Global Warming is a Lie

it hurts: a response to Henninger of WSJ

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:51:00 +0000

From: Christopher Essex
To: henninger@wsj.com
Subject: it hurts.
Date: Dec 3, 2009 12:56 PM

Dear Daniel,

My friend Willie Soon passed on your article: Wonderland. It's very good. It is an angle that I have anticipated for a very long time.

Wonderland is certainly where I have been trapped for more than twenty years. But it is not nearly as nice as Alice's version. Thoughts of the inquisition come to mind instead.

Many of we scientists have been ringing the alarm bells from the beginning on this. We have been telling everyone who would listen about who we were dealing with. We have known all along. Climategate is no surprise at all to us. Evidence for this is in my book with Ross McKitrick from 2002, Taken by Storm. It won a $10,000 prize, and is now in a second edition. But few were listening. If my book had a title like "Oh, my God, we are all going to die," I am sure that it would have been on the NYT bestseller list at once.

Even though I understand where you are coming from, but I find it rings flat with me that so many many obstacles were put in our way to get a fair hearing and then now to have to face people asking where the scientists were. The scientists have been tied up and gagged in the back room. I hate that. We were there screaming our lungs out all along. Damn it all, my friends Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre had to have a hearing before US congress to get that ridiculous hockey stick broken! It should have been a simple matter. The thing could hardly hold together under its own weight. Ross and I had a whole chapter on the hockey stick in our book, long before the controversy came to light. We used similar techniques to compute the US GDP with
tree rings back to the year 1000, and we got a lovely hockey stick.

I did not want in on the original hockey stick paper, because of my objections to the merits of the underlying physics, but I did comment on the drafts. In the second edition, there is an account of how the thing got broken by Ross and Steve. That science needed to get settled in congress should have got people's attention right there that there was something seriously wrong.
Science is alive and well in the individual scientists who are not caught up in gaming the system for bigger grants. I call it small science. Many of them are doing very unfashionable things, and happy to get no recognition for it. That is where you can find the real scientists. And that is where the future will be.

A milestone in this mess can be said to be when John Houghton of the IPCC said it was the IPCC's job to "orchestrate" the views of science.

Everything that has happened flows as an inevitable consequence of that. Some important research fields have been "orchestrated" out of existence. Even before climategate, I have been saying that we have set ourselves back a generation by taking the money from governments
with so many strings attached. Governments leaders wanted something where they could absolve themselves of the responsibility for making informed decisions. They would have to read science stuff otherwise.

They ordered up a kind of unnatural scientist that would tell them precisely what they wanted to hear. But they gave the puppeteers clubs to deal with those of us who remained true. And the perps of climategate are what they got. All of my colleagues have had to endure these bullies and criminals for a very long time.

You should understand that (real) scientists have had to pay the heaviest price for the creation of these monsters for decades. And they were not created by us.

Best wishes,

Chris Essex
____________________
Dr. Christopher Essex,
Professor,
and Associate Chair,
Department of Applied Mathematics
the University of Western Ontario
London, Canada N6A 5B7

Climategate: Science Is Dying

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:35:00 +0000

Finally! The whole world now knows what I've been saying for years: that global warming scaremongers are NOT scientists at all - they're nothing but money grabbing charlatans worthy of nothing more than our disdain. They should be rode off the planet on a rail. Or worse.

"Hello, we're from the UN - you must give us all your money - no really, all of the "scientists" said so. Trust us."

Yeh - I was born yesterday.

See: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574572091993737848.html

OPINION: WONDER LAND DECEMBER 3, 2009, 12:53 P.M. ET

Climategate: Science Is Dying
Science is on the credibility bubble.
By DANIEL HENNINGER

Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.

I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called "the scientific community" had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).
　
Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.

What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences-physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering-came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.
　
This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and "messy" as, say, gender studies. The New England Journal of Medicine has turned into a weird weekly amalgam of straight medical-research and propaganda for the Obama redesign of U.S. medicine.

The East Anglians' mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming's claims-plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish-evokes the attempt to silence Galileo. The exchanges between Penn State's Michael Mann and East Anglia CRU director Phil Jones sound like Father Firenzuola, the Commissary-General of the Inquisition.

For three centuries Galileo has symbolized dissent in science. In our time, most scientists outside this circle have kept silent as their climatologist fellows, helped by the cardinals of the press, mocked and ostracized scientists who questioned this grand theory of global doom. Even a doubter as eminent as Princeton's Freeman Dyson was dismissed as an aging crank.

Beneath this dispute is a relatively new, very postmodern environmental idea known as "the precautionary principle." As defined by one official version: "When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically." The global-warming establishment says we know "enough" to impose new rules on the world's use of carbon fuels. The dissenters say this demotes science's traditional standards of evidence.

What would Galileo do?

The Environmental Protection Agency's dramatic Endangerment Finding in April that greenhouse gas emissions qualify as an air pollutant-with implications for a vast new regulatory regime-used what the agency called a precautionary approach. The EPA admitted "varying degrees of uncertainty across many of these scientific issues." Again, this puts hard science in the new position of saying, close enough is good enough. One hopes civil engineers never build bridges under this theory.

The Obama administration's new head of policy at EPA, Lisa Heinzerling, is an advocate of turning precaution into standard policy. In a law-review article titled "Law and Economics for a Warming World," Ms. Heinzerling wrote, "Policy formation based on prediction and calculation of expected harm is no longer relevant; the only coherent response to a situation of chaotically worsening outcomes is a precautionary policy. . . ."

If the new ethos is that "close-enough" science is now sufficient to achieve political goals, serious scientists should be under no illusion that politicians will press-gang them into service for future agendas. Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails. Science is on the credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with it.

Write to henninger@wsj.com

No Unanimous View

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 03:33:00 +0000

Recently there was a letter to the editor published in one of the local newspapers in which the writer took exception to an article published in that newspaper that didn't pay proper homage to the pop-culture acceptance of AlGore's theories on man-made global warming. In his letter he insulted anyone who insisted on applying actual scientific principles to the discussion (especially those of us who live in Utah) as moon-landing deniers. Anyway, I just loved the response he got from the international scientific community. Since I know that this newspaper's circulation is very limited, I've reprinted both letters below for your enjoyment and edification:

Original letter (see: http://universe.byu.edu/node/1042)
　
Global warming is one-sided
Mon, 07/20/2009 - 20:56

On the front page of The Daily Universe's July 20 issue was an article titled "Farmers reject global warming." I looked with futility for the article's counterpart, "Climatologists virtually unanimous in acceptance of global warming."

I have no problem with journalists informing the public that farmers (or anyone else for that matter) don't believe in global warming. What is frustrating is the article's implication that farmers' opinions somehow carry the same weight as the many scientific studies that have proven the planet is heating up. The denial of global warming seems to be epidemic in Utah. Even among students at BYU, the reality of global warming has been treated with skepticism and even animosity. I can't help but to ask, "Why?" I can only guess the consumers of the aforementioned article fall into the same category of those who maintain the lunar landing was a hoax.

Unfortunately, the issue of global warming has become a war on expertise in which the media still feels the need to tell both sides of the story - the facts according to experts and the facts according to everyone else.

Jeremy Kuhre
Southlake, Texas

And here's the solid gold response from the scientific community:

Jeremy Kuhre recently suggested that BYU students are unreasonably skeptical about global warming, in the face of "virtually unanimous" acceptance among climatologists of the belief that our planet is "heating up." He equates the students with people who maintain the lunar landing was a hoax.

We the undersigned have studied weather, climate and climate change for years -- and we can state with certainty that there is no "unanimous" view among scientists on the matter of manmade catastrophic global warming. By the way, one of the signers of this letter, Dr. Harrison Schmitt, actually stood on the moon, drilled holes, collected moon rocks and has since returned to Earth. He knows the landing was real.

Probably all climate and other scientists do agree that our Earth warmed slowly between 1850 and 1998 and has cooled slightly since. But that is not the issue. The question is whether humans' use of oil, coal, and natural gas can cause a future global warming disaster -- and on that there is tremendous disagreement, just as there is about the forces that are responsible for recent, current and past climate changes. This is the reason why over 31,000 scientists have signed the Global Warming Petition at http://www.petitionproject.org/.

The opposition to the hypothesis of catastrophic climate change from rising atmospheric CO2 is legitimate, and it is the right and duty of all citizens, including American farmers, to ask questions and demand evidence and answers. The news media have contributed to the incorrect and biased view that recent warming was caused by human CO2 emissions, and that future warming will be disastrous for humans, wildlife and our planet. The media and political activists have also promoted policies that attack American liberties and that harm and kill people, by diverting money, attention and energy resources from far more urgent and worthy purposes, like reducing poverty, malaria and malnutrition and raising global as well as American living standards.

The issue of global warming is not a war of "expertise." It is, or should be, an objective study of scientific measurements and data -- which can now confirm that atmospheric CO2 plays at most a minor role in causing weather and climate change.

BYU is an institution of higher learning that should promote the seeking of truth. Similarly, science is an objective assessment of hypotheses, by testing concepts against actual data and observations; it is not a matter of votes, popularity or "virtual unanimity."
We are all harmed, if we allow our universities or our science to be politicized.

Signed

Harrison Schmitt, PhD, Geologist and Astronaut
Craig Idso, PhD, Geographer
David R. Legates, PhD, Climatologist
Art Robinson, PhD, Chemist
Noah Robinson, PhD, Chemist
Willie Soon, PhD, Astrophysicist

21st Century Snake Oil

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:18:00 +0000

A friend of mine asked me the following question. My response follows the question:

BTW what is all this stuff on TV about no such thing as "clean coal"???

Of course there is such a thing as clean coal; my power company happens to be 1/6th owner of the cleanest coal fired plant in the country. Clean coal happens when you filter the noxious gases, like SOx and NOx, which cause bad things like acid rain, out of the emissions.

The only people who argue that there's no such thing as clean coal are those who claim that CO2 is also a pollutant. But the only people who claim that CO2 is anything other than a harmless trace gas are those who are either too lazy to read any of the many scientific studies or they are deliberately trying to scam people out of their hard-earned money. "CO2 pollution" is the snake oil of the 21st Century and we'll all be laughing at those who were gullible enough to buy in to it before very many more years pass.

By the way, it's the fact that all of the scientific information is coming out about how CO2 is NOT causing "Global Warming" and that Al Gore is a great big scam artist that is causing a major panic among the Global Warming alarmists; they're in a huge rush to push through major funding for their projects, while suppressing scientific studies, before they get laughed out of Washington DC.

Sorry to run on so long on this subject, but as a professional power engineer I'm offended to see people have to pay more for their power bill than necessary, and these scam artists (including Obama's new Secretary of Energy) want to double or even quintuple your power bills.

Gore's Scientist Calls Warming Fears ‘Mistaken’

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 22:48:00 +0000

Scientist Fired by Gore Calls Warming Fears ‘Mistaken’

Princeton University physicist Dr. Will Happer, who says he was fired by Vice President Al Gore for failing to adhere to Gore’s views on global warming, has now declared that man-made warming fears are “mistaken.”

