.-Dec. 1997, Beijing had agreed to limit China’s greenhouse gas emissions and actually implemented such limits. Here’s the gist of my response:

The average emissions limitation for Annex I (industrial) counties under the Kyoto Protocol is a 5% reduction below 1990 levels during a 2008-2012 commitment period. China’s CO2 emissions in 1990 were about 2.4 billion metric tons per year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). China’s emissions in 2012 were 8.994 billion metric tons – 274% larger. China could not comply with the Kyoto Annex I target without de-industrializing its economy.

What about the impacts of milder versions of the Annex I target such as limiting China’s emissions growth to, say, 15%, 20%, or 25% above 2005 levels (the year Kyoto entered into force)? Even these ‘soft’ Kyoto targets, if actually implemented, would have devastated China’s economy.

A recent report (p. 16) commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy notes that the increase in China’s coal consumption more than tripled from 3.6% per year during 1980-1999 to 12.2% per year during 2000-2012. Oil and gas consumption also increased dramatically. According to the EIA’s country report on China, oil consumption in China increased from about 6.5 million barrels per day in 2005 to 12 million barrels per day in 2012 — an 84% increase; gas consumption increased from 2.0 trillion cubic feet in 2005 to 4.6 trillion cubic feet in 2011 – a 130% increase.

Yes, China in recent years has also made large investments in hydropower, nuclear, and renewables. Nonetheless, as of 2009, fossil fuels accounted for 93% of the country’s energy consumption. China’s economic development is overwhelmingly fossil-fueled.

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A visitor to Anthony Watt’s blog, Watts Up With That, who identifies himself simply as “Craig,” today posted one of the funniest comments I’ve ever seen in a debate where 97% of scientists seem to have no sense of humor. Enjoy!

STUDY: Climate change causing climate models to become less reliable

A groundbreaking new study has shown that climate change is the underlying cause of increasingly frequent and severe climate model failures. Researchers at Pennsylvania State Community College have discovered a critical link between atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration and general circulation model errors.

“Climate change has made it increasingly difficult to predict climate change,” says Dr. Manyard Michael, the lead scientist behind the study. “The current 16 year pause in global warming illustrates just how serious this situation has been; if not for climate change, we now know that we would have been able to accurately predict the current break in warming and clearly show that climate change is actually accelerating faster than forecast – not stopping as climate change is making it appear to those outside of the climate science community.” Dr. Michael also noted that they stumbled on this important finding almost by accident. “We just happened to notice that the higher carbon dioxide concentrations climbed, the more we had to adjust the data to get the results we knew to be right, and the more we adjusted the data, the bigger the error in the models. It’s a very strong positive feedback.” [click to continue…]