Think the most powerful person in the U.S. government is President Obama? Think again. It reality it may be Environmental Protection Agency Chief Lisa Jackson. In the race for action on climate change and to curb man-made greenhouse gases that moves swifter than the pace of legislative change, many are turning to the EPA and the Clean Air Act, which empowered the federal government to enforce clean air standards to improve human health and living conditions.

If President Obama moves to classify carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant to be regulated by the EPA, as he pledged during the campaign, the change in policy could significantly alter the lives of Americans.

While the Clean Air Act has been legitimately and usefully used to combat ozone depletion, acid rain, pollution and smog, using it to curb greenhouse gases is about as good an idea as using a power drill to do brain surgery.

Changing Lives

Cap-and-trade regulations or a carbon tax are both costly ways to try to cut man-made global warming but using the blunt and heavy regulatory hand of the Clean Air Act will have a huge economic impact not just on large carbon emitters, but on the lifestyles President Obama pledged to protect in his inaugural address.

California Attorney General and potential gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown has already made clear the broad brush with which he would like to see the act used. “Ships, aircraft and industrial equipment burn huge quantities of fossil fuel, causing greenhouse gas pollution.  Because Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency continues to wantonly ignore its duty to regulate pollution, California is forced to seek judicial action,” Brown said.

The costs of compliance for this vision would be severe, particularly since technologies to capture and sequester carbon are far from being online. Those sectors that fall victim to severe Clean Air Act regulations will have no choice but to pass along the costs of compliance to consumers.

Higher Prices

This will surely cripple an already distressed airline industry, and travelers can expect to see more limited flights at a much higher cost. Regulated shipping fleets will impact trade and commerce. Commercial office buildings will be affected. Large-scale retailers and restaurants are huge consumers of energy and could also feel the pains of mandated emissions reduction. They, too, will have no choice but to pass their increased costs on to customers.

New automobiles will undoubtedly be mandated to be equipped with the strictest emission standards, driving the costs of a new car out of reach for many.
Low carbon-emitting natural gas will quickly become the favored fuel, and prices will rise correspondingly to demand. Because we are a carbon-emitting society, virtually all aspects of our daily lives could fall under the purview of the next EPA administration.

Will there be any environmental gain for all of the economic pain? Likely not, since greenhouse gas emissions are a global problem not bound by national boundaries. Despite the best efforts of industrial and business sectors to curb emissions, the Clean Air Act will have zero impact on greenhouse gases
emitted and migrating from developing nations like China and India. Until now, the EPA has wisely rejected use of the Clean Air Act to tackle greenhouse gases and has been able to safeguard Americans against these misguided efforts.

In July, former EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson explained the agency’s decision: “If our nation is serious about regulating greenhouse gases, the Clean Air Act is the wrong tool for the job.” While recent legal efforts by states and environmental groups could overturn the EPA’s decision, broad use of the Clean Air Act against greenhouse gases will likely be left up to Ms. Jackson.

Consult With Industry

If President Obama wants a meaningful energy and environment policy without putting our struggling economy into a tailspin, business and industry should be invited to the table to come up with a collaborative, market-based approach. There will also need to be global partnerships that focus on practical steps to promote cleaner, less-emitting technology for electricity generation from coal-fired plants, capturing and storing CO2, as well as reducing emissions from steel, aluminum production, and coal mining in developing and developed countries. Energy use and economic growth go hand in hand. Leaders that seek solutions through legislative fiat do not recognize this fact and will do permanent harm to both.  Read this post here.

Thorning is senior vice president and chief economist of the American Council for Capital Formation.

It is common for Australian academics to publicly express an opinion on climate change including in our newspapers; think Tim Flannery, Ian Lowe and more recently Barry Brook.

A couple of weeks ago Jon Jenkins, an Adjunct Professor at Bond University, had an opinion piece published by The Australian newspaper. The piece was critical of the accepted dogma on anthropogenic global warming with a focus on how global temperatures are recorded and ended with a comment on sustainable development: “Science is only about certainty and facts. The real question is in acknowledging the end of fossil fuels within the next 200 years or so: how do we spend our research time and dollars?

Do we spend it on ideologically green-inspired publicity campaigns such as emissions-trading schemes based on the fraud of the IPCC, or do we spend it on basic science that could lead us to energy self-sufficiency based on some combination of solar, geothermal, nuclear and renewable sources? The alternative is to go back to the stone age.”

