The comment period for the Environmental Protection Agency’s exploration of greenhouse gas regulation ended last Friday, with farmers lobbying furiously against the notion of a “cow tax” on methane, a potent greenhouse gas emitted by livestock. The New York Farm Bureau issued a statement last week (PDF) saying it feared that a tax could reach $175 per cow, $87.50 per head of beef cattle and upward of $20 for each hog.

Such a tax would represent a “massive hit on our industry here in New York,” said Peter Gregg, a spokesman for the farm bureau, in an interview. “You could take all of our cows together and they probably wouldn’t have the same effect on the atmosphere than the average traffic jam on the Tappan Zee Bridge,” he added. Farm officials from Texas to Alabama also sounded the alarm, and Mr. Gregg said that the response in New York among farmers was “almost a panic.”

The hysteria may be premature, however. The E.P.A. indeed issued an “advanced notice of proposed rulemaking” this summer that called for public comments on the idea of regulating greenhouse gas emissions from cars, as well as “stationary sources” - which, yes, would include cows and other livestock. The Department of Agriculture commented on the ease with which even small farms and ranches would run up against a proposed 100-ton limit on emissions:

Even very small agricultural operations would meet a 100-tons-per-year emissions threshold. For example, dairy facilities with over 25 cows, beef cattle operations of over 50 cattle, swine operations with over 200 hogs, and farms with over 500 acres of corn may need to get a … permit. It is neither efficient nor practical to require permitting and reporting of [greenhouse] emissions from farms of this size. Excluding only the 200,000 largest commercial farms, our agricultural landscape is comprised of 1.9 million farms with an average value of production of $25,589 on 271 acres. These operations simply could not bear the regulatory compliance costs that would be involved.

The idea of a cow tax aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions has been tried elsewhere - with similar reactions from the agricultural community. Plenty magazine notes, for example, that such taxes were proposed in New Zealand and Estonia, but were eventually shouted down.

But the E.P.A. may find new impetus for the idea with the arrival of a new administration that seems determined to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Methane has more than 20 times the heat-trapping potential of carbon dioxide, according to the E.P.A. (though it stays in the atmosphere for a shorter period). Read more here.

Christopher C. Horner has deconstructed global-warming alarmism before, but in “Red Hot Lies,” he focuses on how the global-warming industry, with huge money and power on the line, defends itself and perpetuates its beliefs. The senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute shows readers scientists, bureaucrats, journal editors and government agency administrators acting more like con men and mob enforcers than objective seekers of truth.

In the current global-warming lobby, Mr. Horner points out that leftists who want ever bigger government with hypertaxation and microregulation of every aspect of our lives find common cause with large companies that stand to make a bundle if alternative energy forms are mandated and/or one of the carbon-fuel-rationing schemes is adopted. (With billions in government research grants, there’s more money in alarmism than on the skeptical side, worth remembering when a skeptic is accused of being in the pocket of “Big Oil” - no alarmist is ever accused of being in the pocket of Big Research Grants.) These two groups are enabled by a compliant press that relishes sensational scare stories and by politicians ever eager for ways to show their virtue and ways to appear to be saving their constituents.

In his first book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism)” (Regnery, 2007) Mr. Horner parsed the fanciful claims of the global warmers. He built the case, infrequently encountered by the public, that the warming our planet has undergone over the past century is almost certainly nothing outside of the normal temperature variations the Earth has been undergoing since there’s been an Earth. Man’s activities may have played a part in this small temperature increase, but almost certainly a trifling part compared to variations in solar activity. There remain plenty of honest scientists who go to work every day with no other objective than to look for the truth, wherever it leads. Read more here.

China’s ice breaker Xuelong or “Snow Dragon” is blocked by thick ice around the Antarctica during her 25th expedition to Antarctica, on Nov. 24, 2008. An ice detection team was formed on Tuesday to search for new routes due to the thick and condensed ice that stopped the ice breaker. (Xinhua/Liu Yizhan)

Several members of the ice detection team walk on the ice to search for routes while China’s ice breaker Xuelong or “Snow Dragon” is blocked by thick ice around the Antarctica during her 25th expedition to Antarctica, on Nov. 24, 2008.

Snow and wind near the station have blocked the expedition team’s progress. The team has decided to transfer food and materials to the station by helicopter. Vegetables are among the most needed items, as the team relies on them for vitamins and nutrition. Weather monitoring stations predict strong wind and snow over the next few days around Zhongshan station and the area where the Snow Dragon ship is stuck. Workers say the vessel will continue toward an area where supplies can be easily transferred to the station, but they’ll have to rely on the helicopter for now.

The plan, at first glance, seems simplicity itself: by charging companies for the , the government hopes to encourage them to switch to cleaner andright to emit CO2 greener technologies. It is the latest development in a global campaign to save the planet by making polluters pay. We are witnessing the birth of the greatest and most complex commodity market the world has seen. Last year alone, permits worth more than 55 billion pounds were traded on the world’s carbon markets - but future trading volumes, if all goes global according to plan, will dwarf these.

