Harold Ambler
Update: Today UAH reported: Compared to seasonal norms, the coldest place in Earth’s atmosphere in June was over the Ross Ice Shelf, where Antarctic winter temperatures were as much as 5.37 C (about 9.67 degrees Fahrenheit) colder than seasonal norms.
The sea ice coverage around Antarctica over the weekend marked a record high, with the ice surrounding the continent measuring at 2.112 million square kilometers, according to an environmentalist and author who says the ice there has actually been increasing since 1979 despite continued warnings of global warming.
The new record was posted for the first time by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s online record, The Cryosphere Today, early Sunday morning and continues to grow an an alarming rate.
It’s not apparent if the record actually occurred on Friday or Saturday, says Harold Ambler on his blog, Talking About the Weather.
Ambler is a journalist and author of the book “Don’t Sell Your Coat: Surprising Truths About Climate Change.”
“The previous record anomaly for Southern Hemisphere sea ice area was 1.840 million square kilometers and occurred on December 20, 2007,” said Ambler. Meanwhile, he pointed out, global sea ice area on Sunday was standing at 0.991 million square kilometers above average, a figure he arrived at by adding anomalies for the North and South hemispheres.
While early models predicted the sea ice would decrease because of global warming, other models are showing that the opposite is happening around Antarctica, where sea ice growth is increasing.
“A freshening of the waters surrounding the southernmost continent as well as the strengthening of the winds circling it were both theorized as explanations for the steady growth of Antarctica’s sea ice during the period of satellite measurement,” said Ambler.
However, he pointed out that climatologists have discounted the importance and growth of the Antarctic sea ice.
According to Walt Meier, formerly of the National Snow and Ice Data Center and currently of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, most of the Antarctic sea ice does not survive between years, and it’s less significant to the Earth’s climate than is the ice around the Arctic.
Meanwhile, Ambler said that the growth of the Antarctic sea ice is providing “a public relations problem, at a minimum, for those warning of global warming’s menace.”
During the past 18 months, global sea ice “has seen its most robust 18-month period of the last 13 years, maintaining, on average, a positive anomaly for an 18-month period for the first time since 2001,” he wrote.
In addition, Ambler said, the South Pole’s temperature has been dropping over the past 40 years.
NOTE: Mark Serreze of NSIDC here says the record ice is due to global warming
In an effort to win public support for the EPA’s recently proposed regulations to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants an estimated 30 percent by 2030, the White House has begun a campaign in which it claims the carbon dioxide “pollution” causes children to get asthma.
“The next version of the White House claim will have puppies and kittens in it too,” David W. Kreutzer, Ph.D., a Heritage Institute research fellow in energy economics and climate change, told WND, treating the Obama administration argument with derision.
“Carbon dioxide has nothing to do with any health effects directly.”
Kreutzer explained that when the issue is pressed directly, top Obama administration “get a little bit more honest” and shift their ground to argue that even if carbon dioxide is not a toxic gas, it is still the indirect cause serious health problems such as asthma.
“What the White House is really maintaining is that when we get more carbon dioxide, we get more ozone, and the ozone causes asthma. Or, if more carbon dioxide causes global warming, then spring will last longer and we will have more pollen. Or, by using less coal we will have reduced particulate emissions and the particulate emissions cause asthma.”
Marc Morano, the executive director of Climate Depot, agrees.
“This is pure propaganda,” Morano told WND.
“The White House is trying to demonize carbon dioxide as a pollutant. The idea is to convince people that carbon dioxide somehow causes asthma and puts children in hospitals.”
Morano said Obama “has shifted the debate to children and asthma because he knows the public is not buying global warming.”
Both Kreutzer and Morano insist the EPA already has ample regulations that have been enforced for decades to remove toxic particles from the air to a level the EPA considers safe for health regardless of cost.
“The whole point of this asthma campaign is for the White House to get sick children on TV,” Kreutzer insisted.