Happer, who served as the director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy from 1990 to 1993, said, “I had the privilege of being fired by Al Gore, since I refused to go along with his alarmism. I did not need the job that badly.”

He said in 1993, “I was told that science was not going to intrude on policy."

Now Happer has asked to join the more than 650 international scientists who have spoken out against man-made global warming fears and are cited in the 2008 U.S. Senate Minority Report from Environmental and Public Works Committee ranking member James Inhofe, R-Okla.

“I am convinced that the current alarm over carbon dioxide is mistaken,” Happer told the committee on Dec. 22.

President-elect Barack Obama’s choice as his top science adviser, Harvard University professor John Holdren, is a staunch believer in the dangers of man-made global warming and advised Gore on his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Dr. Happer has published over 200 scientific papers, and is a fellow of the American Physical Society, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Sen. Inhofe said that the statements of prominent scientists like Happer who are willing to publicly dissent from climate fears strike a blow to the United Nations, Gore, and the media’s claims about global warming.

“The endless claims of a 'consensus' about man-made global warming grow less and less credible every day," Inhofe said.

Happer declared, “I have spent a long research career studying physics that is closely related to the greenhouse effect — for example, absorption and emission of visible and infrared radiation, and fluid flow. Fears about man-made global warming are unwarranted and are not based on good science. The earth's climate is changing now, as it always has. There is no evidence that the changes differ in any qualitative way from those of the past . . .

“Computer models used to generate frightening scenarios from increasing levels of carbon dioxide have scant credibility.”

Manmade Global Warming Theory 'Arrogant'

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 06:06:00 +0000

CNN Meteorologist: Manmade Global Warming Theory 'Arrogant'
Network's second meteorologist to challenge notion man can alter climate.
By Jeff Poor Business & Media Institute12/18/2008 11:02:44 PM http://businessandmedia.org/articles/2008/20081218205953.aspx

Unprecedented snow in Las Vegas has some scratching their heads – how can there be global warming with this unusual cold and snowy weather?

CNN Meteorologist Chad Myers had never bought into the notion that man can alter the climate and the Vegas snowstorm didn’t impact his opinion. Myers, an American Meteorological Society certified meteorologist, explained on CNN’s Dec. 18 “Lou Dobbs Tonight” that the whole idea is arrogant and mankind was in danger of dying from other natural events more so than global warming.

“You know, to think that we could affect weather all that much is pretty arrogant,” Myers said. “Mother Nature is so big, the world is so big, the oceans are so big – I think we’re going to die from a lack of fresh water or we’re going to die from ocean acidification before we die from global warming, for sure.”

Myers is the second CNN meteorologist to challenge the global warming conventions common in the media. He also said trying to determine patterns occurring in the climate would be difficult based on such a short span.

“But this is like, you know you said – in your career – my career has been 22 years long,” Myers said. “That’s a good career in TV, but talking about climate – it’s like having a car for three days and saying, ‘This is a great car.’ Well, yeah – it was for three days, but maybe in days five, six and seven it won’t be so good. And that’s what we’re doing here.”

“We have 100 years worth of data, not millions of years that the world’s been around,” Myers continued.

Dr. Jay Lehr, an expert on environmental policy, told “Lou Dobbs Tonight” viewers you can detect subtle patterns over recorded history, but that dates back to the 13th Century.

“If we go back really, in recorded human history, in the 13th Century, we were probably 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than we are now and it was a very prosperous time for mankind,” Lehr said. “If go back to the Revolutionary War 300 years ago, it was very, very cold. We’ve been warming out of that cold spell from the Revolutionary War period and now we’re back into a cooling cycle.”

Lehr suggested the earth is presently entering a cooling cycle – a result of nature, not man.

“The last 10 years have been quite cool,” Lehr continued. “And right now, I think we’re going into cooling rather than warming and that should be a much greater concern for humankind. But, all we can do is adapt. It is the sun that does it, not man.”

Lehr is a senior fellow and science director of The Heartland Institute, an organization that will be holding the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change in New York March 8-10.

Another CNN meteorologist attacked the concept that man is somehow responsible for changes in climate last year. Rob Marciano charged Al Gore’s 2006 movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” had some inaccuracies.

“There are definitely some inaccuracies,” Marciano said during the Oct. 4, 2007 broadcast of CNN’s “American Morning.” “The biggest thing I have a problem with is this implication that Katrina was caused by global warming.”

Marciano also said that, “global warming does not conclusively cause stronger hurricanes like we’ve seen,” pointing out that “by the end of this century we might get about a 5 percent increase.”

His comments drew a strong response and he recanted the next day saying “the globe is getting warmer and humans are the likely the main cause of it.”

Obama continues anti-American activities

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 05:57:00 +0000

In typical "newspeak" (ala 1984) the Global Warming alarmists claim that President Bush has suppressed science, when in fact they are the ones who totally ignore the science that contradicts their faith-based belief system.

Obama Announces Energy, Environmental Team.

The New York Times (12/16, A24, Broder, Revkin) reports, "The team President-elect Barack Obama introduced on Monday to carry out his energy and environmental policies faces a host of political, economic, diplomatic and scientific challenges that could impede his plans to address global warming and America's growing dependence on dirty and uncertain sources of energy." Obama "vowed to press ahead despite the faltering economy and suggested that he would invest his political capital in trying to break logjams."

The AP (12/16) adds, "Obama selected Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Chu as energy secretary and Carol Browner, a confidante of former Vice President Al Gore, to lead a White House council on energy and climate. Browner headed the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration." Obama also "announced his choice of Lisa Jackson, former head of New Jersey's environmental agency, as EPA administrator and Nancy Sutley, a deputy Los Angeles mayor, as chair of the White House Council on Environment Quality."

The Los Angeles Times (12/16, Tankersley, Hamburger) notes, "With this team, some environmentalists and former federal research scientists expect Obama's White House to break from what they view as the Bush administration's record of overlooking science in favor of politics. ... Critics -- including...former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman -- have complained about the influence of industry lobbyists and ideologues on Bush administration decision-making." Rep. Henry A. Waxman (CA) "is among the Democrats who repeatedly have accused top Bush officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and political advisor Karl Rove, with pressing federal agencies to take positions that put them at odds with their own scientists on energy, global warming and stem cell research." The Politico (12/16, Lee, Lovley), the Wall Street Journal (12/16, A5, Power), USA Today (12/16, Watson), The Hill (12/16, Youngman) and AFP (12/16), among other news outlets, also report on Obama's announcement.

Obama declares war on energy

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 05:57:00 +0000

Just to prove that he hates America, Obama has appointed an academic who knows nothing about real energy to be the next Secretary of Energy:

Obama Expected To Tap Nobel Prize Winner To Head Energy Department.
Fox News' Special Report (12/10, Hume) reported, "Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Chu will be nominated Energy Secretary. Chu is a proponent of using alternative energy sources to replace fossil fuels." CNN's The Situation Room (12/10, Yellin) said Chu is "very well known in energy circles. He runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. He won the Nobel Prize in 1997 in physics. But the big question is going to be: If in fact this goes forward, will he have the political clout? He doesn't have a lot of political experience. Will he have the clout to pass a massive energy reform bill?"

In a front-page story, the Washington Post (12/11, A1, Mufson, Rucker) notes that "Chu, the son of Chinese immigrants, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 for his work in the 'development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.' But, in an interview last year with The Washington Post, Chu said he began to turn his attention to energy and climate change several years ago." Said Chu, "I was following it just as a citizen and getting increasingly alarmed. ... Many of our best basic scientists [now] realize that this is getting down to a crisis situation." USA Today (12/11, Hall, Schouten), the AP (12/11, Sidoti, Cappiello), Los Angeles Times (12/11, Tankersley) and Financial Times (12/11, Luce), among other media outlets, run similar stories this morning.

In the Wall Street Journal (12/11) Environmental Capital blog, Keith Johnson examined Chu's "ideas about finding new supplies of energy." Johnson noted that "Chu's marquee work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is the Helios Project," which is "an effort to tackle what Dr. Chu sees as the biggest energy challenge facing the U.S.: transportation. That's because it's a huge drain on US coffers and an environmental albatross, Dr. Chu says." The project "has focused largely on biofuels," particularly research into second-generation biofuels. However, "Big Coal won't be very happy if Dr. Chu gets confirmed as head of the DOE," as Chu has called coal his "worst nightmare," particularly ""given the sheer scope of the challenge of economically storing billions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions underground." Johnson also examined Chu's stance on nuclear power, and the implementation of renewable energy.

The Washington Post (12/12, A9, Mufson) reports on "the next secretary of energy, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu," who argues that "the United States and other countries" need to address the issue of climate change. "He said governments need to 'act quickly' to implement fiscal and regulatory policies to stimulate the deployment of technologies that boost energy efficiency and 'minimize' carbon emissions." According to the Post, "Chu's views on climate change would be among the most forceful ever held by a cabinet member." In the past, Chu has called "the cost of electricity...'anomalously low' in the United States," and said "that a cap-and-trade approach to limiting greenhouse gases 'is an absolutely non-partisan issue,' and that scientists had come to 'realize that the climate is much more sensitive than we thought.'" Chu has also "said that he had confidence in mankind's ability to solve its energy problems," arguing that "the challenge...was to create things from nature that nature cannot make on its own."

ScareWatch: "Wilder and wetter everywhere"

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 05:33:00 +0000

ScareWatch: "Wilder and wetter everywhere"
by Christopher Monckton, December 10, 2008

The scare: The Guardian, one of the two UK newspapers most prone to write unverified and scientifically-inaccurate stories about the consequences of “global warming”, published an article on 10 December 2008, intended to influence delegates at the UN’s Poznan conference on the climate. The article listed a series of alleged climate catastrophes all round the world, saying that “millions … are feeling the force of a changing climate. … Evidence is emerging of weather patterns in turmoil and the poorest nations disproportionately bearing the brunt of warming”: more and longer droughts, more floods, more heat waves, more rainfall, more frequent and intense cyclones leading to food and water shortages, more illnesses and water-borne diseases, more malnutrition, soil erosion, disruption to water supplies.

In North-Eastern Brazil, temperatures are said to have risen by 1 degree C in 30 years. In “low-lying” Bangladesh, The Guardian says there has been a 10% increase in the intensity and frequency of major cyclones (the period over which this increase is supposed to have occurred is not stated), with too much rain in the rainy season and too little in the dry season. The “balmy” Caribbean is “also being churned up with increasing frequency and ferocity”, with eight hurricanes in 2008, five of which were major, and the hurricane season lasted “a record five months”, leading to “coral bleaching and flooding”.

In Mozambique, there is “a clear increase in temperature”, with more frequent extreme weather events, such as tropical cyclones, and late rains. In Nepal, floods that once happened once a decade “seem to be annual and getting more serious”. Forest pigs farrow earlier; rice and cucumber “will no longer grow where they used to”; days are hotter, trees flower twice a year, and “raindrops are getting bigger”.

