By Paul Driessen, CFACT
We are not weighing in on the climate debate. We are not opining on whether the world’s climate is changing, at what pace or due to what causes, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Shapiro insisted on announcing the SEC’s new “interpretive guidance” on climate change.
The Commission’s two Republican members objected that the Obama Administration was using the Commission to promote its global warming and renewable energy agenda (along with the EPA, NASA, Defense and Interior Departments and others). It’s true, but irrelevant.
Environmentalists and “ethical investing” groups had pressured the Commission for years to require corporate disclosure on climate matters. Now, as the SEC steps in, the Copenhagen treaty negotiations have collapsed in disarray. Cap-and-trade has bogged down over senators’ fears of further damage to the economy and their reelection chances. The Environmental Protection Agency has decreed that plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide is a “dangerous pollutant,” because senators are increasingly reluctant to micromanage the economy, companies and families, but the regulations’ forward trajectory is uncertain.
Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph and the ClimateGate email scandals have metastasized into a tsunami of revelations that have besmirched the IPCC’s credibility and its role as dominant arbiter on matters of energy and climate. Manipulated and missing temperature data. Doctored computer models and disaster scenarios. Alarmist scientists rejecting any studies that dissent from climate catastrophe claims. Headline-grabbing disaster “studies” about melting glaciers and parched rainforests based on rank speculation or written by World Wildlife Fund activists. “Mann-made” climate change, indeed.
Investors certainly do have a “fundamental right to know” which companies are well positioned to address future crises and opportunities, and which are not - as we are frequently reminded by activist investor groups like Institutional Shareholder Services and CALPERS. However, these groups want to use the SEC decision to drive cap-and-trade laws and “endangerment” rulings forward, and drive hydrocarbon use into oblivion.
Many companies have been cowed into going along with this agenda. They seek to gain “a seat at the negotiating table,” curry favorable PR through “greenwashing” and “green-nosing,” protect themselves against lawsuits over CO2 emissions and global warming, or profit from renewable energy mandates, subsidies and stimulus grants.
But the “right to know” extends far beyond the activists’ narrow agenda. Indeed the lesson may be that this SEC guidance offers a tremendous opportunity for any company or investor wise enough to seize it. For the new guidance does not say companies must disclose only alleged risks from climate change.
It says they should also address impacts from legislation, regulation, international accords and their effects on business trends. This creates valuable opportunities for educating investors, customers, employees and voters about climate change issues.
Some 2,400 lobbyists are working on energy and climate issues in Washington. General Electric alone spent $7.6 million lobbying in the second quarter 2009, to secure stimulus, climate change and renewable energy dollars from US taxpayers. GE hopes to garner up to $192 billion over the next several years from projects funded by governments worldwide, including renewables and electricity grid modernization.
Wind turbine and solar panel sales are high on GE’s list, and will play a growing role. However, their electricity is 3-5 times more expensive than coal-based power, which translates into big taxpayer subsidies and more factory layoffs. Moreover, generating just 20% of US electricity with wind power would require some 186,000 turbines, 19,000 miles of new transmission lines, 18,000,000 acres of land (half of Illinois), and 270,000,000 tons of concrete, steel, copper, fiberglass and rare earth minerals (the equivalent of 180,000,000 Toyota Priuses). Even worse, a West Texas wind farm now under construction created 2,800 jobs - but 2,400 of them are in China. Solar power cost-benefit issues are similar.
Insurance companies and reinsurers may want to “disclose” alleged 20-foot higher sea levels and more violent hurricanes conjured up by computer models. These Gore and IPCC scare stories can translate into “increased risk,” higher premiums and additional profits. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand says carbon permits could be a “boon” for the Big Apple’s financial sector, creating a commodities market of “as much as $3 trillion by 2020.”
Other members of the climate-industrial-government-activist-scientist complex likewise have a big stake in global warming disasters and massive government spending to “prevent a cataclysm” and terminate our “perilous dependence on fossil fuels.” Exelon, Duke Energy, Penn State (Mike Mann again), NASA and other institutions all see huge potential returns on “investments” in climate alarmism and lobbying.
