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Cooler Heads Digest 13 August 2010

by William Yeatman on August 13, 2010

in Cooler Heads Digest

In the News

Japan Owns up to Costs of Green Economy
Chris Horner, Planet Gore, 13 August 2010

What’s Going on with the New “Skeptical Science” Website?
John Droz, Jr., MasterResource.org, 13 August 2010

The Real Nuclear Option
Iain Murray, Washington Examiner, 12 August 2010

The Real Gulf Disaster
Lou Dolinar, National Review, 12 August 2010

Spinning the Defeat of Cap-and-Trade
Marlo Lewis, GlobalWarming.org, 11 August 2010

What the Chinese Really Think of Global Warming
James Delingpole, Telegraph, 11 August 2010

The Dejected Greens
Paul Chesser, Spectator.org, 10 August 2010

Smart Grid and the Electricity Market
William Yeatman, The Oklahoman, 7 August 2010

News You Can Use

Sierra Club Is Spending Big Bucks To Make Energy More Expensive

The Politico reported that the Sierra Club is spending $18 million this year and has 100 employees across the country working on challenges to coal-fired electricity, said Michael Brune, the group’s executive director. He hopes to increase the budget to $25 million next year.

California Cold

Daily July temperatures in Southern California averaged about 5 degrees below historical norms, and overall summer temperatures are flirting with all-time cold records.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

EPA Plots To Regulate Carbon

The EPA this week issued two more proposed rules designed to implement the agency’s decision to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.  The first rule deals with thirteen States that are not legally prepared to begin issuing permits for greenhouse gas emissions.

The Clean Air Act requires that stationary sources of listed pollutants be regulated if they emit more than 250 tons of that pollutant per year.  The EPA has already released the so-called Tailoring Rule that changes the limit for greenhouse gas emissions to 75,000 tons.  That change is being made without any legislative authority.

The first of EPA’s proposed further rules tells the 13 States that they need to change their laws so that they can now regulate stationary sources of greenhouse gas emissions, but only such sources that emit more than 75,000 tons annually.  Some States have the 250 ton limit written into their own state air pollution laws.  A few other States prohibit regulating any pollutants not specifically listed in their own state laws.  Under the Clean Air Act’s Prevention of Significant Deterioration program, state environmental agencies are responsible for issuing New Source Review permits.

The States that EPA is telling to comply are Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, and Texas.  The chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Texas Attorney General sent a letter last week telling the EPA why Texas will not change its laws in order to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and explaining why what the EPA was doing was illegal.  The Digest covered this humdinger of a letter last week.  If you didn’t read it, we have posted it on GlobalWarming.org here.

The EPA’s second proposed rule would deal with States that refuse to comply by taking permitting authority away from state environmental agencies and creating a federal permitting process for those States.  Regulatory chaos is only a couple years away now.

Gore Hijinks

Former Vice President Al Gore returned to the public debate this week in a conference call held by his group Repower America (which is also known as the Alliance for Climate Protection).  Gore was realistic about the next-to-nil chance for passing cap-and-trade in the 111th Congress.  He bitterly blamed a long list of the usual suspects: Big Oil, King Coal, the dominant right-wing media, professional deniers (that’s us!), and even the Senate.  According to Gore, the greedy corporations who oppose energy rationing spent hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat cap-and-trade.

This is of course fantasy.  Big corporations hoping to make billions and billions of dollars off the backs of consumers through the higher energy prices caused by cap-and-trade are the ones that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting their own self interest.  Moreover, three of the five biggest oil companies-BP, Shell, and Conoco Phillips-support cap-and-trade.

Gore’s Generation Investment Management and Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers are among the companies that hope to strike it rich.  Gore is understandably bitter because his dream of becoming a global warming billionaire based on comparatively modest investments in green energy made golden by cap-and-trade have gone poof.

Gore even claimed that cap-and-trade had died in the Senate because our system of government wasn’t working the say the Founders intended it should work.  If he meant Thomas Jefferson (founder of the Democratic Party), he’s probably right.  But luckily for us, Jefferson didn’t attend the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and had little influence on our system of checks and balances, which are designed to thwart both the mass of people from robbing the rich and the elites from robbing the people.

The Cooler Heads Digest is the weekly e-mail publication of the Cooler Heads Coalition. For the latest news and commentary, check out the Coalition’s website, www.globalwarming.org.