Lakes in Nepal and Bhutan fed by “glacial meltwater” are “growing so rapidly that they could burst their banks”. In Tadjikistan, “thousands of small glaciers will have disappeared completely by 2050, causing more water to flow and hence a “disastrous decline in river flow”. The area of Peru’s glaciers fallen by “22% … in the last 35 years”.

The truth: The first of two central falsehoods implicit in The Guardian’s wearisomely characteristic catalogue of real or imagined climate disasters is the attribution of every local change in the weather to manmade “global warming”.

We begin, as we have had to begin so often in the past when examining such articles as this, by reminding readers that there has been no statistically-significant “global warming” for 13 full years since 1995, and that there has been a significant global cooling over seven full years since late 2001 – a cooling that The Guardian has chosen not to highlight to its readers. It is at once apparent, therefore, that every single one of the imagined recent catastrophes described by The Guardian’s breathless reporters cannot possibly have been caused by any kind of warming, whether manmade or natural, for the good and sufficient reason that there has not been any warming.

The second central falsehood lies in the fact, repeatedly stated even by the generally-excitable United Nations climate panel, that individual extreme-weather events, particularly on a local scale, cannot – repeat, cannot – be attributed to “global warming”. Why? Because, as the UN’s 2001 climate assessment puts it, the climate of the Earth is “a complex, non-linear, chaotic object” whose long-run evolution, in the words of Lorenz’s famous paper Deterministic Non- Periodic Flow (1963), “cannot be predicted by any method”. It follows that, if even a global phase-transition (a sudden change to what had previously seemed to be a regular pattern) cannot be attributed to a particular cause, then a fortiori a local phase-transition cannot be attributed to that cause.

Given the universal application of these two falsehoods to The Guardian’s alleged catastrophes, it is not strictly necessary to examine each of The Guardian’s specific allegations about the supposed impact of manmade “global warming” on individual regions. The entire article is founded upon sand. However, The Guardian’s latest list of disasters is more than customarily baseless, and betokens some desperation at the failure of “global warming” to do the damage that the newspaper has so often said it would do. We shall look briefly at a few of the supposed climate cataclysms.

“Drought” in north-eastern Brazil: The history of South America, going back to the time of the Inca and Mayan civilizations, has been one of alternate drought and flood. Set in this historical context, which The Guardian is very careful not to mention, a few years of drought in a single Brazilian region are unremarkable. Most of the southern hemisphere has been cooling even more rapidly than the northern hemisphere in recent years.

More and worse “tropical cyclones” in “low-lying” Bangladesh: There is no credible scientific evidence that “global warming”, even if it were occurring (which it is not), would cause any increase in either the frequency or the intensity of tropical cyclones. Dr. Kerry Emanuel, the lead author of a much-cited paper in 2005 suggesting a causative link, has since substantially retracted his finding. The Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index, a running two-year sum of the estimated intensity of all recorded tropical cyclones, hurricanes, and typhoons worldwide, was first compiled 30 years ago: in October 2008, its lowest-ever value was recorded, demonstrating conclusively that, in fact rather than in theory, the combined frequency and incidence – in short, the impact – of tropical cyclones worldwide is at an alltime low. This result confirms other findings: for instance, the absence of any trend in the number of landfalling Atlantic cyclones for a century; the 30-year decline in the frequency of intense tropical cyclones; the similar decline in the frequency of intense typhoons; and the population-weighted decline in the incidence of death and in the cost of insured damage arising from tropical cyclones. Outside the tropics, it is settled science that a warmer world would lead to a reduction in both the frequency and the intensity of storms. And “low-lying Bangladesh”, despite repeated warnings from The Guardian and other newspapers about rising sea levels, has seen a growth of some 70,000 square kilometers in its total land area, caused by various factors that have nothing to do with “global warming”.

“Increasing frequency and ferocity” of hurricanes in the Caribbean: As paper after paper has demonstrated, and as Robinson, Robinson & Soon (2007) have confirmed, there has been no trend whatsoever in the number of hurricanes making landfall in the West Atlantic for a century. The Guardian’s statement is simply false. The hurricane season, said by The Guardian to be “a record five months”, is by no means of unprecedented length. It is true that flooding occurs during any sufficiently intense tropical cyclone, including major hurricanes: but, compared with the great Galveston flood of 1900, and with many other flood disasters in the first 60 years of the 20th century, recent flooding arising from hurricanes has been much reduced and far less harmful either to life or to property. Lloyds of London have been making record profits in the past couple of years.

“Coral bleaching” last occurred on a significant scale ten years ago, in 1998, as a result of the exceptional (but not unprecedented) natural alteration in global ocean currents known as the El Nino Southern Oscillation. There had been two previous such strong El Nino events, each lasting only a few months, over the past 300 years. As a result of both these events, bleaching of corals occurred: however, we know that corals evolved at least 175 million years ago, in the Triassic era (though The Guardian is very careful to avoid giving its readers this perspective), and, therefore, they have survived the major global-extinction events of the Triassic and Cretaceous periods, as well as having survived both global temperatures up to 7 degrees C (12.5 F) higher than the present, and atmospheric and oceanic carbon dioxide concentrations up to 10 times today’s. Bleaching does not in fact harm corals: they continue to grow quite successfully after bleaching events.

“Increased extreme-weather events” in Mozambique: The weather records in most African countries – and particularly in those, such as Mozambique, which were wracked by civil wars for decades – are simply not complete enough to allow any such conclusion to be drawn. Even if there had been more frequent and more intense extreme weather in Mozambique, it would not be proper to assume, as The Guardian strongly implies, that the problem is Africa-wide. In central Africa, for instance, in the region around Mount Kilimanjaro, there has been pronounced cooling for 30 years. It is this cooling, and the consequent atmospheric dessication, that has led to the ablation of most of the summit glacier. The glacier is not melting, because in 30 years the summit temperature has never risen above –1.6 degrees C, and its average temperature has been – 7 °C. It is inappropriate to select only those regions of a generally-cooling planet that (if the local records are reliable enough) have shown some recent warming, and to argue from these particular instances to an implicit general conclusion that “global warming” is occurring, or is causing damage.

“Disappearing glaciers” in Nepal: It is in the nature of glaciers that sometimes they advance and sometimes they recede. Professor M.I. Bhat, of the Indian Geological Survey, says that the 200 years of records concerning the 9575 glaciers that debouch from the Himalayas into India, initially maintained by the surveyors of the British Raj, disclose no recent pattern that is cause for concern. Although The Guardian’s article seems to assume that it is glacial meltwater that provides the nations of the region with their water supply, it is in fact Northern-Hemisphere snowmelt that provides almost all of the water supply. There has been no trend in northern-hemisphere snow-cover extent in the 30 years of continuous satellite monitoring. New records for northern-hemisphere snow-cover extent were set in 2001/2 and in 2007/8, and the latter record may well be surpassed in 2008/9.

The purpose of The Guardian in inventing this galloping concatenation of ingenious but baseless fictions was to induce nations such as the United States to part with large sums of taxpayers’ money to subsidize the imagined consequences of their past over-use of wicked fossil fuels for the poorer countries of the world. Whatever may be the intrinsic merits of aid to the Third World, the recent evolution of the climate, which is well within the parameters of normal variability, provides no basis for any additional funding. End of scare.

Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 04:48:00 +0000

This just in from the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works:

UN Blowback: More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims

Study: Half of warming due to Sun! – Sea Levels Fail to Rise? - Warming Fears in 'Dustbin of History'

POZNAN, Poland - The UN global warming conference currently underway in Poland is about to face a serious challenge from over 650 dissenting scientists from around the globe who are criticizing the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore. Set for release this week, a newly updated U.S. Senate Minority Report features the dissenting voices of over 650 international scientists, many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN. The report has added about 250 scientists (and growing) in 2008 to the over 400 scientists who spoke out in 2007. The over 650 dissenting scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.

The U.S. Senate report is the latest evidence of the growing groundswell of scientific opposition rising to challenge the UN and Gore. Scientific meetings are now being dominated by a growing number of skeptical scientists. The prestigious International Geological Congress, dubbed the geologists' equivalent of the Olympic Games, was held in Norway in August 2008 and prominently featured the voices and views of scientists skeptical of man-made global warming fears.

A hint of what the upcoming report contains:

“I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.” - Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.

“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical.” - Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology and formerly of NASA who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called “among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years.”

Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” - UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.

“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists,” - Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.

“The models and forecasts of the UN IPCC "are incorrect because they only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity.” - Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico

“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” - U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.

“Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will.” – . Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, NZ.

“After reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri's asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it's hard to remain quiet.” - Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society's Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review.

“For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?" - Geologist Dr. David Gee the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.

“Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp…Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact.” - Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, is a former member of the Dutch UN IPCC committee.

“Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly (from promoting warming fears), without having their professional careers ruined.” - Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh.

“Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense…The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning.” - Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder of the Numerical Weather Forecast group, has more than 150 published articles.

“CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another….Every scientist knows this, but it doesn’t pay to say so…Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps Europeans in the driver’s seat and developing nations walking barefoot.” - Dr. Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan.

“The [global warming] scaremongering has its justification in the fact that it is something that generates funds.” - Award-winning Paleontologist Dr. Eduardo Tonni, of the Committee for Scientific Research in Buenos Aires and head of the Paleontology Department at the University of La Plata.

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Meanwhile, while the UN climate conference is in session here in Poznan, the bad scientific news for promoters of man-made climate alarm just keeps rolling in. Below is a very small sampling of very inconvenient developments for Gore, the United Nations, and their promoters in the mainstream media. Peer-reviewed studies, analyses, and prominent scientists continue to speak out to refute climate fears. The data presented below is just from the past week.

Peer-reviewed study: Half of recent warming was solar! - December 10, 2008

Excerpt: In this dose of peer-reviewed skeptical climatological literature, we follow Climate Research News. The blog was intrigued by a new article in Geophysical Research Letters that was accepted on Friday, December 5th. Eichler, A., S. Olivier, K. Henderson, A. Laube, J. Beer, T. Papina, H. W. Gäggeler, and M. Schwikowski:

Temperature response in the Altai region lags solar forcing - Recall that the Siberian Altai Mountains are found at the intersection of Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan. The authors
looked at 750 years worth of the local ice core, especially the oxygen isotope. They claim to have found a very strong correlation between the concentration of this isotope (i.e. temperature) on one side and the known solar activity in the epoch 1250-1850. Their data seem to be precise enough to determine the lag, about 10-30 years. It takes some time for the climate to respond to the solar changes. It seems that they also have data to claim that the correlation gets less precise after 1850. They attribute the deviation to CO2 and by comparing the magnitude of the forcings, they conclude that "Our results are in agreement with studies based on NH temperature reconstructions [Scafetta et al., 2007] revealing that only up to approximately 50% of the observed global warming in the last 100 years can be explained by the Sun." Well, the word "only" is somewhat cute in comparison with the "mainstream" fashionable ideology. The IPCC said that they saw a 90% probability that "most" of the recent warming was man-made. The present paper would reduce this figure, 90%, to less than 50% because the Sun itself is responsible for 1/2 of the warming and not the whole 50% of the warming could have been caused by CO2 because there are other effects, too. Note that if 0.3 °C or 0.4 °C of warming in the 20th century was due to the increasing CO2 levels, the climate sensitivity is decisively smaller than 1 °C. At any rate, the expected 21st century warming due to CO2 would be another 0.3-0.4 °C, and this time, if the solar activity contributes with the opposite sign, these two effects could cancel. Even if you try to stretch these numbers a little bit - but not unrealistically - you have to become sure that the participants of the Poznan conference are lunatics.