Interestingly Bond University has a new name for its business and IT faculties, The Faculty of Business, Technology & Sustainable Development, but apparently didn’t like Professor Jenkins’ very public opinion on the subject of sustainable development.  For his opinion, Professor Jenkins received an official reprimand from the Bond University Registrar and then was informed last Friday that his adjunct status had been revoked.

No doubt he has contravened some rule or other at the University and no doubt this would have gone unnoticed if Professor Jenkins had a more popular opinion on these most politically charged subjects. See Jennifer’s post here.

Is Antarctica warming or cooling? Either way it proves global warming, according to climate modelers. In the 1990s, predictions of a greenhouse-warmed Antarctic abounded. As time passed, though, problems surfaced. Research paper after paper indicated that, other than the tiny Antarctica peninsula, the continent was in fact cooling—and had been doing so for many decades.

Skeptics pointed to this as a flaw in global warming theory. Not so fast, cried the climate modelers. They quickly spun a number of possible explanations, including ozone holes, ocean currents, and terrain that cut off Antarctica from the world’s warming. As the certainty in the cooling trend grew, so did their statements, until they eventually began stating that they had predicted a cooling trend all along. As the folks at RealClimate put it, “Doesn’t this contradict [global warming]? Not at all, because a cold Antarctica is just what calculations predict… and have predicted for the past quarter century.”

Cooling was thus cast as proof of global warming, not refutation. The media dutifully shifted their cameras from penguins to polar bears. The world was safe for Kyoto again. But now a new paper has appeared, saying that Antarctica is warming after all. Written by Eric Steig and Drew Shindell, the paper purports to prove that past evidence of cooling was incorrect. But doesn’t that contradict the models? Not if one can again rewrite history.

Speaking at a news conference today, Steig says, “We now see warming is taking place [in] accord with what models predict as a response to greenhouse gases.” In 2004, Shindell had something very different to say. That year he authored a paper that stated, “Surface temperatures [had] decreased significantly over most of Antarctica,” Shindell added, “This cooling is consistent with circulation changes”. He dedicated the rest of the paper to demonstrating that climate modeling “reproduces the vertical structure and seasonality of observed [cooling] trends.” Today, Shindell says, “It’s extremely difficult to think of any physical way that you could have increasing greenhouse gases not lead to warming at the Antarctic continent.”. One can only wonder if he kept a straight face.

Even the New York Times is playing along, saying that cooling “ran counter to the forecasts of computer climate models”. Memories are short. The real story here isn’t Antarctica. It’s the willingness to rationalize model results to fit any and all scenarios. To the modelers, their results are consistent with well, everything. Whether warmer or colder, flood or drought, more storms or less—it’s all proof that global warming is real and happening now.

This, of course, isn’t real science. A true theory require something called falsifiability—a set of conditions under which it can be disproven. So far, this is something the modelers have failed to give. It allows them to maintain a facade of unflappable certainty-- but it isn’t science. Read full post here.

Among researchers who work with actual climate data, skepticism is climbing. The modelers at least remain faithful. But as of now, their predictions are rather like the gypsy fortune teller who tells you, “You will live a long life—unless you die young.”

One year ago, I believed that man-made global warming was true, with temperatures rising dangerously due to increasing levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere. I also believed that a consensus of the international scientific community supported these conclusions.  I based these beliefs on information from the popular press, television and political leaders. Then I began some real research on the topic. I quickly discovered three critical things:

First, the Earth has experienced significant warming over the past 18,000 years that has nothing to do with human activity. Second, more recent temperature variations demonstrate that there is little or no correlation between levels of atmospheric CO2 and temperature. And third, there is no “consensus” among scientists on climate change.

To understand the science of climate change, you must first know that very accurate historic temperature data going back thousands of years are available through analysis of dead corals in ocean sediments as well as ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica. You must also understand what the Earth was like 18,000 years ago. Back then, our planet was at the peak of its most recent major ice age. At 18 degrees Celsius, average ocean surface temperatures were 5 degrees lower than they are today. Half of North America and Eurasia were covered by massive ice sheets thousands of feet thick and sea level was more than 400 feet lower than today. Then, the Earth began a dramatic warming and the ice age ended. The increase in the Earth’s temperatures over 18,000 years has not been steady. In just the past 1,000 years, average ocean surface temperatures have fluctuated between 22 degrees C and 25 degrees C. Today the average temperature is 23. Nine-hundred years ago, when CO2 levels were lower than today, global temperatures reached what is called the “medieval temperature maximum.” The world was warmer than today. Sea surface temperatures were 24 degrees C and the southern tip of Greenland, which had been settled by Vikings, was actually green and habitable with a European agricultural lifestyle. Unfortunately for the residents of Greenland, temperatures soon began to fall.