“Even if you believed the most dire predictions of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the EPA’s proposed regulations would not reduce enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make any measurable impact on the climate.”
Morano contends there is a difference between regulating the amount of carbon dioxide in the air and regulating pollutants.
“We have largely solved classical air pollution over the past few decades,” he noted.
“The coal-burning power plants coming on line today are vastly cleaner than they were a generation ago. But the Obama EPA isn’t regulating pollution with these new rules. They are regulating carbon dioxide, not carbon.”
He pointed out that carbon dioxide, a miniscule trace gas in the atmosphere, is vital to photosynthesis and life on earth. It is a gas everyone exhales, and plants use it for food.
“There is nothing inherently toxic or unhealthy in carbon dioxide,” he said.
Still, Morano cautioned the White House change of emphasis to health themes is “effective propaganda.”
“People say, ‘I don’t know if I buy global warming, but I want to clean up the air,’” he noted.
“As long as the White House can manage to convince the American people that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, identical to smog, soot and toxic air particulates, the shift of the EPA debate from climate change directly to asthma, lung disease and other health care issues will persuade some normally intelligent people, including generally credible news editors on television.”
White House ‘war on asthma’
The evidence is abundant that the Obama administration has shifted into high gear a campaign to convince the public the EPA carbon dioxide regulations are necessary because carbon dioxide “pollution” increases asthma that impacts disproportionately “vulnerable” groups, including children, the elderly, the poor and “communities of color.”
In a June 6 press release the White House argued, “In the past three decades, the percentage of Americans with asthma has more than doubled, and climate change is putting those Americans at greater risk of landing in the hospital.”
The White House press release went on to state that the effects of climate change “impact the most vulnerable Americans - putting the elderly, kids, and people already suffering from burdensome allergies, asthma, and other illnesses at greater risk.”
To make sure the full emotional impact of the asthma argument was appreciated, the White House press release concluded as follows:
The President believes we have a moral obligation to leave our children a planet that’s not irrevocably polluted or damaged. While no single step can reverse the effects of climate change, we must take steady, responsible action to cut carbon pollution, protect our children’s health, and begin to slow the effects of climate change so that we leave behind a cleaner, more stable environment. That’s why the President put forward the Climate Action Plan last year and earlier this week, the Environmental Protection Agency released a vital component of that plan common sense carbon pollution standards for existing power plants.
The press release linked to a seven-page White House-authored paper that repeated the argument, claiming carbon-dioxide emissions cause climate change that in turn causes children to develop asthma.
“We have a moral obligation to leave our children a planet that’s not irrevocably polluted or damaged. The effects of climate change are already being felt across the Nation,” the White House report claimed in the first sentences.
The second paragraph made the causal link argument: “Climate change, caused primarily by carbon pollution, threatens the health and well-being of Americans in many ways, from increasing the risk of asthma attacks and other respiratory illnesses to changing the spread of certain vector-borne diseases.”
Then came a statement designed to touch the reader’s emotions: “Certain people and communities are especially vulnerable to the health effects of climate change, including children, the elderly, those with chronic illnesses, the poor, and some communities of color.”
The White House campaign to blame carbon-dioxide emissions for causing asthma was kicked off in President Obama’s weekly address May 31, delivered at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington.
“Hi, everybody. I’m here at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., visiting with some kids being treated here all the time for asthma and other breathing problems,” the president said. “Often, these illnesses are aggravated by air pollution. pollution from the same sources that release carbon and contribute to climate change. And for the sake of all our kids, we’ve got to do more to reduce it.”
EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, in a press release announced the agency’s “Clean Power Plant.”
“About a month ago, I took a trip to the Cleveland Clinic,” she said. “I met a lot of great people, but one stood out - even if he needed to stand on a chair to do it. Parker Frey is 10 years old. He’s struggled with severe asthma all his life. His mom said despite his challenges, Parker’s a tough, active kid - and a stellar hockey player. But sometimes, she says, the air is too dangerous for him to play outside. In the United States of America, no parent should ever have that worry.