Cooler Heads Digest 21 May 2010

by William Yeatman on May 21, 2010

in Cooler Heads Digest

In the News

States Divided Over New EPA Rules
Shannon Goessling, Washington Times, 21 May 2010

Cap-and-Trade Magic Show
James Valvo, Washington Times, 21 May 2010

Inequitable in Ecuador
Quin Hillyer, American Spectator, 21 May 2010

Electric Dreamin’
Henry Payne, Planet Gore, 21 May 2010

Scientists Scramble To Address Radio Campaign
Stephen Dinan, Washington Times, 20 May 2010

The Green Jobs Myth
Investor’s Business Daily editorial, 20 May 2010

The EPA’s Shocking Power Grab
George Allen & Marlo Lewis, Forbes, 18 May 2010

UVA’s Dishonorable Double Standard
Barbara Hollingsworth, Washington Examiner, 18 May 2010

Climate Policy Needs a Team “B”
David Schnare, MasterResource.org, 18 May 2010

News You Can Use

Maybe It’s the Sun

Despite the absence of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, Jupiter’s climate changed drastically this month when a giant belt of clouds circling the planet mysteriously disappeared. As noted by the BlogProf, this follows recent discoveries that Triton, a moon of Neptune, is rapidly warming and that Mars’s polar ice caps are evaporating.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

Murkowski Resolution Debate Heats Up

In a story in Environment and Energy Daily (reprinted on the NY Times’s web site), Darren Samuelsohn reports that Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) predicts the Murkowski resolution of disapproval of the EPA’s endangerment finding will pass the Senate when it is brought to the floor for a vote next week.  “I think it will pass,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “There are a lot of people who will be in the camp of, ‘We should do it, not the EPA.'”

I think that is a sensible observation.  Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is among those who favor reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but who do not want it to be done by using the Clean Air Act.  That is because she has concluded that applying the Clean Air Act to carbon dioxide emissions will result in a regulatory nightmare and wreck the economy (which is also sensible).  This conclusion is gaining ground as Members of Congress look at the issue.  Therefore, I do not think the Senate vote is merely “symbolic,” as political commentator Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute told Evan Lehmann and Jessica Leber of Climate Wire (also reprinted on the New York Times’s web site).

My guess is that Murkowski’s resolution, S. J. Res. 26, will pass narrowly and that pressure will then build on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to schedule a House vote.  One of the interesting results of the congressional primary elections so far is that strong opponents of cap-and-trade in both parties are doing well.  Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com has noticed the trend, as has the Huffington Post.  Democratic House Members worried about their re-election may plead with Pelosi that they need a vote against EPA regulation to take back home. An indication that Pelosi may already be feeling some heat is that this week she said, as reported by Bob Cusack and Ben Geman in the Hill, that Congress should legislate global warming policy rather than let EPA regulate.

This week nineteen free market and conservative non-profit groups sent a joint letter to Senators in support of the Murkowski resolution.  It was written and organized by my CEI colleague, Marlo Lewis.  Marlo and former Virginia Governor and Senator George Allen also published an excellent op-ed on the Forbes Magazine web site that explains why stopping EPA from using the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide emissions is a constitutional as well as economic imperative.

Several environmental groups have been running ads against the Murkowski resolution.  Americans for Prosperity has held a bunch of rallies in support of the resolution in the States of key Senators over the past few weeks.  This week Freedom Action (of which I am director) started running radio ads in six States-Virginia, West Virginia, North Dakota, New Mexico, Montana, New Mexico, and Alaska-which tie the ClimateGate scandal to the EPA Endangerment Finding and urge listeners to e-mail their Senators.

Obama Wants To Raise CAFE Again

President Barack Obama today issued a memorandum directing federal agencies to develop tougher new fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks beginning in the 2017 model year and to develop fuel economy standards for medium and big trucks for the first time. This follows the new standards announced in April that will begin with the 2012 model year.  It’s not clear to me that consumers are going to want to buy the models that the Congress and the Obama Administration have decreed will be offered in 2012, but the automakers are now resigned to taking orders from their federal masters rather than their customers. My prediction is that another massive bailout of the automakers is inevitable.