**********

Geophysist: ‘It is time to file this theory in the dustbin of history’ – ‘Alarmists are in denial and running for cover'- Washington Times

By Geophysicist Dr. David Deming, associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma who has published numerous peer-reviewed research articles.

Excerpt: Environmental extremists and global warming alarmists are in denial and running for cover. Their rationale for continuing a lost cause is that weather events in the short term are not necessarily related to long-term climatic trends. But these are the same people who screamed at us each year that ordinary weather events such as high temperatures or hurricanes were undeniable evidence of imminent doom. Now that global warming is over, politicians are finally ready to enact dubious solutions to a non-existent problem. […] To the extent global warming was ever valid, it is now officially over. It is time to file this theory in the dustbin of history, next to Aristotelean physics, Neptunism, the geocentric universe, phlogiston, and a plethora of other incorrect scientific theories, all of which had vocal and dogmatic supporters who cited incontrovertible evidence. Weather and climate change are natural processes beyond human control. To argue otherwise is to deny the factual evidence.

The True Costs of EPA Global Warming Regulation

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 05:45:00 +0000

November 24, 2008
The True Costs of EPA Global Warming Regulation
by Ben Lieberman

Legislation designed to address global warming failed in Congress this year, largely due to concerns about its high costs and adverse impact on an already weakening economy. The congressional debate will likely resume in 2009, as legislators try again to balance the environmental and economic considerations on this complex issue. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), pursuant to a 2007 Supreme Court decision, has initiated steps toward bypassing the legislative process and regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.

The EPA's Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) is nothing less than the most costly, complicated, and unworkable regulatory scheme ever proposed. Under ANPR, nearly every product, business, and building that uses fossil fuels could face requirements that border on the impossible. The overall cost of this agenda would likely exceed that of the legislation rejected by Congress, reaching well into the trillions of dollars while destroying millions of jobs in the manufacturing sector.[1] The ANPR is clearly not in the best interests of Americans, and the EPA should not proceed to a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and final rule based upon it.

Climate Legislation

Concern that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are gradually warming the planet has emerged as the major environmental issue of the day, and certainly the most hyped one. Carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring component of the air, but is also the ubiquitous and unavoidable by-product of fossil fuel combustion, which currently provides 85 percent of America's energy. Thus, any effort to substantially curtail such emissions would have extremely costly and disruptive impacts on the economy and on living standards.

For this reason, the federal government has been cautious about embarking on mandatory carbon reductions. In 1997, the U.S. Senate unanimously resolved to reject any international climate change treaty that unduly burdened the U.S. economy or failed to engage all major emitting nations, such as China and India. Although the Kyoto Protocol was signed by the U.S. later that year, neither President Bill Clinton nor President George W. Bush ever submitted the treaty to the Senate for the required ratification. This has shown itself to be a wise move: Many, if not most, of the European and other developed nations that ratified the treaty are failing to reduce their emissions due to the prohibitive costs in doing so.

Legislatively, Congress has thus far rejected every attempt to control carbon dioxide emissions. Chief among the legislative proposals in 2008 was S. 2191, the America's Climate Security Act of 2007, originally sponsored by Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Warner (R-VA). This was a so-called cap-and-trade bill that would set a limit on the emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide from the combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas. Each power plant, factory, refinery, or other regulated entity would have been allocated rights to emit limited amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Those entities that reduced their emissions below their annual allotment could sell their excess allowances to those that did not--the trade part of cap and trade. The bill would start with a mandated emissions freeze at 2005 levels in 2012, and end with a 70 percent reduction by 2050.

In effect, this bill would have acted like a tax on energy, driving up its cost so that businesses and consumers are forced to use less.

Last June, America's Climate Security Act was withdrawn by its Senate supporters after only three days of debate. A Heritage Foundation analysis detailed the costs of the bill, which included a 29 percent increase in the price of gasoline, net job losses well into the hundreds of thousands, and an overall reduction in gross domestic product of $1.7 to $4.8 trillion by 2030.[2] At the time of the debate, gasoline was approaching $4 per gallon for the first time in history, and signs of a slowing economy were beginning to emerge. Economically speaking, the bill was one of the last items on the agenda that Americans wanted, and its Senate sponsors recognized that. Beyond the costs, the bill would have--even assuming the worst case scenarios of future warming-- likely reduced the earth's future temperature by an amount too small to verify.[3]

The debate is sure to resume in 2009, but the economic concerns about such measures remain. Though gasoline prices may be lower next year than the last time climate legislation came to a vote, unemployment will likely be higher as will unease about the overall state of the economy. Thus, the legislative effort to place costly restrictions on energy still faces an economic headwind. Notwithstanding the state of the economy, such measures will always fail any reasonable cost-benefit test given their high costs and environmental benefits that are marginal at best.

Regulation as an Alternative to Legislation

While proponents of greenhouse gas restrictions have lobbied for additional legislation, they have also tried to force the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant under existing law. In 1999, an environmental activist group sued the EPA over its refusal to restrict such emissions from motor vehicles under the Clean Air Act. The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, which in April 2007 ruled in a five-to-four decision against the EPA.

The decision did not require the EPA to change its position and begin regulating carbon dioxide from vehicle exhaust; it only required the agency to demonstrate that whatever it chooses to do complies with the requirements of the Clean Air Act. Nonetheless, the agency's detailed ANPR, published on July 30, 2008, appears to treat such regulation as a foregone conclusion. Although the ANPR is preliminary in nature, the level of detail (the ANPR and supporting documentation exceed 18,000 pages) suggests that the EPA has already decided to impose regulations that are unprecedented in their cost, complexity, and reach.

The reasons for Congress's reluctance to enact global warming legislation are every bit as relevant to the debate over whether or not the EPA should achieve the same results through regulations. This is especially true given the many shortcomings of the Clean Air Act as an instrument for regulating carbon dioxide emissions--for which the statute was not intended. In effect, the measures detailed in the ANPR would require action at least as costly as comparable cap-and-trade bills, and likely more so given the added difficulty of doing it in a much more convoluted fashion.

Regulating Vehicles--and Almost Everything Else

Because no technology exists to date that offers the possibility to filter out carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicle exhaust, the only way to reduce emissions is to use less fuel. In the ANPR, the EPA contemplates higher gas mileage standards for motor vehicles beyond those already scheduled to be imposed in accordance with the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act. The EPA also discusses strict requirements for everything from airplanes to ships to trains to lawnmowers, all of which could be subject to new design specifications and usage limitations as well as fuel economy standards, as described in painstaking detail in the ANPR.

Beyond regulating anything that is mobile and uses energy, the ANPR also contemplates targeting anything that is immobile and uses energy--commercial and non-commercial buildings, large and small businesses, and farms. Under the Clean Air Act, once carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles are regulated, emissions from stationary sources must also be controlled under the New Source Review (NSR) and other Clean Air Act programs because they apply to all pollutants subject to regulation anywhere else in the statute. Even if the agency tries to rein in the reach of its regulation, it will almost certainly face litigation by environmentalists opposing such restraint.

Given that the existing threshold for regulation under the Clean Air Act--250 tons of emissions per year, and in some cases as little as 100 tons per year--is easily met in the case of carbon dioxide emissions, the agency could impose new and onerous NSR requirements heretofore limited to major industrial facilities. Other Clean Air Act programs, such as the Title V permitting program and the hazardous-air-pollutants program, have even lower thresholds, creating a regulatory maze both restrictive and redundant.

Most pollutants regulated under the Clean Air Act are trace compounds like ozone or mercury that are typically measured in parts per billion, so these threshold levels are sensible to distinguish de minimis contributors from significant ones. But carbon dioxide is not a trace compound, thus, existing Clean Air Act thresholds are ill suited. Background levels alone account for 275 parts per million, and even relatively small usage of fossil fuels could reach these thresholds. Thus, even the kitchen in a restaurant, the heating system in an apartment or office building, or the activities associated with running a farm could cause these and other entities--potentially more than a million buildings, 200,000 manufacturing operations, and 20,000 farms[4]--to face substantial and unprecedented requirements. Churches, hospitals, schools, and government buildings could also be subjected to these requirements.

This type of industrial-strength EPA red tape that imposes an average of $125,000 in costs and takes 866 hours to complete[5] could now be imposed, for the first time, on a million or more entities beyond the large power plants and factories that have traditionally already been regulated in this manner. Even more significant than the administrative costs is that all of these entities would be required to install costly technologies and operate under certain restrictions, as determined by EPA bureaucrats.

In sum, a host of complicated and redundant regulations could be applied to nearly every product, nearly every business, and nearly every building in America that uses fossil fuels. The ANPR, if finalized in anything near its current form, would create an environmental regulatory scheme more costly and intrusive than all the others combined.

The Costs of the ANPR

Either through legislation or regulation, efforts to reduce fossil fuel emissions will impose costs throughout the economy. For purposes of this analysis of the ANPR, the Heritage Foundation ignores the up-front administrative and compliance costs of imposing such an unprecedented crackdown both for regulated entities and for federal and state regulators. Heritage analysts instead assume the unlikely scenario of successful ANPR implementation and focus only on the cost of the rules in the form of higher energy costs.

The impact on the overall economy, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP), is substantial. The cumulative GDP losses for 2010 to 2029 approach $7 trillion. Single-year losses exceed $600 billion in 2029, more than $5,000 per household. (See Chart 1.) Job losses are expected to exceed 800,000 in some years, and exceed at least 500,000 from 2015 through 2026. (See Chart 2). Note that these are net job losses, after any jobs created by compliance with the regulations--so-called green jobs--are taken into account. Hardest-hit are manufacturing jobs, with losses approaching 3 million. (See Chart 3). Particularly vulnerable are jobs in durable manufacturing (28 percent job losses), machinery manufacturing (57 percent), textiles (27.6 percent), electrical equipment and appliances (22 percent), paper (36 percent), and plastics and rubber products (54 percent). It should be noted that since the EPA rule is unilateral and few other nations are likely to follow the U.S. lead, many of these manufacturing jobs will be outsourced overseas.

The job losses or shifts to lower paying jobs are substantial, leading to declines in disposable income of $145 billion by 2015--more than $1,000 per household.

Conclusion

Virtually every concern heightened by the economic downturn, especially job losses, would be exacerbated under the ANPR. As with cap-and-trade legislation, the EPA's suggested rulemaking would be poison to an already sick economy. But even in the best of economic times, this policy would likely end them. The estimated costs--close to $7 trillion dollars and 3 million manufacturing jobs lost--are staggering. So is the sweep of regulations that could severely affect nearly every major energy-using product from cars to lawnmowers, and a million or more businesses and buildings of all types. And all of this sacrifice is in order to make, at best, a minuscule contribution to an overstated environmental threat. Congress has wisely resisted implementing anything this costly and impractical. The fact that unelected and unaccountable EPA bureaucrats are trying to do the opposite is all the more objectionable.