McCarthy proceeded to claim the EPA’s plan to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants would “deliver climate and health benefits up to $90 billion dollars,” while avoiding up to 100,000 asthma attacks and 2,100 heart attacks in the first year alone.
What causes asthma?
Contrary to Obama administration assertions that carbon dioxide causes asthma, the professional health care community appears stumped when asked directly to explain what causes it.
“Asthma is very common, affecting more than 26 million people in the United States, including almost 7 million children. No one knows for sure why some people have asthma and others don’t,” the website of the American College of Allergy, Asthma, & Immunology notes.
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” Daniel J. Boorstin
CNS News Reporting More of Secretary of Flat Earth ..er...State John Kerry’s lies:
Secretary of State John Kerry told an audience in Mexico on Wednesday that temperatures in Europe and in Vietnam were “unprecedented” and broke “every record that’s ever been seen.” However, although it was hot that day, he was off the mark.
Speaking at an environmentally-friendly technology event in Mexico City, Kerry said he had just caught a CNN weather report in his hotel and “saw the temperatures around the world right now.”
“Thirty-four degrees centigrade [Celsius] in Vietnam today, in May. Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-two, thirty-three in places all around Europe,” he said.
“Unprecedented. Breaks every record that’s ever been seen.” The hottest places in Europe in the heat of the day on Wednesday, according to weatheronline.co.uk included parts of Russia, Germany, central Italy and southern Turkey, all in the 29-32C (84-89F) range.
The highest temperature ever recorded in European Russia was 44C (111.2F) in 2010; in Germany was 40.2C (104.4F) in 1983 and 2003; in Italy was 48.5C (119.3F) in 1999; and in Turkey was 48.8C (119.8F) in 1993.
Kerry again dragged out the multi-falsified “97% of Scientist.” He calls us flat-earthers?
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Another clueless local ‘Wiki’ expert who challenges anything posted questioning CAGW or the energy bind we are entering does a weekly letter to the editor, playing amateur climatologist. This was my response to him in a letter along side my regular bi-weekly column.
Temperature records are a far more complicated issue than you might ever imagine. I have been in the business for over 40 years. We use climate data every day. We have all the old data sets. We used them to correlate with factors like El Nino/La Nina, ocean and solar cycles, volcanism, and man’s effects like urbanization to make seasonal and longer-term forecasts for paying clients.
So we are very sensitive to changes in the data sets. One would think the old data was sacrosanct and remained the same but that is not the case by any means. Back in 1990, NOAA released its first US data set compilation, USHCN (US Historical Climate Network). It had adjustments for a factor, urbanization, that my early mentor and the father of climatology, Helmut Landsberg suggested was essential. We all know cities are warmer than rural areas at night as they tend to hold their heat.
Winds during the day mix the air and the difference becomes small. It was regarded in 1990 as the premium data set for the world. The global data was not adjusted for urban warmth because records about the location of the precise station locations (called metadata) were not available. In the late 1990s, after the super El Nino of 1998, while the global data was showing a century long warming as cities dominated, the US data had a sine wave with warming to 1940 cooling to 1978, warming to 1998 but no long term trend. However, the warming of the 1930s dominated. James Hansen of NASA (which uses NOAA data) said back then “The US has warmed during the last century but the warming hardly exceed natural variability. Indeed, the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year 1934” (1.1F warmer than 1998).
When asked why the US was not warming, a note was made on the NASA site that the US was only 1.6% of the globe and regional variances were not unreasonable. But this inconvenient fact caused the politicians who hold the budgetary purse strings to urge the scientists to make the data sets more consistent. The obvious solution was to remove the US urban adjustment and do some blending (called homogenization), which they did in 2008. The claim was the blending would improve the urban issue, but in fact it did more to contaminate the more accurate rural data. They also, without any explanation cooled off the prior warm peak in the 1930s with every new version (we are now four versions later). 1998 is now 0.13F warmer that 1934.