“Invaluable” Climate Reports Released

The National Academies of Science this week released three reports prepared by the National Research Council that endorse the scientific case for global warming alarmism and claim that it is urgent that the federal government adopt mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Former New York Times environment reporter Andrew Revkin on his New York Times blog called the reports “invaluable.”  Yeah, I’ve got a lot of invaluable junk stored in my basement, too, that perhaps I can interest Andy in buying.

The fact is that these three reports are put-up jobs arranged by NAS President Ralph Cicerone to counter the damage done by the Climategate scandal.  I have seen enough of Dr. Cicerone in action to know that he is a political conman first and a scientist second.  I wouldn’t trust him to give a straight answer on the time of day.  The carefully-chosen members of the NRC committees that wrote the reports are mostly committed advocates of alarmism and energy rationing policies.  Mark Landsbaum of the Orange County Register agrees.

4th International Conference on Climate Change

I was one of 700 people attending the Heartland Institute’s fourth International Conference on Climate Change this week.  As with the first three conferences, Joe Bast, James Taylor, Nikki Comerford, and the Heartland staff put together a well-run conference with many outstanding speakers.  All of the keynote and panel presentations are available on video here.

There are a number of famous names among the speakers who gave excellent talks-Richard Lindzen, Bob Carter, Steve McIntyre, Nils-Axel Morner, Ian Plimer, and others whose talks I missed (which is the problem with having four concurrent sessions).  One less famous speaker, whose talk I recommend watching, is Willis Eschenbach.

Across the States

West Virginia

On Tuesday night, the Environmental Protection Agency held a public hearing in Charleston, West Virginia, on its proposed veto of a Clean Water Act permit for Spruce Fork 1 coal mine in Logan County, which is already operating. The EPA is exercising this authority for the first time ever, in order to protect an insect that isn’t even an endangered species. More than 800 people attended, and scores of miners, small businessmen, and community activists gave testimony urging the EPA to spare their livelihoods. The EPA’s veto would result in the direct loss of 250 jobs paying an average of $62,000, and would also deprive the Logan County school system of more than $17 million annually.

Around the World

Spain

Since becoming President, Barrack Obama has cited the “success” of Spain’s green energy policies eight times, most recently in Illinois, three weeks ago. So it was major news when Professor Gabriel Calzada, an economist at King Juan Carlos University, released a study in 2009 concluding that Spain’s ultra-wasteful green energy subsidies were killing 2.2 jobs for every job they created. After CEI’s Chris Horner broke news of the study in the U.S., the Obama administration commissioned a hatchet job analysis to discredit Calzada’s work. This week, Professor Calzada was vindicated when a government report was leaked conceding that the green energy subsidies are unsustainable. The headline of the Spanish daily La Gaceta says it all: “Spain Admits That the Green Economy as Sold to Obama Is a Disaster.”

UNFCCC

Bloomberg reported this week that Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican diplomat, will succeed Yvo de Boer as the head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change on July 1st. Soon after the announcement, she told reporters that she is confident that a legally binding, international greenhouse gas emissions reductions treaty can be reached in 3 years. We’ve heard that before. In 2007, de Boer championed the “Bali Roadmap,” which was supposed to lead to a climate treaty at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC last December in Copenhagen, Denmark. Of course, the Copenhagen Climate Conference foundered amid recriminations over how to share the $45 trillion price tag for a global climate treaty.

The Cooler Heads Digest is the weekly e-mail publication of the Cooler Heads Coalition. For the latest news and commentary check out the Coalition’s website, www.globalwarming.org.

Computer Cloud Illusions

by Paul Chesser, Heartland Institute Correspondent on March 31, 2010

in Blog

Looks like Greenpeace finally got off their greenhouse gas kick and has realized that clouds have as much to do with how climate changes as anything else.

Wait — check that. They say cloud computing is leading us down the path towards catastrophic global warming:

In a study issued Tuesday, environmental organization Greenpeace said the computing “cloud” powering the Internet is becoming a major source of pollution, as companies build data centers powered by coal, according to a Reuters report from Monday.

The study (PDF) singles out a Facebook facility that relies on a coal-powered utility, along with Apple’s North Carolina data center, also powered by coal.

According to Reuters, in the report Greenpeace concludes that “the last thing we need is for more cloud infrastructure to be built in places where it increases demand for dirty coal-fired power.”