Ben Lieberman is Senior Policy Analyst in Energy and the Environment in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

[1]This Backgrounder is a companion to: David W. Kreutzer and Karen A. Campbell, "CO2-Emission Cuts: The Economic Costs of the EPA's ANPR Regulations," Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analysis Report No. 08-10, October 29, 2008, at http://www.heritage.org/Research/EnergyandEnvironment/cda08-10.cfm.

[2]William W. Beach et al., "The Economic Costs of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Change Legislation," Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analysis Report No. 08-02, May 12, 2008, at http://www.heritage.org/Research/EnergyandEnvironment/cda08-02.cfm.

[3]Ben Lieberman, "The Lieberman-Warner Climate Change Act: A Solution Worse Than the Problem," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 2140, June 2, 2008, pp. 6-9, at http://www.heritage.org/Research/EnergyandEnvironment/bg2140.cfm.

[4]Portia M. E. Mills, Mark P. Mills, "A Regulatory Burden: The Compliance Dimension of Regulation CO2 as a Pollutant," U.S. Chamber of Commerce, September 2008, p. 3.

[5]Carrie Wheeler, "Information Collection Request for Prevention of Significant Deterioration and Nonattainment New Source Review," U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, no date.

see: http://www.heritage.org/Research/EnergyandEnvironment/bg2213.cfm

Waxman Win Exposes Democrats' Leftward Bent

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 04:24:00 +0000

With Waxman over the House Energy Committee, the Obama/Gore agenda has one more green light:

Democrats’ surprising selection of liberal Rep. Henry Waxman of California as the new chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee signals that the new Congress will take a definite turn further to the left.

By a 137-122 vote on Thursday, the Democratic caucus voted to oust John Dingell of Michigan from a post he has held as chairman or ranking Democrat since 1981.

Some senior Democrats were stunned by Waxman’s victory, which violated the party’s long-held principle of seniority.

Seniority has “just been buried,” said Rep. Charles Rangel of New York, a Dingell supporter.

Moderate to conservative Democrats viewed the vote “as a rebuke by the caucus’ liberal wing, which has accused Dingell of not supporting global warming legislation,” The Washington Post observed.

The powerful committee has broad jurisdiction over a range of issues, from consumer protection and regulation of energy resources to global warming, conservation, telecommunications policy, health, and auto emissions.

Waxman, who represents Beverly Hills and parts of Los Angeles, told reporters after the vote, “Seniority is important, but it should not be a grant of property rights to be chairman for three decades or more.”

He also said, “I am very gratified by the trust put into me,” Reuters reported.

Dingell, a prominent supporter of his state’s auto industry, has clashed with junior committee members over efforts to impose fuel efficiency standards on vehicles.

Waxman argued that Dingell would be a roadblock to legislation the Obama White House will want to push.

“This is a big deal since it rejects the sacred seniority system for chairmen,” a Washington insider told Newsmax.

“It also suggests far-left House Democrats are finished holding their fire like they did over the first two years of Democratic control.

“If they can do this, all kinds of nutty left-wing legislation is possible.”

“I heard one moderate Democrat say, ‘I guess we’re trying to help you guys [House Republicans] get out of the wilderness.'”

Obama Speaks on Carbon Regulation

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 04:18:00 +0000

For any of you who might be holding out hope that the current economic crisis will derail Obama’s plans for carbon taxes, think again. In his first post-election speech on the topic, Obama underscored the urgent need to address global warming, and seemed to put off suggestions that delay might be prudent in light of the current economic situation. Here’s a report on the speech:

Obama seeks immediate action to curb emissions
David R. Baker, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 19, 2008

In his first speech on global warming since winning the election, President-elect Barack Obama promised Tuesday to set stringent limits on greenhouse gases, saying the need is too urgent for delay.

Many observers had expected Obama to avoid tackling such a complex, contentious issue early in his administration. But in videotaped comments to the Governors' Global Climate Summit in Beverly Hills on Tuesday, he called for immediate action.

"Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all," Obama said. "Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response. The stakes are too high, the consequences too serious."

He repeated his campaign promise to create a system that limits carbon dioxide emissions and forces companies to pay for the right to emit the gas. Using the money collected from that system, Obama plans to invest $15 billion each year in alternative energy. That investment - in solar, wind and nuclear power, as well as advanced coal technology - will create jobs at a time of economic turmoil, he said.

"It will ... help us transform our industries and steer our country out of this economic crisis by generating 5 million new green jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced," Obama said.
Many people listening to Obama's speech Tuesday had waited years to hear it.

Schwarzenegger 'very happy'

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger convened the Global Climate Summit along with the governors of Florida, Illinois, Kansas and Wisconsin - states that have been developing their own global warming policies rather than waiting for federal action. Schwarzenegger clashed repeatedly with the Bush administration on climate policy and complained that the White House was dragging its feet on a looming crisis. He told the conference Tuesday that he welcomed a new approach from Washington and will work with Obama.

"Of course I am very, very happy," Schwarzenegger said. "This is so important for our country, because we have been the biggest polluters in the world, and it is about time that we as a country recognize that and that we work together with other nations in order to fight global warming."

Obama touted the idea of companies paying to emit greenhouse gases, a system known as "cap and trade," during the campaign. But many people had doubted he would make it an early priority as president.

Under such a system, the government would set an overall limit on greenhouse gas emissions and let companies buy and sell the right to emit specific amounts. The limit would decline over time.

Such systems are complicated to create. They're also controversial. Critics say they amount to a tax on energy use that would hurt businesses and consumers at a time when the economy is floundering.

But one business group threw its support behind Obama on Tuesday. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, which includes San Francisco's Pacific Gas and Electric Co. as well as several environmental organizations, started calling for government action on global warming two years ago. The group wants a cap and trade system as soon as possible, even though many of its members - such as oil giants BP and ConocoPhillips - emit large amounts of greenhouse gases.

"We stand united behind President-elect Obama's statement earlier today," said James Rogers, chief executive officer of Duke Energy, one of America's largest electric utilities. "Delaying this further doesn't make sense. And using the economy as an excuse is wrong. ... We can solve our economic and environmental crises simultaneously."

Paying for emitting carbons

A cap and trade system forces companies to pay for emitting greenhouse gases, effectively putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions. As a result, alternative energy technologies should become more cost-competitive with fossil fuels.

"At its core, it's very simple - we need a price on carbon," said David Crane, chief executive officer of NRG Energy, another Climate Action Partnership member. "We own coal-fired power plants. That's what we do for a living. We've been developing low- or no-carbon technologies as we look to the future. ... But again, we need a price on carbon, because it's not cheap."

Obama's four-minute, videotaped speech largely repeated elements of his energy plan from the campaign trail, saying the nation must cut greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2050.

He repeatedly linked the fight against global warming to reviving the economy, saying the investment in alternative energy would put Americans to work.

Nuclear power, 'clean coal'

Obama also made a point of backing technologies that many environmentalists despise - nuclear power and "clean coal," which involves trapping and storing underground the emissions from coal-burning power plants.

Obama told participants at the governors' climate conference that he would work with any country, state or business that wanted to fight climate change. Brazil, Canada, China, Chile, Mexico, India, Indonesia and the United Kingdom all sent representatives to the two-day conference.

"I promise you this: When I am president, any governor who's willing to promote clean energy will have a partner in the White House," he said. "Any company that's willing to invest in clean energy will have an ally in Washington. And any nation that is willing to join the cause of combatting climate change will have an ally in the United States of America."

Freezing Heat

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 04:03:00 +0000

This article just illustrates how sloppy the "science" behind Global Warming alarmism really is:

The world has never seen such freezing heat
By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 16/11/2008

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising "very much faster" than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.

Pickens' wind plan hits a snag

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 04:00:00 +0000

This is from today’s news:

Billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens is delaying his massive Texas wind project, citing a drop in natural gas prices and the tightening credit market. "With natural gas prices where they are, you can't kick off a wind project, you're not economical." Pickens said Tuesday at a news conference in Arizona.

In case the logic is lost (and it’s easy to lose sight of it) the “Pickens” wind plan is, was, and always will be, a “Pickens High Priced Natural Gas” plan. Take away the high priced natural gas, and Pickens won’t build either the wind nor the gas plants to firm it. His “I’m greener than a gourd” attitude appears to be heavily influenced by one particular shade of green more than any other – the green back.

Here’s the link to the story; the story itself is below:

http://money.cnn.com/2008/11/12/news/economy/pickens/index.htm?postversion=2008111213

Pickens' wind plan hits a snag
Credit crunch and falling natural gas prices delay plans for giant Texas farm.
By Steve Hargreaves, CNNMoney.com staff writer
Last Updated: November 12, 2008: 1:50 PM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens is delaying his massive Texas wind project, citing a drop in natural gas prices and the tightening credit market.
"With natural gas prices where they are, you can't kick off a wind project, you're not economical." Pickens said Tuesday at a news conference in Arizona.

But Pickens, who has spent millions over the last few months promoting his "Pickens Plan" to wean the United States off foreign oil by switching to wind and natural gas, said natural gas and oil prices will rise again in less than a year, and characterized the setback as temporary.

A spokesman for Mesa Power, Pickens' company that is building the Texas wind farm, laid the blame more on the credit markets.

"The capital markets are problematic for everyone and...may lead us to scale back a bit," Jay Rosser, a spokesman for Mesa, said in a statement. "But we are still going forward with our wind business."

Pickens' wind farm in Texas, known as the Pampa Wind Project, was slated to be the largest wind farm in the world, generating 4,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 1.3 million homes.

A spokesman for Pickens said turbines for the first phase of the project, 1,000 megawatts of power, are still being purchased. The first phase was slated to come online in 2011. Although now it is no longer clear when it will come on line.

The Pickens Plan, which the billionaire has been pushing in TV commercials, media appearances and lobbying efforts since last summer, calls for the country to use wind to generate 20% of its electricity, displacing some of the natural gas that's currently used to generate power. The natural gas, an abundant domestic resource, could then be used to power vehicles, thus reducing oil imports.

But natural gas prices have fallen from over $12 per million British thermal units last summer to current levels of around $6.

The fall in natural gas prices makes switching to wind power a less certain bet, as utilities would be reluctant to replace natural gas with wind now that natural gas prices are so low.

Pickens said Tuesday that natural gas prices need to be about $9/Btu in order for wind power to be competitive.

He remained confident the dip in prices would not effect his overall Pickens Plan.

"We will get the plan," he said.

Pickens, who made his money in oil production and trading, has been saying for years that the United States is too dependent on foreign oil, and that oil prices will continue to rise over the long term as demand outstrips supply.

First Published: November 12, 2008: 11:58 AM ET

McCain Wrong on Global Warming

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 02:53:00 +0000

This just illustrates the fact that this year's [2008] presidential election isn't between right and wrong, it's between bad and worse. I'm so discouraged.