This past winter as record cold dominated, another quick fix was implemented that resulted in a warming for the US and most states. Maine was an egregious example. The change in Maine’s temperature record from the dataset switch is dramatic. The data as of February showed a slight cooling trend of negative 0.03 degrees per decade since 1895. The new data set shows a substantial 0.23 degrees per decade warming. They cooled off the early 1900s for Maine by over 4F!!!
Fortunately we have the raw data set. It does not have the homogenization and other adjustments but is subject to urbanization warming. And here it shows the cold season from October to March was the coldest since 1911/12 - over a century ago. HCN stands for Historical Climate Network (1221 mostly stable stations with the longer histories).
Note the 60 year cycle that matches the ocean and solar cycles. These natural cycles suggest it is all downhill from here (a story for another day). There is no evidence of the linear warming from increasing CO2, the theory demands.
This next chart is from the nation’s foremost state climatologist (John Christy) and was used in the U.S. Senate and House testimony. The state record highs and lows are not altered because every TV station and forecast company and local NWS has them listed and mayhem would ensue if the record highs and lows were changing every year. The total number of 90F and 100F days has been declining since the 1930s. The all-time state records shows what we believe is the real temperature trends the past 120 years. 23 of the 50 record highs were set in the 1930s and 38 before 1960. There have been more record lows than highs since the 1940s. Our climate has been unusually benign in recent decades despite the hyping of extremes.
Enlarged
Dr. Charles Battig, VA Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment
Separation of church and state has long been a fundamental part of the U.S. Constitution, as it prohibits the imposition of a federal religion. Various interpretations of this principle as stated in the First Amendment to the Constitution have been employed by those wishing to abolish any and all religious expression in federal and state affairs. Vociferous outcries and legal challenges await those attempting the mere reference to our Judeo-Christian heritage within the confines of any branch of government.
Yet a new religion has been imposed upon the citizens of this country. It emanates from the highest federal levels; it has found its voice in the White House bully pulpit. It is promulgated with a religious fervor reminiscent of the fictional Elmer Gantry. This religion is complete with warnings and admonitions of coming days of doom for mankind lest the new tenets be rejected by anyone.
In this era of electronic communications, this new religion’s commandments have been dispersed via the internet, which obviated the inconvenience of another trip to Mt. Sinai. The 2014 tablets bear the title of the third “National Climate Assessment (NCA)” report.
At over 800 pages, this federal document of secular religion based on human guilt and the presumptive sin of having eaten excessively of fossil fuel outstrips the Ten Commandments by a mile in word count. Man-made carbon dioxide has been targeted by the high priests of the profane as some sort of original sin staining the purity of the virgin Earth, thereby bringing the wrath of devil-like climate change in punishment. Heat waves, excessive rainfall, floods, ocean rise, crop failures are retributions awaiting mankind should the new Federal religion be violated by human-caused carbon dioxide emanations.
Lacking a true Biblical source, the high priests of this federal climate religion have relied on their man-made computers to foretell these days of doom, should mankind not renounce this essential, life-giving gas...carbon dioxide. The reality of years of climate observations has not supported the prophecies of these priestly climate computers. Two federal agencies, NOAA and NASA, both confirm that there has been no increase in global temperature for the past 17 years, even as atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased over 9 percent. Risking running afoul of Voltaire’s admonition - “It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong” - McKitrick, Spencer, and others have published the failures of these foundational computer engines of the new federal climate dogma. Heck, even the ancient Oracle at Delphi had a better track record of forecasting, albeit with the benefit of a few whiffs of earthly hydrocarbon gases, including ethylene.
Post-normal science has been enlisted to aid the weak dogmatic foundations of the NCA. The halls of federally funded academia overflow with a cornucopia of papers supporting the climate catastrophes prophesied in the federal climate dogma. These advocates would have one believe that the climate has never wandered far from some fictional present-day perfect weather that exists in their climate models.