The organization also points to Microsoft, Yahoo and Google as having data centers that rely on “heavy” use of coal power.

That’s right, another polluter demon has been unleashed from the pit of corporate hell: Big Internet.

Audi Super Bowl Ad: Working Both Sides of Street? (Updated Feb. 10, 2010)

by Marlo Lewis on February 9, 2010

in Blog

(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!

American Enviro-Media Still MIA

by Paul Chesser, Heartland Institute Correspondent on February 5, 2010

in Blog

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?

Cooler Heads Digest 29 January 2010

by William Yeatman on January 29, 2010

in Cooler Heads Digest

In the News

Obama’s Energy Muddle
Marlo Lewis, National Journal, 29 January 2010

The Scientific “Consensus”
Chip Knappenberger, MasterResource.org, 29 January 2010

Mandated Carbon Cuts Won’t Work
Bjorn Lomborg, Wall Street Journal, 29 January 2010

Insecurity and Change Commission
Wall Street Journal editorial, 29 January 2010

The Real Climate Confusion
Iain Murray, National Review Online, 28 January 2010

EPA Should Ground Carbon Regs for Good
Washington Examiner editorial, 28 January 2010

IPCC Newest Headache: Amazongate
Gene Koprowski, Fox News, 28 January 2010

EPA at Center of Coal Controversy
David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post, 27 January 2010

Floating Islands
Willis Eischenbach, WattsUpWithThat.com, 27 January 2010

Discredited IPCC Report Reveals Media Malpractice
Paul Chesser, GlobalWarming.org, 26 January 2010

James Hansen: Would You Buy a Used Temperature Data Set from This Man?
James Delingpole, Daily Telegraph, 22 January 2010

Why We Need Innovation, Not Insulation
Bill Gates, Huffington Post, 22 January 2010

News You Can Use

Pew Poll Ranks Global Warming Last

A new poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds that the American public ranks global warming last among twenty “domestic priorities.”

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

SEC’s Demand for Climate Disclosures Might Backfire

The Securities and Exchange Commission this week voted 3 to 2 to issue guidance that will require companies to disclose to investors the effects that climate change and climate change policies could have on the company’s performance.  As Joel Kirkland reported in Climate Wire (reprinted on the New York Times web site), “The SEC public disclosure guidance on climate-related risks is seen as a major victory by an army of environmental groups and institutional investors that have pressed the issue since 2007.”

Well, maybe, but Tom Borelli pointed out in a National Center for Public Policy Research press release that the new rules will actually work against the promoters of energy-rationing policies.  “Fully disclosing the business risk of cap-and-trade will embarrass many CEOs who are lobbying for emissions regulations. Shareholders will discover that these CEOs are pursuing legislation that will negatively impact their company.”  We will discover, I think, that many CEOs have joined the U. S. Climate Action Partnership and other business coalitions that support cap-and-trade without doing adequate or indeed any analysis of what the effects of enacting such legislation could have on their companies’ profits.  This violates their legal fiduciary duties to their shareholders.

Obama to Democrats: Jump off the Cliff

It’s been a busy week on global warming and energy-rationing policy for President Barack Obama and his Administration.  In his State of the Union address to Congress on Wednesday night, the President re-iterated his support for cap-and-trade legislation.  Here is the transcript: “And, yes, it means passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America. (Applause.)  I am grateful to the House for passing such a bill last year. (Applause.)  And this year I’m eager to help advance the bipartisan effort in the Senate. (Applause.)  I know there have been questions about whether we can afford such changes in a tough economy.  I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change.  But here’s the thing — even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy-efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future — because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy. And America must be that nation. (Applause.)”

President Obama has thus fallen back on the argument first enunciated by then-Senator Timothy Wirth (D-Colo.) in 1988: even if global warming isn’t a problem, it will make us do the right thing.  I’m pretty sure that there are a lot of Democrats in the House and Senate who wish that the President would stop beating his head against this particular political wall.  Cap-and-trade is dead because it is a huge political liability going into November’s congressional elections.  Many who voted for the Waxman-Markey bill in the House last June now regret it and would not vote for it again.  Several Democrats who voted for it have decided to retire.