But 38 states depend on coal for 35-98% of their electricity and a sizable portion of their jobs and tax revenues. While others get rich, they will pay dearly. While a few members left the US Chamber, because it opposes cap-and-trade legislation, most recognize the risks in laws and regs that will send energy costs skyrocketing, ship millions of jobs overseas, and shackle living standards and civil rights across America.
Carbon emissions trading on the Chicago Climate Exchange began at $1 per metric ton in January 2004. Prices then fluctuated wildly, reaching a $7 peak value in May 2008, before crashing to $0.10 in October 2009. Speculators who entered the carbon market on 5/30/08 lost 98.6% of their investment.
Imagine how they might have fared if SEC rules had compelled utility companies, the Chicago Climate Exchange, and Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management firm to truthfully disclose what was going on in the IPCC, Climate Research Unit and NASA. Imagine the roller coaster ride that GE, Exelon and Munich RE investors could take, as more sordid details come out of the IPCC, concerns soar about US deficits and credit ratings, and taxpayer anger rises over climate fraud, subsidies, and sweetheart deals that corporate lobbyists have negotiated with Congress and the Administration.
(Pfizer and Big Pharma’s recent experience with Congress over national healthcare should serve as a cautionary tale. See Kimberly Strassel, “Pfizer’s bad political bet,” Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2009.)
Investors have a right to know all these complex facts. That’s where the SEC guidance offers vital opportunities for intelligent investors and socially responsible companies. They should carefully consider how to comply with the Commission’s ruling in the areas it has identified.
Physical impacts of climate change: Are the impacts real, or generated by computers and activists? What is the current state of climate science and its integrity, transparency and accountability?
Impacts of legislation, regulation and international accords: Are projected future profits based on current and reliable vote counts and realistic assessments that a binding climate treaty will be agreed to? As Climategate unfolds and 2010 elections approach, will wind turbine makers and carbon traders benefit - or will it be hydrocarbon-based industries like chemicals, manufacturing, airlines and tourism?
Indirect impacts on business trends: Are profit projections based on melting glaciers and other Climategate fraud, greenwashing, backroom lobbyist deals, or wishful carbon trading? How will new laws affect demand for goods in industries that have recently been extolled - or vilified? How will they affect consumers?
It has become increasingly clear that the real risks to businesses, investors, employees, and low-income, minority and elderly families are not from climate change. They are the result of policies enacted in the name of preventing climate change. The SEC guidance can help identify risks and opportunities - and advise people about them in a timely, accurate, responsible manner. Socially responsible companies will seize the opportunity.
By Richard Gray and Ben Leach, UK Telegraph
Last month, the IPCC was forced to issue a humiliating retraction after it emerged statements about the melting of Himalayan glaciers were inaccurate Photo: ALAMY
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report is supposed to be the world’s most authoritative scientific account of the scale of global warming. But this paper has discovered a series of new flaws in it including:
The publication of inaccurate data on the potential of wave power to produce electricity around the world, which was wrongly attributed to the website of a commercial wave-energy company.
Claims based on information in press releases and newsletters.
New examples of statements based on student dissertations, two of which were unpublished.
More claims which were based on reports produced by environmental pressure groups.
They are the latest in a series of damaging revelations about the IPCC’s most recent report, published in 2007. Last month, the panel was forced to issue a humiliating retraction after it emerged statements about the melting of Himalayan glaciers were inaccurate.
Last weekend, this paper revealed that the panel had based claims about disappearing mountain ice on anecdotal evidence in a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.
And on Friday, it emerged that the IPCC’s panel had wrongly reported that more than half of the Netherlands was below sea level because it had failed to check information supplied by a Dutch government agency.
Researchers insist the errors are minor and do not impact on the overall conclusions about climate change. However, senior scientists are now expressing concern at the way the IPCC compiles its reports and have hit out at the panel’s use of so-called “grey literature” - evidence from sources that have not been subjected to scientific scrutiny.
A new poll has revealed that public belief in climate change is weakening. The panel’s controversial chair, Rajendra Pachauri is facing pressure to resign over the affair.