A most perplexing question for these alarmists is “When has the climate not changed?”
What about that “old time religion,” or at least that old time science? Traditional science as exemplified by Karl Popper and Richard Feynman should be good enough for anyone. If the facts do not match the theoretical predictions, go back to square one, and find a different theory that can stand the test of reality and your best efforts to disprove it. The NCA relies on fear and unproved claims of future disasters, and computer fabrications. Climate change is happening now; it is going to get worse; it will be a catastrophe...this is not the language of traditional science, it is the lingua franca of the political ruling class, crony capitalists, and Gaia cultists.
Is there even such a thing as a climate? Is there a normal climate, and for whom, where, and at what time? The father of chaos theory pondered these questions. Meteorologist Edward Lorenz predates post-normal science, and his writings reflect the thought processes of traditional science. From his 1964 paper: “In the special case of the atmosphere, theory alone does not tell us that a climate exists. Recourse to observations is not much more enlightening; the weather of the current century does seem to resemble the weather of the past century, but the weather of the past 12,000 years presumably does not resemble that of the previous 12,000 years, when an ice age flourished. Next, even if a climate does exist, there is no a priori reason why this climate should be unique.”
From Lorenz’s 1966 paper:
Failure to produce perfect weather forecasts at any range of prediction must be ascribable to one or more of three general causes:
1. The atmospheric system is not deterministic; the present and past states of the atmosphere and its environment do not uniquely determine the state at all future times.
2. Observations are insufficient: regardless of whether the atmospheric system is deterministic, the observed present and past states of those portions of the atmosphere and its environment which are observed do not uniquely determine the future states.
3. Forecasting procedures are inadequate; presently used techniques do not duplicate the behavior of the atmosphere and its environment.
Nearly 50 years later, the true scientists of climatology have not yet fully resolved these basic questions. Post-normal science has given us “abby normal” science, as Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein might have expressed it, and placed it in the corpus of the NCA. The Federal NAC is a political corpse of might-have-been-science, with an “abby normal” brain. It fails as science and it even fails as credible dogma.
Give me that old time religion, and give me that old time science.
Charles Battig, M.D., Piedmont Chapter president, VA-Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment (VA-SEEE). His website is www.climateis.com.
CFACT
Update: By now you probably are aware the scientists we reported on earlier has come under enormous pressure and received threats and has backed off his involvement in GWPF, a group hoping to bring balance to climate science.
In an e-mail to GWPF, Lennart Bengtsson has declared his resignation of the advisory board of GWPF. His letter reads :
“I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF. I had not expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc. I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expecting anything similar in such an original peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently it has been transformed in recent years.
Under these situation I will be unable to contribute positively to the work of GWPF and consequently therefore I believe it is the best for me to reverse my decision to join its Board at the earliest possible time.”
See the reason why the big push back from enviros trying to save their failing agenda in the post on the billions at stake. Unfortunately it comes with help from governments and universities. I know many in private industry and in the government, universities and in the labs that are heavily funded who have skepticism but are unable to speak their minds. There are many examples of those discovered to be skeptics actually being ousted. Follow the money. The risk is great to you if they succeed. Global depression and loss of jobs and unaffordable energy at a time when we are sitting on the world’s greatest supply. The story is the same in the democratically controlled statehouses and cities. They are all failing. They live in a echo chamber- only allowing themselves to listen from people who are ideologues like them that haven’t a clue about what will happen in their new world.
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Just a few days ago:
You wouldn’t know it from watching the news, but there is something big going on in climate science.
As large institutions such as President Obama’s National Climate Assessment, or the UN IPCC, issue reports laden with fear, but short on science, scientists with a conscience are concluding they can no longer be a part of them.
One by one, the world’s most reputable scientists are concluding that they just can’t have their names associated with wildly unscientific claims and propaganda calculated to promote hysteria.