U.S. Makes Carbon Pledge To Comply with Copenhagen Accord

Todd Stern, the Administration’s top climate negotiator, on Thursday announced that the U. S.’s pledge under the Copenhagen Accord to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. This was the number that was unofficially announced before the fifteenth Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen in December, so it’s no surprise.  What is slightly surprising is that Stern said that it’s conditional on Congress passing legislation and therefore could be subject to change.  According to a list compiled by the U. S. Climate Action Network, 15 countries have now (as if Friday, 3 PM EST) submitted their pledges to the Copenhagen Accord and 14 more have announced that they are likely to do so.  The 29 countries account for more than 72% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Obama Orders Feds To Curb Carbon Footprint

President Obama this week also ordered the federal government to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 28% below current levels by 2020.  This order follows from Executive Order 13514, which the President signed last fall and which requires federal departments and agencies to set targets for cutting emissions.  He has now set their target for them.  The most practical way to meet this goal would be to shut down large parts of the federal government.  Let’s hope President Obama seizes this opportunity and achieves the most drastic downsizing of government in history.  The Administration claims that these emissions reductions will save from $8 to 11 billion dollars in energy costs, but the Institute for Energy points out the costs of achieving the reductions are not included and probably outweigh the savings. Ironically, according to a 2008 GAO report, the Environmental Protection Agency had the poorest record among federal departments and agencies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Across the States

Even Green Energy Isn’t Good Enough for Greens

A Maryland developer has agreed not to build 24 turbines and will abandon 31 proposed sites at a West Virginia wind farm, settling a lawsuit by environmental groups worried about potential harm to the endangered Indiana bat, according to a report from ABC News. In related news, California Senator Dianne Feinstein is pushing for federal legislation to block one million acres of the Mojave Desert from solar power development, so as to protect the endangered desert tortoise.

Around the World

The EPA Is Working on Bin-Laden’s Climate Solution

The AP reported this week that terrorist kingpin Osama bin Laden has released a new audio tape claiming that global warming must be stopped by bringing “the wheels of the American economy” to a halt. To learn more about how the Environmental Protection Agency is doing everything in its power to implement Bin Laden’s climate policy recommendation, click here.

Climategate Update

The United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has ruled that the University of East Anglia violated the Freedom of Information Act by withholding raw data requested by Stephen McIntyre, the Canadian statistician and businessman who earlier exposed Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” fraud.  The ruling results from a complaint filed by David Holland, a retired engineer in England. The ICO also announced that they could not prosecute Professor Phil Jones, then-director of the university’s Climatic Research unit, and others implicated in the Climategate scandal because of a flaw in the statute, which they will now recommend be corrected by Parliament.  However, others have suggested that the ICO is misinformed and that the six month statute of limitations does not begin when the violation occurs, but when it is discovered.

As an official British government enquiry into Climategate continues, the House of Commons announced this week that its science and technology committee will undertake their own investigation of the scandal.  Roger Helmer, Member of the European Parliament for the UK, has already submitted his ideas for the enquiry.  Finally, John Beddington, the British government’s chief science adviser, criticized the CRU in an interview with the Times of London this week, defended skepticism as an essential part of scientific enquiry, and advised climate scientists to be more honest about the uncertainties involved in their research.

IPCC: “Our bad! Global warming not about to melt Himalayas.

by Michael Fumento on January 21, 2010

in Blog

“The glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, a large number of them may disappear by 2035 because of climate change.” Such was the lede of one of countless articles about how 1.3 billion Asians were in imminent danger of first flooding and then drought. And that’s not to mention the certain extinction of the abominable snowman.

You didn’t need a Cray computer to figure that this was nonsense, that temperatures would have to more or less instantly soar to incredible heights and stay there for this to happen. (As it turns out, 18 degrees Centigrade.) But people wrote it, read it, and believed it. You’d think a magazine with the name Technology Review would know better, yet its latest issue declares: “The Himalayan glaciers that feed rivers in India, China, and other Asian countries could be gone in 25 years.”

Why did they say it? In part, because it was convenient. And in part because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said it in its Fourth Assessment Report (2007). Now the IPCC is saying, “Whoopsie!”

In a statement released on Wednesday, the group admitted “poorly substantiated estimates.” More specifically, it appears to have been based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published in 1999. That story, in turn, was based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist in Delhi. And Hasnain has since admitted his assertion “speculation” unsupported by any formal research.