The Earth reached the depth of what historians call the “Little Ice Age” in about 1600 with an average ocean surface water temperature of 22 degrees C. With no help from humans, global temperatures rose significantly from 1600 to 1900. It is true that the levels of CO2 in our atmosphere have been rising over the past hundred years as global society has industrialized. But increased CO2 stimulates increased plant and tree growth. And there are many natural ways CO2 is created, including by the breathing of humans and animals. CO2 is essential to life and feedback loops are complex. Further, temperatures have not risen in correlation with the increase in CO2. Global temperatures actually decreased between 1940 and 1975, increased from 1976 through 1998 and remained relatively unchanged between 1998 and 2006. Since 2006, temperatures have declined.

This year record snowfall and low temperatures are being reported all over the world, from the Americas through Asia to Europe. In just a few examples, this winter the European nation of Slovenia set a record low temperature of minus 49 degrees C and travel in Madrid was hindered by the deepest snowfall in years. Record snowfall and winter storms have forced Minnesota officials to cancel an annual dog-sled race and closed schools and roads in Las Vegas. Even Malibu, Calif., and Houston, Texas, have experienced rare snowfall this winter. Lower temperatures have also led to an expansion in Alaska’s glaciers. Once you look beyond the political beliefs of the man-made global warming or climate change movement, the scientific truth is that there is no evidence of a correlation between atmospheric temperatures and CO2 levels.

The idea that there is a “consensus” among scientists supporting man-made global warming also is plainly untrue. According to the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Minority Staff Report released this winter, “more than 650 international scientists” who are considered experts in the atmosphere disagree with the global warming theory. This is 12 times the number of scientists who authored the pro-global warming “United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 Summary for Policymakers.” While no correlation has been demonstrated between CO2 levels and temperature, early data do suggest a strong correlation between changes in surface activity on the sun (sunspots) and temperatures on Earth.  So, it might be that the same forces that have guided the changes in Earth’s atmosphere for eternity are still at work and still beyond human control. Despite the science, many who advocate dramatic, state-dictated changes in our economy to reduce carbon levels view man-made global warming as “sacrosanct”—an indisputable, dogmatic fact. As we debate climate change legislation—which would have negative economic effects on all of us—it is time to move beyond belief to scientific understanding. See post here.

A deeply flawed new report will be cited ad nauseam by everyone from the BBC to Al Gore. The measures being proposed to meet what President Obama last week called the need to “roll back the spectre of a warming planet” threaten to land us with the most colossal bill mankind has ever faced. It might therefore seem peculiarly important that we can trust the science on which all the alarm over global warming is based, But nothing has been more disconcerting in this respect than the methods used by promoters of the warming cause over the years to plug some of the glaring holes in their scientific argument.

Another example last week was the much-publicised claim, contradicting all previous evidence, that Antarctica, the world’s coldest continent, is in fact warming up, Antarctica has long been a major embarrassment to the warmists. Al Gore and co may have wanted to scare us that the continent which contains 90 per cent of all the ice on the planet is heating up, because that would be the source of all the meltwater which they claim will raise sea levels by 20 feet.

However, to provide all their pictures of ice-shelves “the size of Texas” calving off into the sea, they have had to draw on one tiny region of the continent, the Antarctic Peninsula - the only part that has been warming. The vast mass of Antarctica, all satellite evidence has shown, has been getting colder over the past 30 years. Last year’s sea-ice cover was 30 per cent above average.

So it predictably made headlines across the world last week when a new study, from a team led by Professor Eric Steig, claimed to prove that the Antarctic has been heating up after all. As on similar occasions in the past, all the usual supporters of the cause were called in to whoop up its historic importance. The paper was published in Nature and heavily promoted by the BBC. This, crowed journalists such as Newsweek’s Sharon Begley, would really be one in the eye for the “deniers” and “contrarians”.

But then a good many experts began to examine just what new evidence had been used to justify this dramatic finding. It turned out that it was produced by a computer model based on combining the satellite evidence since 1979 with temperature readings from surface weather stations. The problem with Antarctica, though, is that has so few weather stations. So what the computer had been programmed to do, by a formula not yet revealed, was to estimate the data those missing weather stations would have come up with if they had existed. In other words, while confirming that the satellite data have indeed shown the Antarctic as cooling since 1979, the study relied ultimately on pure guesswork, to show that in the past 50 years the continent has warmed - by just one degree Fahrenheit.