They are swelling the ranks of the thousands of scientists who have already come out against the global warming scare.
One very big name to openly dissent is Prof. Dr. Lennart Bengtsson, the former Director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology.
As Dr. Bengtsson points out, real world observations of temperature do not support the climate computer models upon which the whole warming shebang is predicated.
Contrary to what we are constantly being told by the warming-compliant media, there has been very little temperature change, nothing unusual about the weather, and the models call for higher temperatures than have actually occurred. There has been no meaningful temperature increase since the turn of the millennium.
Scientists like Dr. Bengtsson are choosing the scientific method over politics. If it can’t be verified through observation, they will not endorse it.
Whose scientific conscience will take them off the warming team next?
Alan Caruba, CFACT
April seems to be the month in which the Supreme Court devotes itself to decisions that have no basis in real science and can do maximum damage to the economy. Invariably, the cases are brought against the Environmental Protection Agency and are decided in its favor.
In April 2007, the Court decided that carbon dioxide, the second most essential gas for all life on the planet, was “a pollutant”, the definition the EPA had applied to it in order to regulate it. Now comes word that the Court had concluded that the EPA may regulate power-plant emissions that blow across state lines as per a 2011 regulation, the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule. Not content having put nearly 150 or more coal-fired power plants out of commission, the Court’s rule now gives them the authority to do the same thing to about a thousand power plants in the eastern and western regions of the U.S. that will have to adopt new pollution controls or reduce operations.
In effect, the Court has just agreed to a regulation that represents a major increase in the cost of electricity in 28 states deemed to be polluting the air in those around them. The EPA’s claims that this will save lives they attribute to the alleged pollution is as bogus as all the rest of their claims, the purpose of which is to undermine the nation’s economy in every way it can.
James M. Taylor, the Heartland Institute’s Senior Fellow for Environmental Policy, said of Tuesday’s decision that, “It is a shame that the U.S. Supreme Court continues to empower EPA to issue nonsensical interpretations of statutes with the primary goal of amassing more money and power.”
Every day the press is filled with reports of environmental groups suing to ensure that no new providers of electricity can be built. The Environmental Protection Agency has instituted all manner of regulations intended to shut down coal-fired plants and they are based on the total lie that carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” are causing the Earth to warm. The science cited is entirely without merit and the Earth is cooling, not warming, and has been for the past 17 years.
As winters grow colder, it is putting a tremendous demand on the nation’s electrical grid. In a recent commentary, Steve Goreham, the author of The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania, quoted Philip Moeller, Commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, as saying that “the experience of this past winter indicates that the power grid is now already at the limit.”
“EPA policies,” said Goreham, “such as the Mercury and Air Toxics rule and the Section 316 Cooling Water Rule, are forcing the closure of many coal-fired plants, which provided 39% of U.S. electricity last year. American Electric Power, a provider of about 10% of the electricity to eastern states, will close almost one quarter of the firm’s coal-fired generating plants in the next 14 months. Some 89% of the power scheduled for closure was needed to meet electricity demand in January. Not all of this capacity has replacement plans.”
Before Obama was elected, coal-fired plants provided 50% of the nation’s electricity.
What is the Obama Administration’s response to this? It is pouring billions into the wind and solar energy sector that provides barely 1% of all the electricity used in the nation and can never begin to replace traditional plants.
In an April 25 letter to the House Ways and Means Committee, the American Energy Alliance, expressed opposition to the Wind Production Tax Credit: “The PTC has been a failure for taxpayers and ratepayers. In exchange for tens of billions of dollars in handouts to wind producers, the states with the highest wind production have seen their electricity rates increase nearly five times faster than the national average. In fact, states with at least 7% wind power have seen their electricity rates increase at an average of 17.4% over the last 5 years compared to an increase of only 3.5% for the U.S. as a whole” Why, indeed, are taxpayers being required to sustain providers of wind power that would not be able to stay in business otherwise?