The IPCC attempted to counter growing criticism by releasing a statement insisting that authors who contribute to its 3,000-page report are required to “critically assess and review the quality and validity of each source” when they use material from unpublished or non-peer-reviewed sources. Drafts of the reports are checked by scientific reviewers before they are subjected to line-by-line approval by the 130 member countries of the IPCC. Despite these checks, a diagram used to demonstrate the potential for generating electricity from wave power has been found to contain numerous errors. The source of information for the diagram was cited as the website of UK-based wave-energy company Wavegen. Yet the diagram on Wavegen’s website contains dramatically different figures for energy potential off Britain and Alaska and in the Bering Sea.
When contacted by The Sunday Telegraph, Wavegen insisted that the diagram on its website had not been changed. It added that it was not the original source of the data and had simply reproduced it on its website. The diagram is widely cited in other literature as having come from a paper on wave energy produced by the Institute of Mechanical Engineering in 1991 along with data from the European Directory of Renewable Energy.
Experts claim that, had the IPCC checked the citation properly, it would have spotted the discrepancies. It can also be revealed that claims made by the IPCC about the effects of global warming, and suggestions about ways it could be avoided, were partly based on information from ten dissertations by Masters students. One unpublished dissertation was used to support the claim that sea-level rise could impact on people living in the Nile delta and other African coastal areas, although the main focus of the thesis, by a student at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, appears to have been the impact of computer software on environmental development.
The IPCC also made use of a report by US conservation group Defenders of Wildlife to state that salmon in US streams have been affected by rising temperatures. The panel has already come under fire for using information in reports by conservation charity the WWF.
Estimates of carbon-dioxide emissions from nuclear power stations and claims that suggested they were cheaper than coal or gas power stations were also taken from the website of the World Nuclear Association, rather than using independent scientific calculations.
Such revelations are creating growing public confusion over climate change. A poll by Ipsos on behalf of environmental consultancy firm Euro RSCG revealed that the proportion of the public who believe in the reality of climate change has dropped from 44 per cent to 31 per cent in the past year. The proportion of people who believe that climate change is a bit over-exaggerated rose from 22 per cent to 31 per cent.
Climate scientists have expressed frustration with the IPCC’s use of unreliable evidence. Alan Thorpe, chief executive of the Natural Environment Research Council, the biggest funder of climate science in the UK, said: “We should only be dealing with peer-reviewed literature. We open ourselves up to trouble if we start getting into hearsay and grey literature. We have enough research that has been peer-reviewed to provide evidence for climate change, so it is concerning that the IPCC has strayed from that.”
Professor Bob Watson, who chaired the IPCC before Dr Pachauri and is now chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, insisted that despite the errors there was little doubt that human-induced climate change was a reality. But he called for changes in the way the IPCC compiles future reports. “It is concerning that these mistakes have appeared in the IPCC report, but there is no doubt the earth’s climate is changing and the only way we can explain those changes is primarily human activity,” he said. Mr Watson said that Dr Pachauri “cannot be personally blamed for one or two incorrect sentences in the IPCC report”, but stressed that the chairman must take responsibility for correcting errors.
Another row over the IPCC report emerged last night after Professor Roger Pielke Jr, from Colorado University’s Centre for Science and Technology Policy Research, claimed its authors deliberately ignored a paper he wrote that contradicted the panel’s claims about the cost of climate-related natural disasters. A document included a statement from an anonymous IPCC author saying that they believed Dr Pielke had changed his mind on the matter, when he had not. Read story here.
-----------------------
Top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility
By Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor, TimesOnline
A LEADING British government scientist has warned the United Nations’ climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility.
Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more potential inaccuracies emerged in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on global warming.
The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.
This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035.
The African claims could be even more embarrassing for the IPCC because they appear not only in its report on climate change impacts but, unlike the glaciers claim, are also repeated in its Synthesis Report. Read more here.
By Alan Caruba
It should tell you something about the federal government’s puerile efforts to advance the global warming (now called climate change) fraud that it had to cancel a scheduled press conference at the National Press Club on February 8th because a huge blizzard had shut down the entire city.