A British editor and politician prominent in the discussion of climate change has written an open letter to John McCain criticizing statements the Republican candidate has made about global warming.

The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, who was an adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, sought to keep Al Gore’s global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” out of public schools in Britain, and in March 2007 challenged Gore to a debate on climate change.

Now in his letter to McCain, published on the Web site American Thinker, Monckton calls manmade global warming fears “scientifically discredited” and advises, “Not for a single moment longer must you allow yourself to be distracted by the murderous foolishness of the climate alarmists.”

Monckton quotes a McCain statement that “we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures.”

Monckton, saying he bases his assertions on “peer-reviewed scientific literature,” counters, “For most of the past 600 million years, the temperature that most often prevailed globally is thought to have been 12.5 degrees higher than today’s temperature . . .

“From 1700 to 1998, temperature rose at a near-uniform rate of about 1 degree per century. In 1998, ‘global warming’ stopped, and it has not resumed since. Indeed, in the past seven years, temperature has been falling at a rate equivalent to as much as 0.7 degrees per decade.”

Responding to McCain’s statement that greenhouse gases, chiefly carbon dioxide, “are heavily implicated as a cause of climate change,” Monckton writes, “Two-thirds of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is naturally present, and carbon dioxide occupies just one ten-thousandth more of the atmosphere today than it did 250 years ago.”

Monckton, who was an editor and writer with Britain’s Evening Standard newspaper, quotes McCain, “We need to deal with the central facts of . . . rising waters.”

He counters, “Sea level has been rising since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago . . . The rate of increase has averaged four feet per century. Yet in the 20th century, when we are told that ‘global warming’ began to have a major impact on global temperature and hence on sea level, sea level rose by just eight inches.”

Then in a swipe at Al Gore, whom he does not mention by name, Monckton observes, “There is not and has never been any scientific basis for the exaggerated projections by a certain politician that sea level might imminently rise by as much as 20 feet.

“That politician, in the year in which he circulated a movie containing that projection, bought a $4 million condominium just feet from the ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco.”

Monckton also seeks to refute statements McCain has made on receding glaciers, melting polar ice sheets, extreme weather events, threats to polar bears, and more.

And in reference to the candidate’s stated support for efforts to control climate change by reducing the emission of greenhouse gases, Monckton tells McCain: "With every respect, there is no rational basis for your declared intention that your great nation should inflict upon her own working people and upon the starving masses of the Third World the extravagantly pointless, climatically irrelevant, strategically fatal economic wounds that the arrogant advocates of atmospheric alarmism admit they aim to achieve.”

Straight Talk About Energy Policy

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 02:45:00 +0000

I promised Kimball that I wouldn't post or editorialize about his paper - he was worried that I'd make him look too radical. So instead I will only reprint what other publications have already said about his paper:

Kimball Rasmussen, president and CEO of Deseret Power Electric Cooperative, the Utah G&T, gave a presentation this week to CFC employees at their Herndon, Va., headquarters based on his recent position paper, “A Rational Look at Climate Change Concerns and the Implications for U.S. Power Consumers.” The 50-page white paper does a skillful job of discussing NRECA’s “Our Energy/Our Future” campaign and explaining the complex science—and its inconsistencies and shortcomings—used to calculate the effects of global warming, referencing the recognized authority on global warming science, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Rasmussen acknowledges that global warming is occurring and that mankind’s activities contribute to it but advocates a thoughtful consideration of what to do about it based on the demand for electricity, the need for technology development, the costs associated with efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and the effect those efforts will have on rising temperatures.

Here are a few of the points presented by Rasmussen:

* The IPCC model is based on an average global temperature increase of 3 degrees Celsius (range of 2 to 4.5 degrees) from a base calculation in the year 1750 to the expected temperature in 2100. This is due to a doubling of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the earth’s atmosphere from 275 parts per million (ppm) to 550 ppm; the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere is 385 ppm.

* Climate change legislation is expected to be considered by the U.S. Congress. At a potential $50 per ton of CO2 settling price, a cap-and-trade program would cost the U.S. electric industry a staggering $100 billion per year—enough money to retire the net book value of every coal-fired plant in America within 3.5 years.

* The likely result of a U.S. cap-and-trade program is the exodus of U.S. industry and manufacturing to other parts of the world to reduce costs.

* If the United States were to develop enough renewable energy resources to replace current carbon-based resources within 10 years, as some have called for, we would need to duplicate the current amount of U.S. installed wind energy capacity once every 31 days for the next 10 years or build 1,247 new solar facilities similar to the 140-acre facility at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev. (the third largest in the world) every month for the next 10 years. Neither outcome is possible.

* The United States emits about 6 billion tons of CO2 annually; the U.S. power sector emits about 2 billion tons of CO2 annually; and world CO2 emissions are approximately 30 billion tons annually. The U.S. percentage of annual global CO2 emissions is expected to decline over time.

* According to the IPCC formulae, if the United States were to shut down all of its fossil-fueled electricity within the next 10 years, the climate response would be a temperature decrease of just 0.07 degrees Celsius.

“I would hope that we could get past the extremes and apply reason and wisdom as we explore the best energy policy,” Rasmussen concludes in his white paper. “We should be cautious that international pressures do not overcome prudent domestic energy policy. An economically healthy America will have the best opportunity to develop technologies that can efficiently and methodically lead to a prudent transition from carbon resources. A misguided carbon tax, or cap-and-trade program, will grievously damage the U.S. economy, will accelerate the out-migration of heavy industry and will have no beneficial effect on future climate.”

Green fascists given free rein in England

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 02:36:00 +0000

How far will all of this go? The energy industry and the government in the UK have allowed the environmental groups free rein to delegitimize coal (and oil for that matter). They have invested nothing in defending fossil fuels, legitimizing their product or in advancing strategies to combat global warming that do not involve getting rid of coal. As a result, the jury was, in a literal sense, prejudiced against coal. The benefits of affordable energy for the many must be championed, otherwise we will end up with expensive energy for the few.

Vandalizing the Economy
CEI’s Iain Murray, from Planet Gore

This is very big. In Britain, a group of Greenpeace supporters trespassed on to a coal-fired power station and started vandalizing it, painting a message to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown about global warming. They were arrested and prosecuted. Their defense strategy was to claim a "lawful excuse" on the grounds that their actions could help prevent significant damage to others' property that would result from global warming. Their defense witnesses included James Hansen, Al Gore's adviser and head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and Zac Goldsmith, ultra-wealthy heir of Sir James Goldsmith and a conservative candidate for Parliament. The strategy worked. Yesterday, a jury returned a majority verdict, acquitting the so-called Kingsnorth Six. As The Independent put it, the jury decided the "threat of global warming justifies breaking the law ."

The ramifications are huge. Operators of coal-fired power stations in the UK have just been stripped of legal protection from the criminal actions of the environmental lobby (to call them extremists would be wrong - this is the mainstream). It is perfectly possible that a future jury will find differently, but the chances of that happening have fallen dramatically. Investor confidence in coal energy will therefore be damaged. There will be huge political risk in building a new coal plant. Existing coal plants will come under literal attack.

The same people hate nuclear and will work to delay new nuclear plants. Renewables are marginal, even according to the Renewable Energy Foundation . North Sea Gas is running out, so the only solution to keep the lights on is kowtowing to Vladimir Putin and Gazprom .

Article on the sun's activity and earth climate

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:06:00 +0000

Apparently our solar system is larger than just the United States. Would someone please educate Al Gore...

Scientists disagree over lack of sunspots
Mark Lawson

The current cycle of the sun is taking a long time to start, triggering different explanations, writes Mark Lawson. Despite being dismissed by a number of scientists as of little consequence to the present discussion of climate change, the issue of the sun's activity - or apparent lack of it - has been the subject of considerable debate in recent months. Scientists who concern themselves with the fledgling subject of spaceweather (changes in the sun's emissions) have been wondering where all the sunspots have gone, when they might come back and what effect this will have on climate.

The sun has a well-recognised, 11-year cycle marked by spots, or cool dark regions with strong magnetic fields, that appear on its surface. At the peak of the cycle, when the sun may be giving off lots of flares and solar storms that affect satellites, there are lots of spots. At the low part of the cycle there are few to no spots and the sun is calm. The last solar cycle peaked in 2001 and was pronounced complete by NASA in March 2006. At the same time a team from the National Centre forAtmospheric Research in the US forecast that the next sunspot cycle will be 20 to 50 per cent stronger than the previous one. Since then some spots from the new cycle have appeared, as well as -confusingly - some spots from the old cycle which appeared in March of this year. (Scientists can tell which cycle the spots belong to by their magnetic polarity.) The next cycle is taking a long time to start, and this lack of activity has prompted observers to invoke the possibility of another Maunder Minimum - a period from 1645 to 1715 with very few sunspots, which is associated with a sequence of bitter winters known as the Little Ice Age.

Scientists have offered two different interpretations for this absence of sunspots, both based on statistical research. In early July NASA solar physicist David Hathaway pointed out that the solar minimum is still well within historic norms for the solar cycle. He notes that the average solar cycle lasts 131 months, plus or minus 14 months. By July, cycle 23 (the one just winding up) had lasted 142 months, but it can last much longer, despite NASA's declaration. In the early 20th century, the sun was quiet for periods twice as long as the present spell, Hathaway says. The current cycle has lasted 143 months, with another group saying that although there may be only a few spots, this lack of activity will continue until 2014 when the spots will disappear altogether. William Livingston and Matthew Penn, both at the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, base their forecast on measurements of both the magnetic strength and the temperatures of spots. Livingston tells The Australian Financial Review that in a trend independent of the solar cycle, the magnetic strength of the sunspots had been declining and their temperature increasing. They graphed the magnetic field decline and extrapolated it to reach an end point in 2014. They have forecast that although there may be more sunspots, the present lack of activity will continue until 2014 when there will be no sunspots at all. As this forecast is based just on what they read from the graphs, rather than on a physical theory, they cannot say what will happen after that, Livingston says. The pair submitted a paper to Nature three years ago but it was rejected, Livingston says, because it made a strong statement based solely on statistical trends. Recently, however, the paper has been circulated unofficially as part of the climate debate and also because the sun has been quiet. Livingston says he will wait for the right time before resubmitting it.

The role of sun activity in climate is very hotly debated, with the ruling theories emphasising the role of industrial gases, and assigning only a comparatively minor role to the sun in the short term. But there are dissenters. Willie Soon, a researcher at the Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says he has identified a clear link between the sun's activity - as indicated by its magnetic activity - and temperature variations in the Arctic and Greenland over 130 years. Soon tells The Australian Financial Review he chose this area for study as it has good temperature records and is an area sensitive to climate change, so that the signal from any one climatic influence should be easier to spot. He also says he can point to a physical mechanism in the circulation of the ocean linking the sun's influence on temperature in the region. Soon was due to present his results at the 33rd International Geological Conference in Oslo this week. He was co-chairing a sun-climate connection session with Bob Carter, a professor at the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University and a noted Australian climate sceptic. Another scientist who says he has identified a link between the sun's activity and climate - in particular between rainfall in Australia and sunspots - is Robert Baker, an associate professor at the University of New England's School of Human and Environmental Studies. Baker tells the AFR he has identified a strong correlation between sunspots, the sun's magnetic activity and the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI). He says variations in the earth's magnetic field account for about half of the variation in the SOI, and that changes in sunspot activity as an indicator of magnetic activity can be correlated with rainfall patterns in south-east Australia. The Bureau of Meteorology has rejected Baker's reasoning and a paper by him was not accepted by the Australian Meterological Magazine. But Baker says his analysis has been accepted by the peer-reviewed journal Solar Terrestrial Physics for publication in December.