In addition to the fact that you cannot manufacture anything without the use of electricity, a deliberate effort is being made to ensure that vast sections of the nation will not be able to receive electricity to warm homes and businesses in the winter and cool them in the summer. Simply put, people will die for lack of the warmth and coolness needed, not from the phony pollution the EPA cites.
This is the heart of an environmental agenda that views the human population as “a cancer” that needs to be vastly reduced. This agenda is directed from the United Nations and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that falsely claims that humans have a vast impact on the climate. They do not. Human activity barely, if at all, affects the climate. What does? The Sun! Add in factors that include the Earth’s oceans and volcanic activity, and it should be obvious that everyone is being targeted for extinction.
In an article, “The EPA’s Science Problem, Arnold Ahlert noted in early April that, “In a stunning admission, EPA administrator Gina McCarthy revealed to House Science, Space and Technology Committee chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) that the agency neither possesses, nor can produce, all the scientific data used to justify the rules and regulations they have imposed on Americans via the Clean Air Act. In short, science has been trumped by the radical environmental agenda.”
The Obama Administration has done everything in its power to restrict and slow down access and use of America’s huge energy reserves, enough to ensure all the electrical power we will need for hundreds of years to come. The same policy applies to transportation’s petroleum needs. Oil and gas production on federal lands is down 40% from levels 10 years ago.
According to the Institute for Energy Research, “North America has enough oil to fuel every passenger car in the U.S. for 430 years, enough natural gas to provide the U.S. with electricity for 575 years, and enough coal to provide electricity for about 500 years.” And that’s based on known reserves. They are, however, of little use if the Obama administration continues its efforts to restrict access to them.
In an August 2013 Washington Times commentary, Ben Wolfgang warned that the EPA, the Energy Department, and other agencies’ “working group” quietly raised “their estimated social cost of carbon from $21 per ton of emissions to $35 per ton.” The upshot was that, “The dramatic increase greatly alters cost-benefit analyses offered by the EPA when floating rules, allowing the agency to claim that billions of dollars will be saved over a period of decades as a result of proposed limits on power plant emissions, tougher fuel economy standards and other steps.”
The “social cost” is a complete invention, a fiction without any basis in fact. It is a device to further restrict access and use of all fuel sources.
Americans had better wake up to the fact that their government - the Obama Administration - is doing everything in its power to cut off the provision of electrical power and access to transportation fuel that it can. And the Democrats in Congress, particularly Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, are doing everything to advance this agenda by blocking any legislation generated in the House to counter this agenda.
In November, the midterm elections offer an opportunity to elect enough Republicans to secure control of the Senate and increase its strength in the House.
Let me end with the good news. Despite what the enemies of energy are doing, the energy sector - coal, oil, and natural gas - in the decade ahead is going to grow, going to generate many new jobs, and is going to help dig us out of the huge government debt that too much borrowing and spending has generated.
Roger Pielke Jr.
There should be no censoring of those who critique the claims of AGW. Roger Pielke, Jr. writes,
“More specific to academia, in 1975 Yale University published a report on freedom of expression (PDF) which was adopted as formal university policy and is often referred to as a authoritative statement in support of freedom of expression. Here is an excerpt of some of its eloquent and forceful prose (emphases added):
The primary function of a university is to discover and disseminate knowledge by means of research and teaching. To fulfill this function a free interchange of ideas is necessary not only within its walls but with the world beyond as well. It follows that the university must do everything possible to ensure within it the fullest degree of intellectual freedom. The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable. To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily also deprives others of the right to listen to those views.
By Steve Goreham
Originally published in Communities Digital News. Reprinted with author Permission.
Americans take electricity for granted. Electricity powers our lights, our computers, our offices, and our industries. But misguided environmental policies are eroding the reliability of our power system.
Last winter, bitterly cold weather placed massive stress on the US electrical system-and the system almost broke. On January 7 in the midst of the polar vortex, PJM Interconnection, the Regional Transmission Organization serving the heart of America from New Jersey to Illinois, experienced a new all-time peak winter load of almost 142,000 megawatts.