Instead, the announcement of a proposed new bureaucracy, a “Climate Service”, had to be made via a telephone conference call to those reporters either too stupid or too determined to maintain the hoax.
The fact that the Obama administration would attempt to set up a NOAA Climate Service reveals that the same cabal of warmists within the administration are determined to keep the global warming fraud alive and to make U.S. taxpayers pick up the tab. These people constitute a relentless enemy of scientific truth.
Joe D’Aleo, a respected meteorologist, reacted to the news saying, “This was expected. A climate super agency was talked about for years. Could NOAA and NASA have been competing by seeing who could be warmest and take home the prize? NOAA’s statements showed how this whole climate nonsense is politically driven.”
NOAA, for example, is warning of “earlier snowmelt and extended ice-free seasons”, but Steven Goddard points out that “what NOAA isn’t saying is that snow is falling earlier and heavier in the Northern Hemisphere. Rutgers University Global Snow Lab has reported that January was the sixth snowiest on record, and that six of the last eight Januaries were above normal snowfall.” February is set to break former record snowfalls.
NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is, according to Jane Lubchenco, PhD, an administrator, “committed to scientific integrity and transparency; we seek to advance science and strengthen product development and delivery through user engagement.”
That is hogwash!
A visit to NOAA’s new website, reveals how the same old lies about global warming are being trotted out to scare the heck out of a public that has long since concluded it is a vast pile of steaming hot lies.
It’s worth asking why a new climate bureaucracy is needed when, if you think about it, climate trends are measured in centuries!
Do we need a “Climate Service” to tell us that the climate will change a thousand years from now? The proposal is absurd, but not if you see if from the point of view of an administration desperate to expand the federal government until it literally implodes.
The proposed agency would be led by Thomas Karl, the director of the current National Climatic Data Center, headquartered in Washington, D.C., and would have six regional directors across the country. All this to predict what the climate will be in 3010 and beyond!
Consider that we already have a National Weather Service that has the best computer models available and a vast array of satellites with which to analyze the weather. At best it can only accurately predict what will likely occur over the next four days. Predicting next week’s weather is a roll of the weather dice.
Given the reports of how the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change devoted decades to fudging and jiggering the data on “global warming”, why would Congress even consider authorizing such a “climate service”? Some of those involved included IPCC scientists from academic meteorological centers in the U.S. and some are already under investigation for their role in the fraud, both here and in England.
NOAA and NASA consistently issued statements and reports intended to support the global warming hoax. Leading the effort was James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute, who kicked off the entire hoax back in the 1980s by warning Congress of a completely invented scenario of an Earth endangered by human beings using energy resources from oil to coal.
Al Gore, a former Vice President, has massively enriched himself by scare mongering of the worst kind, aided and abetted by NASA and NOAA, along with determined effort to foist the worst kind of energy sources, wind and solar, on the nation with billion dollar subsidies to these and other “clean” energy entrepreneurs. He is part of an international cabal selling worthless “carbon credits.”
The “Cap-and-Trade” Act, still waiting action in the Senate, would impose a massive tax on Americans for the crime of using energy for any reason. It would destroy what’s left of our economy.
The Climate Service demonstrates that the most thoroughly discredited information and individuals within our government are still determined to push ahead with the global warming fraud. It not only needs to be stopped, but all those involved with it need to be investigated by Congress. See more here.
By Chris Horner, Planet Gore
You have heard much talk about various schemes devised by members of Congress to ensure that the energy tax masquerading as a rationing scheme - the cap-and-trade wonder that President Obama insists will cause your electricity prices to “necessarily skyrocket” and “bankrupt” key industries - won’t cost you anything. And yet it will still lead you to use far less energy, result in the invention of pixie dust, and otherwise do all those things that Europe’s scheme failed to do.
From Europe today comes yet another admission that, unless the thing hurts - bad, it won’t do anything emissions-wise (nor climate-wise, given that the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations say fuggedaboudit).
Climate Wire writes of today’s Guardian story about UK lawmakers confronting the fact that cap-and-trade doesn’t reduce emissions, and pondering a tax on top of cap-and-trade to do what they said cap-and-trade would do (though we now know it merely moved money from productive uses to pals who had invested in schemes to profit from the scam):
To help boost the price of carbon from its level of 15 Euros ($20) a ton to what the MPs see as a more credible price of 100 Euros ($137) a ton, Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee is calling on the government to introduce new measures such as a carbon tax.