Several such schemes are up and running around the world: Europe’s Emissions Trading Scheme, founded in 2005, is the biggest, but others are following in Australia, the US and even China. It sounds good news for everyone: governments, taxpayers, City boys and the environment. The reality is a great deal less rosy - indeed some of those closest to the carbon markets say openly that the system is doomed to failure.

Many carbon traders believe they could make the system work but fear the politicians who oversee it will never dare put a sufficiently high price on carbon emissions to make a difference. Those millions collected by the Treasury, for example, came mainly from UK power companies, and the cost will be added directly to our bills, as will the cost of annual CO2 permits in future. More worrying still, carbon trading shows no sign of achieving its purpose: CO2 emissions have increased, not slackened, since the first trading schemes. What, then, is the point? Good question, particularly for the 10,000 politicians, policy-makers and civil servants arriving this week in Poznan, Poland, for the latest round of global climate negotiations. They will consider a proposal to make carbon trading one of the world’s main tools for cutting greenhouse gas emissions after the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012.

The incongruity of proposing that a brand new financial market might be able to save the world - when faith in every other kind of financial market is tumbling - needs no underlining. But there are plenty of other reasons for scepticism, too. Jim Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Space Centre and a renowned critic of global measures to combat climate change, believes carbon trading is a “terrible” approach. “Carbon trading does not solve the emission problem at all,” he says. “In fact it gives industries a way to avoid reducing their emissions. The rules are too complex and it creates an entirely new class of lobbyists and fat cats.”

Even some of those involved in setting up the carbon markets fear they will fail in their principal aim of cutting carbon emissions. Liz Bossley of CEAG, a City consultant in carbon trading, may have helped the fledgling system to grow from nothing into a big business but she is frank about its limitations. “The fatal flaw is the politicians, because they set the cap which determines the supply of CO2 credits,” she says.  Read more here

Europe is shivering through an extreme cold snap. One of the coldest winters in the US in more than 100 years is toppling meteorological records by the dozen, and the Arctic ice is expanding. Even Australia has been experiencing unseasonable snow. But the stories about global warming have not stopped, not for a second. 

In May last year, The Sydney Morning Herald breathlessly reported that climate change had reduced the Southern Ocean’s ability to soak up carbon dioxide, claiming that as a result global warming would accelerate even faster than previously thought.  The story was picked up and repeated in a number of different journals around the region.  But this week the CSIRO suggested the exact opposite. “The new study suggests that Southern Ocean currents, and therefore the Southern Ocean’s ability to soak up carbon dioxide, have not changed in recent decades,” it said. This time the story got no coverage in the SMH, and was run on the ABC’s website as evidence the Southern Ocean was adapting to climate change. 

CSIRO oceanographer Stuart Rintoul, a co-author of the study, said it did not disprove global warming and he did not believe its lack of an alarmist tone was responsible for the poor coverage.  But the story is being pointed out as an example of media bias on global warming. Critics argue that the ABC and the Fairfax media are the worst offenders.  ABC board member Keith Windschuttle said yesterday the national broadcaster was in breach of its charter to provide a diversity of views. “The ABC and the Fairfax press rarely provide an opportunity for global warming sceptics to put their view,” Mr. Windschuttle said. “The science is not settled.  “We are seeing an increasing number of people with impeccable scientific backgrounds questioning part or whole of the story. I don’t believe the ABC has been reflecting the genuine diversity of the debate. Under its own act, the ABC is required to produce a diversity of views.” Bob Carter of James Cook University, one of the world’s best-known climate change sceptics, said there was no doubt Windschuttle was correct.  “With very few exceptions, press reporters commenting on global warming are either ignorant of the science matters involved, or wilfully determined to propagate warming hysteria because that fits their personal world view, or are under editorial direction to focus the story around the alarmist headline grab—and often all three,” Professor Carter said. 

National Climate Centre former head William Kininmonth said coverage of global warming had been hysterical and was getting worse, with a large public relations effort inundating the media with information from the alarmist side.  Read more here.

See another similar view here.

The problem with the “scientific consensus” on global warming is that participants in the debate are not objective. In other areas of science, it is assumed without question that researchers will follow the evidence wherever it leads with an open mind that is neutral as to the outcome. That is not the case with global warming. Unlike other scientific questions, the answer to whether humans are causing dangerous global warming has massive political implications for economic and social policy. Scientists are human beings with political and ideological preferences just like the rest of us. If a scientist has a strong preference for a certain political ideology, and that ideology will either be advanced or inhibited based on the results of his research, it is reasonable to view his interpretation of the data with an increased level of skepticism.

If anthropogenic global warming is accepted as real, it will produce wide ranging political and economic changes that have been long advocated by the political left. There will be massive tax increases and much stricter regulation of business. It should therefore be no surprise that almost all non-scientists who are on the political left insist that global warming is real and use it as an indictment of free market capitalism and the traditional American lifestyle based on consumerism. In the same way, almost all non-scientists who are on the political right insist that global warming is nothing more than liberal hysteria. On both sides, their conclusions are not based on an impartial evaluation of the data. Neither Al Gore nor Rush Limbaugh are competent to assess the accuracy of a sophisticated computer climate model.