The IPCC says it will “probably” issue a formal correction. “Probably?”

But admit it guys, wasn’t it fun while it lasted?

The Audacity of Doom

by Ivan Osorio on January 8, 2010

in Blog

At Bigjournalism.com, Woody Hochswender puts global warming alarmism in the context of a long tradition of doomsaying — which wasn’t invented by Al Gore and need not necessarily be about climate —  by looking at the dismal career of author Jonathan Schell.

1. Schell argued that given the incredibly dire state of things, a world-destroying nuclear exchange was inevitable. A nuclear exchange was virtually certain to happen, sooner or later, he said, and when it did radioactive clouds would blot out the sun and create a “nuclear winter” resulting in the extinction of human life. Once it started, there was no going back. The concept of inevitability was mortised into the framework of the argument.

2. It was also depicted as a race against time! We had only a teeny-weeny window in which to reverse the horrendous policies and mindset of our ignorant, bellicose leaders (read: Republicans). It was, like, so super urgent, action had to be taken, like, yesterday.

3. But, almost paradoxically, it was already too late! In the bottomless pit of his despair and revulsion at the civilized world for imperiling the planet, Schell contended that we were already too far gone, and it really was too late to stop the nuclear holocaust, although everyone had a moral duty to try.

Sound familiar? What we have here, as Yogi Berra would say, is déjà vu all over again. The eerie parallels between the nuclear-freeze movement and the global-warming movement are clear: the direness of the forecast (which resembles prophecy and has a teleological dimension); the dramatic, race-against-time urgency of the healing project; the element of existential threat as a goad to activism; the notion of human extinction and the “fate” of the earth hanging in the balance, as if suspended by a slender thread; and finally, the admonition that it is probably already too late. The nuclear clock is about to strike midnight; the ice caps are already melting. Fear and trembling all around.

Like other neo-Malthusians, Schell has been spectacularly wrong time and again, but that’s not likely to make him or his correligionists give up on despair. For doomsayers, every year is 2012.

For a more uplifting — and accurate — view of human history, see here.

Is “several degrees” of warming “virtually certain,” as NASA claims?

by Marlo Lewis on December 17, 2009

in Blog

Earlier this week, at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, NASA unveiled new data on atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs), notably carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapor, from its Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) unit on the agency’s Aqua spacecraft. NASA touted two main findings as “breakthroughs” in GHG research.

One supposed breakthrough is the discovery that CO2 is not “well-mixed” through the global troposphere (mid-level atmosphere), but is actually “lumpy” — distributed in higher concentrations in two “belts” circling the globe, especially in Northern hemisphere, which is more heavily industrialized. Now, I suppose this is a breakthrough in the sense that it will allow researchers to improve CO2 “transport models,” which hitherto have assumed that CO2 concentrations are uniform throughout the troposphere. But it would be surprising indeed if scientists did not know until now that industrialized regions have higher CO2 levels than non-industrialized areas.

The second supposed breakthrough is the claim that the AIRS data remove “most of the uncertainty about the role of water vapor [feedback]” in climate change.  “AIRS temperature data have corroborated climate model predictions that the warming of our climate produced as carbon dioxide levels rise will be greatly exacerbated — in fact, more than doubled — by water vapor,” said climate scientist Andrew Dressler of Texas A&M University. According to Dressler, “We are virtually certain to see Earth’s climate warm by several degrees Celsius in the next century, unless some strong negative feedback mechanism emerges elsewhere in the Earth’s climate system.” Dressler is talking about the assumption, common to all IPCC climate models, that the initial warming from rising CO2 levels increases concentrations of the atmosphere’s main greenhouse gas, water vapor, trapping more outgoing longwave (heat or infrared) radiation (OLR) and increasing global average rainfall.

William Gray of Colorado State University, perhaps the world’s leading hurricane forecaster, offers a different perspective on the NASA water vapor data. Gray’s comment follows:

I have just heard that NASA has a new satellite in orbit that can directly measure CO2 content in the atmosphere and that these new measurements are beginning to show that there is a positive association between increased rainfall (from higher CO2 gas amounts) and Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) suppression. This is to be expected in and around the areas of precipitation — but not necessarily in global areas surrounding precipitation where return flow mass subsidence is driving the water vapor radiation emission level to a lower and somewhat warmer temperature.