Friends of the Earth said the report’s findings were ‘another nail in the coffin’ of the Emission Trading System . . . .
Ah. So not the $7 to $35 per-ton fantasies we’ve been told would be sufficient to avoid Europe’s disaster. I’ll leave it to Iain Murray and David Kreutzer (or you can extrapolate from EIA) to tell us what that will mean per gallon and on your monthly electric bill.
But suffice it to say, despite all the happy-talk, cap-and-trade will cost you. A lot. So we might as well just admit it’s a gesture - the scandalousness of which we rarely see even in Washington - and then turn on those pushing it, politely requesting they seek other career opportunities or simply spend more time with their families. Should they decline, we vote them out.
Read more here.
By Paul Chesser
A sampling of stories (thanks to Climate Depot), since the Climategate story broke in November, that discredit “consensus” global warming science and the UN IPCC—many from British media:
Greenpeace cited as ‘sole source’ for ‘coral reef degradation’ claims
UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article
‘Researchers are still grappling to understand the balance of feedback loops’
UN IPCC’s Global Warming Report Under Fresh Attack for Rainforest Claims
Analysis: NASA GISS Rural US Sites Show No Temperature Increase Since 1900
BBC: Temperature and CO2 feedback loop ‘weaker than thought’
Study: ‘Carbon dioxide appears to play a very limited role in setting interglacial temperature’
IPCC cited multiple Master’s Students in AR4, some unpublished
And that just scratches the surface, as they say. But what do the intrepid Society of Environmentalist Journalist template-followers at USA Today report about today? Butterflies, in another one of those “scientists say” articles:
A study of beleaguered butterflies in California provides some of the best clues yet as to how other animals may react to climate change, scientists say.
The unprecedented, 35-year analysis of butterfly populations in the Sierra Nevada details how several species are fleeing to higher elevations to escape warming temperatures.
Formerly mainstream American enviro-media sure know how to sniff out a scandal, don’t they?
----------------------
Climate alarmists out in the cold
By Miranda Devine, Sydney Morning Herald
As the wheels keep falling off the climate alarmist bandwagon, it’s suddenly become fashionable to be a sceptic. Out of the woodwork have crawled all sorts of fair-weather friends. But where were they when the going was tough, when we were being hammered as Holocaust deniers, planet wreckers, in the pay of the “Big Polluters”, bad parents, pariahs, equivalent to murderers? It was pure McCarthyism.
But now, even the most aggressive alarmists have gone quiet or softened their rhetoric and people who sat on the fence have morphed into wise owls. They still think it’s acceptable to mock touring British sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton’s protruding eyes, a distressing symptom of his thyroid disease, in an effort to marginalise him as a lunatic, rather than address his criticisms. But, when even the British left-leaning, warmist-friendly Guardian newspaper has begun to investigate the fraud involved in “sexing up” climate change science, it’s clear the collapse of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s credibility and the holes in the case for catastrophic man-made climate change can no longer be ignored.
We are witnessing an outbreak of neo-open-mindedness and face-saving from people who brooked no nuance. The formerly alarmist British chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, has said: “I don’t think it’s healthy to dismiss proper scepticism.” Hallelujah.
Australia’s Chief Scientist, Professor Penny Sackett, who just three months ago was telling us that we had only five years to stop catastrophic global warming, is similarly less gung-ho these days. On ABC television’s 7.30 Report this week she expressed concern about “a confusion” between the science and the politics of climate change. “I think that we’re seeing more and more a confusion between a political debate, a political debate that needs to happen, it’s important to happen, and the discussion of the science. I feel that these two things are being confused and it worries me, actually.”
Funny, proponents of the theory of catastrophic man-made climate change never expressed concern about the “confusion”, aka politicisation of science, when it was running their way. Blows to the climate alarm case keep coming, from fraudulent claims about melting glaciers, increased hurricanes and drought, dying Amazon rainforest, disappearing polar bears and the flooding of half of Holland.