Eight of the top ten of PJM’s all-time winter peaks occurred in January 2014. Heroic efforts by grid operators saved large parts of the nation’s heartland from blackouts during record-cold temperature days. Nicholas Akins, CEO of American Electric Power, stated in Congressional testimony, “This country did not just dodge a bullet - we dodged a cannon ball.”
Environmental policies established by Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are moving us toward electrical grid failure. The capacity reserve margin for hot or cold weather events is shrinking in many regions. According to Philip Moeller, Commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, “...the experience of this past winter indicates that the power grid is now already at the limit.”
EPA policies, such as the Mercury and Air Toxics rule and the Section 316 Cooling Water Rule, are forcing the closure of many coal-fired plants, which provided 39 percent of US electricity last year. American Electric Power, a provider of about ten percent of the electricity to eastern states, will close almost one-quarter of the firm’s coal-fired generating plants in the next fourteen months. Eighty-nine percent of the power scheduled for closure was needed to meet electricity demand in January. Not all of this capacity has replacement plans.
In addition to shrinking reserve margin, electricity prices are becoming less stable. Natural gas-fired plants are replacing many of the closing coal-fired facilities. Gas powered 27 percent of US electricity in 2013, up from 18 percent a decade earlier. When natural gas is plentiful, its price is competitive with that of coal fuel.
But natural gas is not stored on plant sites like coal. When electrical and heating demand spiked in January, gas was in short supply. Gas prices soared by a factor of twenty, from $5 per million BTU to over $100 per million BTU. Consumers were subsequently shocked by utility bills several times higher than in previous winters.
On top of existing regulations, the EPA is pushing for carbon dioxide emissions standards for power plants, as part of the “fight” against human-caused climate change. If enacted, these new regulations will force coal-fired plants to either close or add expensive carbon capture and storage technology. This EPA crusade against global warming continues even though last winter was the coldest US winter since 1911-1912.
Nuclear generating facilities are also under attack. Many of the 100 nuclear power plants that provided 20 percent of US electricity for decades can no longer be operated profitably. Exelon’s six nuclear power plants in Illinois have operated at a loss for the last six years and are now candidates for closure.
What industry pays customers to take its product? The answer is the US wind industry. Wind-generated electricity is typically bid in electrical wholesale markets at negative prices. But how can wind systems operate at negative prices?
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The answer is that the vast majority of US wind systems receive a federal production tax credit (PTC) of up to 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour for produced electricity. Some states add an addition credit, such as Iowa, which provides a corporate tax credit of 1.5 cents per kw-hr. So wind operators can supply electricity at a pre-tax price of a negative 3 or 4 cents per kw-hr and still make an after-tax profit from subsidies, courtesy of the taxpayer.
As wind-generated electricity has grown, the frequency of negative electricity pricing has grown. When demand is low, such as in the morning, wholesale electricity prices sometimes move negative. In the past, negative market prices have provided a signal to generating systems to reduce output.
But wind systems ignore the signal and continue to generate electricity to earn the PTC, distorting wholesale electricity markets. Negative pricing by wind operators and low natural gas prices have pushed nuclear plants into operating losses. Yet, Congress is currently considering whether to again extend the destructive PTC subsidy.
Capacity shortages are beginning to appear. A reserve margin deficit of two gigawatts is projected for the summer of 2016 for the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), serving the Northern Plains states. Reserve shortages are also projected for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) by as early as this summer.
The United States has the finest electricity system in the world, with prices one-half those of Europe. But this system is under attack from foolish energy policies. Coal-fired power plants are closing, unable to meet EPA environmental guidelines. Nuclear plants are aging and beset by mounting losses, driven by negative pricing from subsidized wind systems. Without a return to sensible energy policies, prepare for higher prices and electrical grid failures.
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.