I and a colleague, Barry Schwartz, have been analyzing 21 years (1984-2004) of ISCCP (International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project) outgoing longwave radiation on various space scales as related to precipitation differences. We have investigated how OLR changes with variations in precipitation from NOAA reanalysis data on time scales from 3 hours, a day, a month, and up to a year scale.

We find that on a small space scale where rainfall is occurring OLR is greatly suppressed. But on the larger regional to global scales, OLR rises with increasing precipitation. This is due to increased return flow subsidence in the surrounding cloud free and partly cloudy areas. Globally, we are finding that net OLR increases with net increased amounts of global precipitation. This is the opposite of what most GCMs [general circulation models] have programmed into their models and, if I’m interpreting the new NASA announcement correctly, opposite to what they are currently reporting to the media.

Dr. Gray presents a more detailed examination of these issues in his March 2009 Heartland Institute climate conference paper, available here.

Cooler Heads Digest 6 November 2009

by William Yeatman on November 6, 2009

in Cooler Heads Digest

Announcements

A video of “Deconstructing Global Warming,” a Cooler Heads Coalition briefing by Dr. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is now available online at GlobalWarming.org.

In the News

Our Choice or Al Gore’s Choice?
Nick Loris, Heritage Foundry, 6 November 2009

Climate Policy Imperils China, India
Marlo Lewis, GlobalWarming.org, 5 November 2009

Election Defeats Make Dems Cautious on Climate
Jonathan Salant, Bloomberg, 5 November 2009

Remarks by Czech President Václav Klaus on Cap-and-Trade
Washington Times Briefing “Advancing the Global Debate over Climate Change Policy,” 4 November 2009

The Four Horsemen of Cap-and-Trade Defeatism
Chris Horner, Energy Tribune, 4 November 2009

The Economics of Climate Change: Essential Knowledge
Jerry Taylor, MasterResource.org, 4 November 2009

GW Alarmism Given Same Status as Religion
Stephen Adams & Louise Gray, Telegraph, 3 November 2009

Video: Stop Energy Rationing in Australia
Cori Bernardi, Herald Sun, 26 October 2009

News You Can Use

Expensive Failure of Cap-and-Trade in Europe

Between January 2005 and the end of 2008 the European Union’s cap-and-trade scheme cost consumers €93 ($123) billion or €185 ($245) per person, according to “The Expensive Failure of the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme,” a new report by Matthew Sinclair of the Taxpayers’ Alliance.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

EPW Passes Kerry-Boxer

The big news this week is that after days of partisan wrangling, the Senate and Environment and Public Works Committee on Thursday passed the Kerry-Boxer energy-rationing bill. The vote was eleven to one, with Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont.) the one no vote.  The committee’s seven Republicans boycotted the mark-up session and did not vote. Chairman Barbara Boxer’s (D-Calif.) high-handed tactics have so poisoned the Senate atmosphere that I think the Kerry-Boxer bill is now dead for the 111th Congress (which continues to the end of December 2010).

Under committee rules and precedents, no mark-up session can be held unless a majority of committee members including at least two members of the minority are present. The Republicans began boycotting the mark-up on Tuesday because, as the committee’s ranking Republican, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), insisted, it was premature to mark up the bill because official cost estimates had not been completed by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Chairman Boxer then had EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson meet with the committee.  She explained that it would take EPA several weeks to complete a full analysis of the bill, but that it didn’t matter because the bill was similar to the Waxman-Markey bill and therefore the costs would be similar. The problem with this claim is that the EPA’s analysis of Waxman-Markey underestimated the costs by making highly unrealistic assumptions. For example, EPA assumed that nuclear power would double by 2035.

Faced with the Republican boycott, Chairman Boxer interpreted the rules to the effect that two members of the minority were required to consider amendments, but not to vote on final committee passage.  So she then went ahead and marked up her “chairman’s mark” version of S. 1733 with no Republicans present. The problem I see here is that the chairman’s mark is an amendment to S. 1733 in the nature of a substitute. Thus I conclude that Chairman Boxer has violated her own interpretation of the committee’s rules.