One of the first to express astonishment was Dr Kenneth Trenberth, a senior scientist with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a convinced believer in global warming, who wryly observed “it is hard to make data where none exists”. A disbelieving Ross Hayes, an atmospheric scientist who has often visited the Antarctic for Nasa, sent Professor Steig a caustic email ending: “with statistics you can make numbers go to any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage.”

But it was also noticed that among the members of Steig’s team was Michael Mann, author of the “hockey stick”, the most celebrated of all attempts by the warmists to rewrite the scientific evidence to promote their cause. The greatest of all embarrassments for the believers in man-made global warming was the well-established fact that the world was significantly warmer in the Middle Ages than it is now. “We must get rid of the Mediaeval Warm Period,” as one contributor to the IPCC famously said in an unguarded moment. It was Dr Mann who duly obliged by getting his computer-model to produce a graph shaped like hockey stick, eliminating the mediaeval warming and showing recent temperatures curving up to an unprecedented high.

This instantly became the warmists’ chief icon, made the centrepiece of the IPCC’s 2001 report. But Mann’s selective use of data and the flaws in his computer model were then so devastatingly torn apart that it has become the most comprehensively discredited artefact in the history of science.
The fact that Dr Mann is again behind the new study on Antarctica is, alas, all part of an ongoing pattern. But this will not prevent the paper being cited ad nauseam by everyone from the BBC to Al Gore, when he shortly addresses the US Senate and carries on advising President Obama behind the scenes on how to roll back that “spectre of a warming planet”. So, regardless of the science, and until the politicians finally wake up to how they have been duped, what threatens to become the most costly flight from reality in history will continue to roll remorselessly on its way. Read more here.

Anthropogenic Global Warming became a religion to many people pro and against the current theories on climate change. We read daily articles in the blogosphere with exaggerated views on cooling and warming of the globe. Some say to world is about to freeze, others point to an imminent disaster due to rapid warming that has failed to happen so far. Some days ago I wrote on this page that some scientist were claiming in 1997, during the Super El Nino, that El Nino would become permanent and that in a matter of a decade we would experience El Nino events of 18 years instead of 18 months of duration. A decade has passed and we have a sequence of La Nina episodes. Time will tell who is right or wrong in this heated debate over our climatic future.

For that reason, personally, I believe every scientific approach and scientific professional should be read and respected, despite my agreement or not with the opinion presented. In this context, it was a shock to me to read Gavin Schmidt attacks against ICECAP’s Joseph D’Aleo on Real Climate webpage. Schmidt, a professional with a distinct and respectful biography, says D’Aleo is a “cherry-picker in chief” and goes further to state “scientific credibility is a hard won and fragile thing and he has none”. Mr. Gavin Schmidt’s biography and scientific opinions deserve my profound respect but his behavior and words towards D’Aleo are hateful, disgraceful and disgusting. Joseph D’Aleo credentials and work for many decades in the weather and climate forecasting do not allow any doubt on his credibility as a scientist. His name is highly known in the meteorological community in the United States and abroad, a merit that many others would like to enjoy. Furthermore, democracy allows him to question any theory he does not eventually agree. If anyone believe scientific thinking should always has only one theory discussed, as the proposed consensus on global warming, I recommend to take the next plane to Cuba, North Korea, Iran or any other place in the world without free flow of ideas and opinions.

There is a famous quote in the Latin world that declares: “It is not enough to the Caesar’s wife to be honest, she also must be seen as honest”. To Mr. Gavin Schmidt I would answer that it is not sufficient to be a respected scientist, but is also necessary to look and behave as one. The climate change debate deserves much more than smearing and false imputations. Let’s promote science and debate, Gavin, not a climate jihad. You have much more to offer than frivolous words.

Alexandre Aguiar / MetSul Weather Center (Brazil)

Tensions are rising between environmental groups and California’s Governor Schwarzenegger as he seeks to rein in environmental protection measures in an attempt to kickstart the economy. Schwarzenegger has built himself a reputation as a world leader on tackling climate change and has imposed some of the most stringent green regulations anywhere in the US since he took office.