Poll: Few Americans Worried About Global Warming

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 02:02:00 +0000

This just proves how out of touch our politicians have become while becoming disciples of Al Gore:

Only 1 in 4 Americans believes global warming is the biggest environmental challenge facing the world, a new poll reveals.

The ABC News/Planet Green/Stanford University survey found that public concern over the global warming issue has diminished over the past year.

Fewer than half of the poll’s respondents, 47 percent, think global warming is an important issue to them personally, down from 52 percent in April 2007.

While 80 percent believe the earth is warming, that figure is down four percentage points from last year.

Doubts over the science behind the global warming issue still linger in people's minds, according to the poll results reported by the National Journal. Just 30 percent of respondents said they trust what scientists have to say about the environment "completely" or "a lot," 39 percent said they trust them "a moderate amount," and 30 percent said they do not trust them.

Also, nearly 60 percent of respondents said there is "a lot of disagreement" within the scientific community as to how dangerous climate change is.

According to ABC News' Gary Langer, the diminished concern over global warming coincides with decreased media attention to climate change, in favor of the election and economy. "A database search finds 50 percent fewer news stories on global warming in the month before this poll was conducted, compared with the month before last year's survey," Langer wrote.

In any case, about 7 in 10 respondents said they're attempting to reduce their energy consumption by driving less, using less electricity and recycling.

But 63 percent are in favor of drilling for oil in coastal waters where it is currently not allowed, and 55 percent support drilling in U.S. wilderness areas where it is not allowed.

Waning Warming Debate

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 03:37:00 +0000

Do you see what happens when the 24/7/365 news channels have something else to talk about besides the myth of man-made global warming?

Waning Warming Debate
AMERICANS AIM TO REDUCE CARBON FOOTPRINTS, DESPITE DROP IN CONCERN FOR CLIMATE CHANGE
Monday, Aug. 11, 2008
by Amy Harder

For all the recent coverage of the pollution surrounding Beijing's Olympic Games, global warming has gotten relatively little attention, whether on the nightly news or on the campaign trail. While the majority of Americans still say they consider climate change a serious issue, a new poll suggests public concern over the issue has ebbed since last year.

According to a survey [PDF] from ABC News, Planet Green and Stanford University, fewer than half -- 47 percent -- of Americans consider global warming an important issue to them personally, down from 52 percent in April 2007. Although a vast majority still think the planet is warming -- 8 in 10 respondents -- that figure is also down from last year, having dropped 4 percentage points. Furthermore, in an open-ended question, the number of respondents who called global warming the biggest environmental challenge facing the world fell 8 points from 2007 and currently hovers at 25 percent.

According to an analysis by ABC News' Gary Langer, the drop in these numbers coincides with decreased media attention to climate change, in favor of the election and economy. "A database search finds 50 percent fewer news stories on global warming in the month before this poll was conducted, compared with the month before last year's survey," Langer wrote.

That dimmer media spotlight could explain respondents' lack of knowledge about how John McCain and Barack Obama measure up on global warming. About 8 in 10 respondents said they knew little or nothing about the candidates' positions on the issue. Nevertheless, the Democratic contender has a clear advantage: Fifty-five percent of respondents said Obama would do a better job of reducing global warming, while only 23 percent said so of the GOP nominee.

Respondents split evenly when pollsters asked whether government-led or market-based solutions would do a better job of reducing global warming, but they did favor government measures such as a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions.

Americans appear to be holding themselves responsible as well for the energy crisis. About 7 in 10 respondents said they're attempting to reduce their carbon footprint, by driving less, using less electricity and recycling. But despite the overwhelming consensus that global warming is indeed occurring, doubt over the science behind the issue is still lingers strongly in people's minds. Only 30 percent of ABC News respondents said they trust what scientists have to say about the environment "completely" or "a lot," with 39 percent saying they trust them "a moderate amount" and 30 percent saying they do not trust them. On top of that, nearly 60 percent of respondents said there is "a lot of disagreement" within the scientific community as to how dangerous climate change is.

Copyright ©2008 by National Journal Group Inc. The Watergate 600 New Hampshire Ave., NW Washington, DC 20037
202-739-8400 • fax 202-833-8069 NationalJournal.com is an Atlantic Media publication.
National Journal - Waning Warming Debate http://www.nationaljournal.com/njonline/print_friendly.php?ID=pn_200...

Global Warming Movement Turns Cool

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 03:31:00 +0000

Finally, we're starting to hear some reasonable voices in the media - I'm starting to feel less lonely already:

Global Warming Movement Turns Cool
June 22, 2008, 3:44 pm James Spann Climate

Two years ago, it seemed like nothing could stop the global warming train. Most of the media, those in Hollywood, politicians (many on both sides of the cultural divide), and “enlightened environmentalists” were all telling us that man was causing runaway warming of the earth’s atmosphere, meaning global catastrophe only decades ahead for all of us.

Scary stuff.

The problem is that a majority of those in this almost religious movement have little training in atmospheric science, and little understanding of the issue. They jumped on the bandwagon because it matches their worldview, or pads their pocket. This issue has generated great wealth on both sides of the argument, and I need to say up front I have absolutely no financial interest in climate. I am paid the same regardless of whether man is involved in climate change or not, and I have never taken a dime for a speech on the subject.

The simple truth is that the anthropogenic global warming train has slowed to a crawl, and the riders are jumping off as the facts are discovered.

What is the truth? Lets begin with something we all can agree on. The climate IS changing. It has always changed, it is changing now, and it will always change.

Beyond that, here are some simple facts that make those left on the global warming train very uncomfortable:

*The earth is no warmer now than it was in 1998.
*Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a gas indispensable to plant life. Plants, in turn, release oxygen, which sustains animal and human life.
*The primary greenhouse gas is water vapor, not carbon dioxide.
*The lack of solar activity in recent months suggests global cooling might be our biggest potential climate change problem in coming years.
*The planet has had weather disasters, extremes, and anomalies since it has been here. We just didn’t have 24 hour news channels and the Internet in prior decades to spread the news.

I have been doing the weather on local television for 30 years, and EVERY YEAR I have had people come up to me and tell me that they can “never remember the weather being this strange”.

Most of those that you see and hear speaking on the subject have little scientific knowledge. Here is a quote from Dr. Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, from an article he penned recently:

“Alarmists like Al Gore will use pseudo-scientific justifications and comparisons in their attempt to make a connection between carbon dioxide and global warming. Even though CO2 is necessary for life on Earth, the alarmists insist on calling it a pollutant, referring to our atmosphere as an “open sewer.” For instance, Gore likes to point out that Venus has far more CO2 in its atmosphere than the Earth does, and its surface is hot enough to melt lead. Therefore, more CO2 causes warming. But we also know that the Martian atmosphere has 15 times as much CO2 as our own atmosphere, and its surface temperature averages about 70 deg. F below zero. So you see, in science a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

Dr. James McClintock (marine biologist at UAB) today, in an op-ed piece published by the Birmingham News, claims that Antarctica is “warming quickly”. Dr. McClintock, I am sure, is an excellent marine biologist, and I would not even make an effort to challenge his knowledge of that science. But, what is his background in atmospheric science? And, where does that claim come from?

Here is what Certified Consulting Meteorologist (CCM) Joe D’Aleo says about this:
“The shattered part of the Wilkins ice sheet was 160 square miles in area, which is just 0.01% of the total current Antarctic ice cover, like an icicle falling from a snow and ice covered roof,” D’Aleo wrote on March 25. “We are very likely going to exceed last year’s record [for Southern Hemisphere ice extent]. Yet the world is left with the false impression Antarctica’s ice sheet is also starting to disappear,” D’Aleo added.

And, from climate scientist Ben Herman, past director of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics and former Head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona: “It is interesting that all of the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) stories concerning Antarctica are always about what’s happening around the [western] peninsula, which seems to be the only place on Antarctica that has shown warming. How about the net ‘no change’ or ‘cooling’ over the rest of the continent, which is probably about 95% of the land mass, not to mention the record sea ice coverage recently.”

I also should note that the mythical UN IPCC “consensus” continues to crumble… Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist who specializes in optical waveguide spectroscopy from the University of Tokyo, and a top UN IPCC Scientist, calls global warming fears: the “worst scientific scandal in history” in the weblog of former Colorado State Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke.

Here is what Canadian climatologist Tim Ball says about the IPCC: “The IPCC is a political organization and yet it is the sole basis of the claim of a scientific consensus on climate change. Consensus is neither a scientific fact nor important in science, but it is very important in politics. There are 2500 members in the IPCC divided between 600 in Working Group I (WGI), who examine the actual climate science, and 1900 in working Groups II and III (WG II and III), who study “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” and “Mitigation of Climate Change” respectively. Of the 600 in WGI, 308 were independent reviewers, but only 32 reviewers commented on more than three chapters and only five reviewers commented on all 11 chapters of the report. They accept without question the findings of WGI and assume warming due to humans is a certainty. In a circular argument typical of so much climate politics the work of the 1900 (less than one percent of the scientific population) is listed as ‘proof’ of human caused global warming. Through this they established the IPCC as the only credible authority thus further isolating those who raised questions.”

I find it interesting that most of the predictions coming from the IPCC are based on computer model output. Those of us in the trench, who deal with the Earth’s atmosphere every day, know that computer model data is often horrible 24 hours in advance… how bad can it be out to 50 or 100 years?

The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine this month announced that 31,072 U.S. scientists (9,021 with PhDs) signed a petition stating that “… There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will cause in the future, catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate…”

John Coleman, meteorologist and founder of The Weather Channel, calls the GW movement the greatest scam in history.

I encourage all of you to read material on BOTH sides of the issue and make up your own mind. Mr Gore, the science is “not settled”, and the invitation for a debate remains wide open.

Heaven help us this fall when ABC television tells us that the world, as we know it, is about to end because of “global warming”. Never let facts get in the way of a good story, especially one that scares you to death.

I consider myself an environmentalist. There are some serious environmental issues out there. “Global warming” is not one of them. One of the best ways to become a truly environmentally concerned person is to walk the banks of an Alabama river or stream for a half day and pick up trash and garbage. Anyone want to join me?