It was obvious before Boxer went ahead with what Inhofe called the “nuclear option” that this would unite Republicans in opposition to the bill.  So I can only conclude that Boxer or the Democratic leadership have concluded that Kerry-Boxer is dead.  By voting it out of committee, they at least have something to take to COP-15 in Copenhagen in December.  Senator Baucus’s no vote is also significant.  As Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, he has as much jurisdiction over cap-and-trade legislation as does the EPW Committee.  He did not sound pleased with what Boxer was doing.

The U.S. Chamber Finds a New Leader

The U. S. Chamber of Commerce on November 3 sent a letter to Senators Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Chairman and Ranking Republican, respectively, of the Environment and Public Works Committee, that touted an op-ed published in the New York Times on October 11th by Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) as the way forward on energy-rationing legislation. The letter, signed by the Chamber’s executive vice president, Bruce Josten, said in part: “Senators Kerry and Graham have set forth a positive, practical and realistic framework for legislation, one that echoes the core principles that the Chamber embeds in all of its communications on climate policy. The Chamber agrees with a great deal of the principles set forth by Senators Kerry and Graham….”

The Chamber’s letter immediately made a big splash on Capitol Hill.  Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer read the letter into the record at one of the committee’s attempted mark-up sessions on the Kerry-Boxer bill and said, “This  really is a game-changer.”

The Environmental Defense Fund, which has masterminded the campaign against the Chamber that has included several major corporations withdrawing their memberships, praised the letter. My group, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, did not.  We sent out a press release calling on small businesses to withdraw from the Chamber and join with us in continuing to fight against energy-rationing legislation.

The Chamber responded by saying that they hadn’t changed their position on what kind of legislation it would support.  That may be so, but the timing was clearly designed to boost the supporters of energy-rationing legislation-which it did.  Moreover, the Chamber has now identified Senators Kerry and Graham as the leaders on the issue that the Chamber will work with and follow.  The Chamber claims to support solid, workable, commonsense, realistic, and practical climate policies.  And John Kerry is just the Senator to lead us to those policies?  Solid, workable, realistic, practical, commonsense-yes, those are just the words that come to mind when Senator Kerry’s name comes up.

Across the States

Oregon Government Deliberately Underestimated Cost of Green Power by 40 Times

An investigation by the Oregonian shows that state officials deliberately underestimated the cost of Governor Ted Kulongoski’s plan to lure green energy companies to Oregon with taxpayer subsidies, resulting in a program that cost 40 times more than unsuspecting lawmakers were told.

Around the World

Copenhagen Already a Failure

Next month in Copenhagen, the United Nations will host negotiations for a treaty to mitigate climate change. The December conference was supposed to be the deadline for a final agreement, but diplomats are far apart on how to distribute the huge costs of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. This week, Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Framewoprk Convention on Climate Change, told Bloomberg that too little progress has been made to conclude a treaty at a summit in Copenhagen next month, and that it may take another year.

Solar-Here Today and Gone Tomorrow

Julie Walsh

According to the Boston Globe, last year Evergreen Solar built a new factory in Massachusetts with $58 million in state aid, but is now shifting its assembly of solar panels from there to China. Plus Evergreen will be writing off $40 million in equipment, due to the move. The biggest irony in this story is that one main reason solar panel factories will move to China is that Chinese energy prices to assemble them are less!

Marlo Lewis goes further, “China is investing heavily in solar panel and wind turbine manufacture, but China does not cap carbon. Also, only a small fraction of China’s production of solar photovoltaic generators – 20 megawatts out of 820 megawatts (2%) produced in 2007 – is for China’s domestic market. So capping domestic carbon emissions is not a prerequisite to success in exporting clean-tech products, nor is having a large domestic market for such products.”

Chinese solar has been growing by leaps and bounds. One reason-“China is not enforcing environmental regulations, and many of the new factories are dumping toxic silicon tetrachloride (a byproduct of polysilicon production) directly into nearby farmlands.  For perspective, 4 tons of this toxic byproduct is produced for every ton of polysilicon. Because it is expensive (the cost to produce one ton is approximately $84,500 versus the Chinese companies making it for $21,000 to $56,000 a ton) and time-consuming to set up systems to recycle the hazardous materials, companies are instead dumping indiscriminately, and people close to these sites are complaining of illness, crop failures, acrid air, and dead fields.” (ilovecarbondioxide.com)

Obama recently went to Florida to announce his plans for modernizing the electric grid, and visited a major new solar energy facility. And where were those solar panels manufactured? The Philippines.

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