However, his state’s budget crisis is now so severe that some reports claim the government will run out of money next month - a scenario that prompted Schwarzenegger to write to President-Elect Obama earlier this month, asking him to “Waive or greatly streamline National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) requirements consistent with our statutory proposals to modify the California Environment Quality Act (CEQA) for transportation projects”. CEQA demands that an environmental review is undertaken before any project requiring Government approval can go ahead.

The move was seized upon by green groups as evidence that the Governor was seeking to roll back important environmental protections in an attempt to accelerate state capital investment projects “All Californians care about the fiscal health of our state, but relaxing environmental law is not the way to do it,” responded Ann Notthoff, California advocacy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “California’s dedication to our workforce and investment in developing clean energy technology has built our economy into the eighth largest economy in the world. These are tough times, but it’s times like these that we need to work toward what’s best for California.”

Speaking at press conference this week, Schwarzenegger said that the relaxation of the environmental rules was needed to help tackle rising unemployment. “It’s about jobs, jobs, jobs,” he said. “That’s why I’ve been adamant about easing environmental regulations and other red tape in order to get the infrastructure going, to get infrastructure projects moving as quickly as possible.”

The Governor, currently locked in a stalemate with his legislature over his proposed budget, urged Democrat legislators to compromise and approve the budget despite the push to water down environmental rules. The request for Obama to waive the National Environmental Protection Act is not the first instance of Schwarzenegger seeking to streamline planning rules to water down environmental inspections. At the end of September, he signed bill SB 375, introducing rules to help plan suburban communities that produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, but also exempting home construction projects from the California Environmental Quality Act.

Schwarzenegger has traditionally been an ally of environmental groups, but his complaints about the economic effect of delays to infrastructural projects have been mounting recently. Up to 2,000 infrastructure projects are currently in danger of failing, he said, adding that the ability to rely on the government bonds market for extra capital is partly to blame for the financial mess. “The board that controls the state bank account has now pulled the plug on $3.8 billion of infrastructure loans; that means that thousands of infrastructure projects will be cancelled and that will have a devastating effect,” he said in December. California’s unemployment rate was at 8.4 per cent in November, and is estimated to reach nine per cent. See story here. H/T Benny Peiser.

Hoping to unravel the mysteries of human origin, anthropologist Louis Leakey sent three young women to Africa and Asia to study our closest relatives: It was chimpanzees for Jane Goodall, mountain gorillas for Dian Fossey and the elusive, solitary orangutans for Birute Mary Galdikas. Nearly four decades later, 62-year-old Galdikas, the least famous of his “angels,” is the only one still at it. And the red apes she studies in Indonesia are on the verge of extinction because forests are being clear-cut and burned to make way for lucrative palm oil plantations.

Galdikas worries many questions may never be answered. How long do orangutans live in the wild? How far do the males roam? And how many mates do they have in their lifetime? “I try not to get depressed, I try not to get burned out,” says the Canadian scientist, pulling a wide-rimmed jungle hat over her shoulder-length gray hair in Tanjung Puting National Park. She gently leans over to pick up a tiny orangutan, orphaned when his mother was caught raiding crops.

“But when you get up in the air you start gasping in horror; there’s nothing but palm oil in an area that used to be plush rain forest. Elsewhere, there’s burned-out land, which now extends even within the borders of the park.”

The demand for palm oil is rising in the U.S. and Europe because it is touted as a “clean” alternative to fuel. Indonesia is the world’s top producer of palm oil, and prices have jumped by almost 70 percent in the last year. But palm oil plantations devastate the forest and create a monoculture on the land, in which orangutans cannot survive. Over the years, Galdikas has fought off loggers, poachers and miners, but nothing has posed as great a threat to her “babies” as palm oil.

There are only an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 orangutans left in the wild, 90 percent of them in Indonesia, said Serge Wich, a scientist at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa. Most live in small, scattered populations that cannot take the onslaught on the forests much longer. Trees are being cut at a rate of 300 football fields every hour. And massive land-clearing fires have turned the country into one of the top emitters of carbon.

Tanjung Puting, which has 1,600 square miles, clings precariously to the southern tip of Borneo island. Its 6,000 orangutans - one of the two largest populations on the planet, together with the nearby Sebangau National Park - are less vulnerable to diseases and fires.  That has allowed them, to a degree, to live and evolve as they have for millions of years.

“I am not an alarmist,” says Galdikas, speaking calmly but deliberately, her brow slightly furrowed. “But I would say, if nothing is done, orangutan populations outside of national parks have less than 10 years left.” Read more here.