Yet they both believe with absolute certainty. Flawed human beings will always tend to interpret information in such a way that it reinforces our pre-existing ideological preferences or self interest. Given the huge amounts of funding involved, professional standing in academia and personal political preferences, it would be foolish to assume that scientists are not subject to the same failing. I do not claim that scientists who support anthropogenic global warming are wrong, merely that it is unwise to massively reorder our society based on interpretations of extraordinarily complex data conducted by people who are not neutral as to the result. When scientists who believe in global warming stop calling colleagues who disagree with them “Flat Earthers” and “Neanderthals”, or insist that “the debate is over” and therefore it is illegitimate to question them, then I may be willing to listen to their arguments. Not until then.

Even though the computer models have never yielded a single result that matches observations, any criticism of the models is met with some sort of complex justification that is beyond the comprehension of the general public so it is readily accepted by the masses and those questioning the validity of the models are vilified by the promoters of the AGW agenda as skeptics and deniers who are in the pockets of big oil.

The sole support for AGW is the climate models, and the sole support for the climate models with respect to CO2 is the forcing parameter. There is no actual physical rational for the forcing parameter, because it was simply contrived from the assumption that observed warming of 0.6C was due entirely to a 100ppmv increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. There was never any verification of this parameter either by theory or observation. There is no justification for this parameter based on the physical properties of CO2, because the molecular configuration of the CO2 molecule precludes any significant effect from CO2 beyond a concentration of 300ppmv, and the current concentration is 386ppmv.

There is no justification for this parameter based on observation because the observed notch in the spectrum created by CO2 is virtually identical for both the Earth and Mars, and Mars has over 9 times the physical concentration of CO2 in its atmosphere than the Earth has in its atmosphere. Even the reference temperature value for the parameter is faulty because the maximum temperature increase possibly attributable to human CO2 emissions is 0.1C per century; not the 0.6C that is used in the forcing parameter.

There is only a single vibration mode of CO2 that resonates within the thermal spectrum radiated by the Earth (and Mars). This bend vibration resonates with a band of energy centred on a wavelength of 14.77microns (wavenumber 677cm-1) and the width of this band is quite narrow as depicted on the spectra from Earth and Mars.

It only takes a minute amount of CO2 to fully “capture” the energy at the resonant wavelength, and additional CO2 progressively captures energy that is further and further from the peak wavelength. At the 280ppmv CO2 preindustrial level used as reference in the forcing parameter, about 95% of the energy bandwidth that could possibly be captured by CO2 has already been captured. There is only 5% of this limited energy available within the confines of this potential “capture” band left to be captured. The greenhouse effect from CO2 is generally stated as 3C, so an additional 100ppmv above the 280ppmv level is only capable of generating a maximum 5% increase or 0.15C. Furthermore if this 0.15C increase has used up the full 5% of the remaining possible energy as the concentration reached 380ppmv, there is zero warming possible from further increases in CO2.

Unless all these points can adequately be addressed, the climate models based on this forcing parameter must be declared invalid, and all work based on these models as a reference for global warming mitigation must also be declared invalid. Read full detailed account here.

Let’s start your Monday morning off with a triple-snort. It was ratings sweeps week last week and NBC’s Today Show decided to dispatch its celebrity journalists to all the corners of the Earth to show us that the planet’s melting and it’s all our fault.

Ann Curry must have drawn the short straw because NBC decided to send the 52-year-old Today Show anchor - an inexperienced climber with less than three weeks to prepare - to race to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in time for a dramatic, end-of-the-week ascent. Why Kilimanjaro? It’s the pet cause of Al Gore and his alarmist acolytes who blame humans for purportedly retreating snow caps there. The inconvenient truth is, as University of Washington climate scientist Philip Mote, put it: “Kilimanjaro is a grossly overused mis-example of the effects of climate change.” But that wouldn’t have reeled in sensationalism-seeking viewers for sweeps week.

Curry was expected to produce fresh, new photographic and video evidence of the man-made snow cap calamity for NBC’s green initiative. But her much-hyped interview segments turned into tragi-comic medical updates and plaintive wails as she and her large crew were slowed by fatigue and altitude sickness. The sweeps stunt bombed. Curry moaned: “his is like climbing a Stairmaster for six hours a day with 20 pounds on your back,"Curry said in a telephone interview from her tent following Saturdays climb.” She’s hardly an experienced climber. The last mountain she scaled was half the size, and she did it while in college, said Curry, who turns 52 on Wednesday. She learned of the assignment only three weeks ago, giving her little time to train. “I miss my family,"said Curry, whose clothes were clammy and wet from a rainstorm Saturday. “And also warm showers. And I could really use a stiff drink.”

The exhausted NBC crew failed to summit and instead turned back with their 100 local tribal porters (nice of them to help the local economy, though those fired NBC/Weather Channel employees might question the expenditures). Curry will be back today to try and save face. But as Marc Sheppard points out in a must-read blow-by-blow of the disaster, NBC execs have major egg on theirs. The network put the green agenda ahead of its employees’well-being. And for what? Viewers were left as ill-informed as they were before Ann Curry took a single step. Read more here.