See: http://www.alabamawx.com/?p=7509

A Better Way Than Cap and Trade

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 03:21:00 +0000

Hmm... $800 billion to reduce inevitable temperature increases by just 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit... that sounds like a good deal... at least it does to the U.S. politicians:

A Better Way Than Cap and Trade
By Bjorn LomborgThursday, June 26, 2008; A19

The bitter arguments in the Senate this month over the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill, which would have required major emitters to pay for the right to discharge greenhouse gases, proved that climate change caused by humans has come to the fore of U.S. policy debates. This fact may comfort those who believe that future generations will judge us on the zeal with which we face the challenge. It may even assuage the fears of those who believe that warming will end life as we know it. But political rhetoric is unlikely to put us on a path toward solving the problem of climate change in the best possible way.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), a co-sponsor of the bill, has called it "the world's most far-reaching program to fight global warming." It is indeed policy on a grand scale. It would slow American economic growth by trillions of dollars over the next half-century. But in terms of temperature, the result will be negligible if China and India don't also commit to reducing their emissions, and it will be only slightly more significant if they do. By itself, Lieberman-Warner would postpone the temperature increase projected for 2050 by about two years.

Politicians favor the cap-and-trade system because it is an indirect tax that disguises the true costs of reducing carbon emissions. It also gives lawmakers an opportunity to control the number and distribution of emissions allowances, and the flow of billions of dollars of subsidies and sweeteners.

Many people believe that everyone has a moral obligation to ask how we can best combat climate change. Attempts to curb carbon emissions along the lines of the bill now pending are a poor answer compared with other options.

Consider that today, solar panels are one-tenth as efficient as the cheapest fossil fuels. Only the very wealthy can afford them. Many "green" approaches do little more than make rich people feel they are helping the planet. We can't avoid climate change by forcing a few more inefficient solar panels onto rooftops.

The answer is to dramatically increase research and development so that solar panels become cheaper than fossil fuels sooner rather than later. Imagine if solar panels became cheaper than fossil fuels by 2050: We would have solved the problem of global warming, because switching to the environmentally friendly option wouldn't be the preserve of rich Westerners.

This message was recently backed up by the findings of the Copenhagen Consensus project, which gathered eight of the world's top economists -- including five Nobel laureates -- to examine research on the best ways to tackle 10 global challenges: air pollution, conflict, disease, global warming, hunger and malnutrition, lack of education, gender inequity, lack of water and sanitation, terrorism, and trade barriers.

These experts looked at the costs and benefits of different responses to each challenge. Their goal was to create a prioritized list showing how money could best be spent combating these problems.

The panel concluded that the least effective use of resources in slowing global warming would come from simply cutting carbon dioxide emissions.

Research for the project was done by a lead author of the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- the group that shared last year's Nobel Peace Prize with former vice president Al Gore -- who noted that spending $800 billion over 100 years solely on mitigating emissions would reduce inevitable temperature increases by just 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century. Even accounting for the key environmental damage from warming, we would lose money, with avoided damage of just $685 billion for our $800 billion investment.

The economists didn't conclude that the world should ignore the effects of climate change. They pointed out that a better response than cutting emissions would be to dramatically increase research and development on low-carbon energy -- such as solar panels and second-generation biofuels.

The United States has an opportunity to lead the world on research and development, which would give it the moral authority to demand that everyone else do the same. The world's sole superpower could finally provide the leadership on climate change that has been lacking in the White House.

Even if every nation spent 0.05 percent of its gross domestic product on research and development of low-carbon energy, this would be only about one-tenth as costly as the Kyoto Protocol and would save dramatically more than any of Kyoto's likely successors.

In the United States, this approach would open up new avenues for the nation's creative, innovative spirit and leave behind the political mess of Kyoto-type negotiations.

A low-carbon energy, high-income future is possible. Unfortunately, the political battles we just witnessed in Washington have done nothing to make it a reality.

The writer is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Consensus Center, Copenhagen Business School.

See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/25/AR2008062501946.html

Poll: most Britons doubt cause of climate change

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 03:15:00 +0000

I can see by the following article that our brethren in the UK are better at sifting the truth out of the drivel that spews from the mainstream media than we are here in the U.S.

Poll: most Britons doubt cause of climate change

The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans - and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem, according to an exclusive poll for The Observer.

The results have shocked campaigners who hoped that doubts would have been silenced by a report last year by more than 2,500 scientists for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found a 90 per cent chance that humans were the main cause of climate change and warned that drastic action was needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The findings come just before the release of the government's long-awaited renewable energy strategy, which aims to cut the UK's greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent over the next 12 years.

The poll, by Ipsos MORI, found widespread contradictions, with some people saying politicians were not doing enough to tackle the problem, even though they were cynical about government attempts to impose regulations or raise taxes. In a sign of the enormous task ahead for those pushing for drastic cuts to carbon emissions, many people said they did not want to restrict their lifestyles and only a small minority believe they need to make 'significant and radical' changes such as driving and flying less.

'It's disappointing and the government will be really worried,' said Jonathon Porritt, chairman of the government's Sustainable Development Commission. 'They [politicians] need the context in which they're developing new policies to be a lot stronger and more positive. Otherwise the potential for backlash and unpopularity is considerable.'

There is growing concern that an economic depression and rising fuel and food prices are denting public interest in environmental issues. Some environmentalists blame the public's doubts on last year's Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, and on recent books, including one by Lord Lawson, the former Chancellor, that question the consensus on climate change.

However Professor Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, said politicians and campaigners were to blame for over-simplifying the problem by only publicising evidence to support the case. 'Things that we do know - like humans do cause climate change - are being put in doubt,' said Lomborg. 'If you're saying, "We're not going to tell you the whole truth, but we're going to ask you to pay up a lot of money," people are going to be unsure.'

In response to the poll's findings, the Department for the Environment issued a statement: 'The IPCC... concluded the scientific evidence for climate change is clear and it is down to human activities. It is already affecting people's lives - and the impact will be much greater if we don't act now.'

Ipsos MORI polled 1,039 adults and found that six out of 10 agreed that 'many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change', and that four out of 10 'sometimes think climate change might not be as bad as people say'. In both cases, another 20 per cent were not convinced either way. Despite this, three quarters still professed to be concerned about climate change.

Those most worried were more likely to have a degree, be in social classes A or B, have a higher income, said Phil Downing, Ipsos MORI's head of environmental research.

'People are broadly concerned, but not entirely convinced,' said Downing. 'Despite many attempts to broaden the environment movement, it doesn't seem to have become fully embedded as a mainstream concern,' he said.

More than half of those polled did not have confidence in international or British political leaders to tackle climate change, but only just over a quarter think it's too late to stop it. Two thirds want the government to do more but nearly as many said they were cynical about government policies such as green taxes, which they see as 'stealth' taxes.

See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/22/climatechange.carbonemissions

Tax protests paralyze Europe's "green" policies

noreply@blogger.com (Colin) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 02:57:00 +0000

Note: Europe is suffering under "green" taxes that are one fifth what the U.S. politicians are proposing for us after this next election.

Fuel protests herald grim times for European green policy
DOUG SAUNDERS
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
May 28, 2008 at 2:06 AM EDT

LONDON — After hundreds of angry drivers shut down highways in England Tuesday in protest against green automobile taxes, and drivers and fishermen in France and Spain paralyzed their ports and roads in a fuel-tax protest, politicians began to signal Europe's ambitious emission-control policies may soon have to be abandoned.

While Europe has led the way in using tax incentives to encourage people to buy low-emission cars and to build carbon-neutral houses in order to meet Kyoto targets, it has become increasingly apparent that inflation-battered voters are no longer willing to go along.

Political leaders in Britain and France are seeking the reversal of tax policies designed to make polluting vehicles more expensive, with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and some British ministers calling on their own governments and the European Union to relax ecologically friendly taxes in order to give relief to citizens suffering from fast-rising food and fuel prices.

As Prime Minister Stephen Harper launches a European tour Wednesday to persuade leaders that Canada's greenhouse-gas policies are acceptable, he may find the gaps between their views have narrowed, as formerly ecologically assertive leaders react to rising voter backlash against green policies.

In Britain, drivers Tuesday held a mass traffic stoppage over a new surtax, introduced by Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a way to encourage people to buy more fuel-efficient cars, that would have raised the average family's vehicle taxes by $80, with higher-polluting vehicles paying more and very efficient ones being exempt.

After Tuesday's protest and days of anger in the news media, members of Mr. Brown's Labour Party government began to call for a reversal. Parliamentary Secretary Rob Marris complained in a radio interview that “Millions of people will be affected. … I am in favour of prospective green taxes to change people's decisions when they buy a car, but to tax them heavily on a car when it was bought seven years ago doesn't seem a good way to go and it will discredit green taxes.”

Officials close to Chancellor of the Exchequer Allistair Darling hinted strongly last night that he is considering a complete reversal of the tax and a reconsideration of other tax-led emissions policies.

“The Chancellor is listening to what people are saying about vehicle excise duty, as he has done on a number of occasions recently about tax rises,” said John Hutton, Mr. Brown's business secretary. “We are trying to get the balance right between encouraging choices to go green but not hammering people.”

A survey this month by the British polling firm Opinium showed that more than 70 per cent of voters are not willing to pay any higher taxes in order to combat climate change. There are indications that such opinions are increasingly prevalent across Europe as fuel and food prices rise and consumer-credit crises become widespread, making politicians increasingly out of step with their constituents on climate policy.

Mr. Sarkozy, joined by Spanish ministers yesterday, called on the EU to rescind part of the value-added tax it places on fuel, after fuel-tax strikes caused much of France to grind to a halt last week and resulted in clashes with riot police yesterday. Italian, Greek and Portuguese fishermen have threatened to join the protests later this week.

While the European fuel tax is not specifically tagged as green, environmental groups have praised high fuel taxation as an important part of Europe's emissions-reduction strategy, and warned that tax cuts on fuel will discourage industries and consumers from pursuing low-emission equipment and methods.

But it appears that the EU is already moderating its green stand on fuel in response to consumer pressure. While EU leaders had pledged last year to have 10 per cent of all road transportation fuelled with biofuel sources by 2020, a report from the European Commission yesterday backed away from that pledge, adding a new clause stating that “the target has never been to reach 10-per-cent biofuels at any price. It is 10-per-cent biofuels under strict conditions.”

Such reversals led the chief United Nations climate-change official to criticize Europe for losing its leading position on emission controls.

“The whole world gave a standing ovation when Europe announced last year its willingness to reduce its emissions by 20 per cent, and perhaps by 30 per cent if others [such as Canada] join in,” said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, according to the Agence France-Press news agency.

“But now this position is under a lot of pressure, especially from European Union industries. … I am not seeing this push yet.”

Mr. Brown had joined other European leaders two years ago in placing targeted taxes on large vehicles, fuel, plastic bags and air travel with the goal of reducing carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2050, in accordance with the Kyoto agreement. Experts had said that even with these policies, that target would be difficult to meet.

But European voters have begun to rebel against these measures. For example, a British tax incentive adopted last year to encourage people to build carbon-neutral homes, which would typically allow buyers to waive $20,000 in sales tax if the house is made to low-emissions standards, had been adopted by only three home buyers as of January. Builders said they had spurned the exemption because carbon-neutral practices could add 10 per cent to the cost of a house.

See: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080528.wgreen28/BNStory/International/home