The latest, most serious, blow was the revelation this week that an influential paper discounting the so-called urban heat island effect was based on vanished and perhaps fraudulent data from remote Chinese weather stations. The 1990 paper was co-authored by the besieged director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones and a US colleague, who are now accused of a “cover-up”.
Jones, of course, and other leading scientists, have been exposed by their leaked “Climategate” emails, as political partisans who tried to suppress data, subvert freedom of information laws, and blackball journals and scientists who didn’t toe the alarmist line.
Meanwhile, revelations pile up about shoddy references used to sex up the IPCC’s Nobel Prize-winning Fourth Assessment Report of 2007. Among them is the bogus claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, based on a speculative interview in a popular science magazine.
The IPCC lead author of the chapter that contained the reference, Murari Lal, told Britain’s Mail on Sunday last week that he knew the glacier claim was wrong but included it to put political pressure on world leaders to cut emissions. “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policymakers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”
Because it was in a good cause it was somehow OK for the United Nations’ lead climate change body to slant science, cherry-pick data, and base claims on such flimsy references as Greenpeace and WWF propaganda, a student’s master’s thesis and anecdotes in Climber magazine. This sort of ‘’noble cause’’ corruption appears to have permeated climate change science, and set back the legitimate cause of fighting pollution. The dishonesty will have only ensured a generation of people will no longer trust environmental warnings.
One of the most significant recent revelations is how influential and embedded were environmental activists such as WWF and Greenpeace. Not only were their publications cited in the 2007 report in at last 24 instances as if they were proper peer-reviewed science, but their staffers were in familiar communication with East Anglia climate researchers, and were regarded apparently as “honest brokers” rather than political lobbyists.
In one email, Alan Markham from WWF writes to climate scientists urging a paper on climate change in Australia be “beefed up”. WWF “would like to see the section on a variability and extreme events beefed up, if possible,” Markham wrote in 1999. “I guess the bottom line is that if they are going to go with a big public splash on this they need something that will get good support from CSIRO scientists.”
In another email to East Anglia scientists, WWF’s Stephan Singer offers “a few thousand euros” to write a paper about the economic cost of Europe’s 2003 heatwave. They got away with it for a very long time.
Today, the bankruptcy of the climate alarm cause is demonstrated by the fact its highest profile champion is Osama bin Laden. ‘’Boycott [America] to save yourselves...and your children from climate change”, he said in an audiotape released last week.
Rising in the opinion polls, the opposition leader, Tony Abbott, has found himself on the right side of history. He was even able this week to utter the former heresy that “carbon dioxide is an essential trace gas” and “these so-called nasty big polluters are the people who keep the lights on’’.
But in the game of musical chairs that politics often is Kevin Rudd has found himself with no place to sit.
By Michael Barone, Washington Examiner
Quick, name the most distrusted occupations. Trial lawyers? Pretty skuzzy, as witness the disgraced John Edwards, kept from the vice presidency in 2004 by the electoral votes of Ohio. Used car dealers? Always near the bottom of the list, as witness the universal understanding of the word “clunker.”
But over the last three months a new profession has moved smartly up the list and threatens to overtake all. Climate scientist.
First came the Climategate e-mails made public in November that showed how top-level climate scientists distorted research, plotted to destroy data and conspired to prevent publication of dissenting views. The British government concluded last week that the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit violated the nation’s freedom of information act, although the violations occurred too long ago for prosecution.
The CRU has been a major source of data for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which for 20 years has issued alarms about supposed global warming. The e-mails conclusively establish the intellectual dishonesty of the climate scientists at the CRU and their co-conspirators.
Recently, there have been even more shocking revelations. The IPCC has claimed that warming will cause the Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035. It turns out that that claim was based solely on a pamphlet published by the World Wildlife Federation, based on no science at all. The head of the IPCC was informed that a 1996 report said those glaciers could melt significantly by 2350, not 2035, but he let the claim stand.
As Christopher Booker writes in the Telegraph of London, “A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC’s report which cite similarly non-peer-reviews WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority.” Similarly, the Times of London reports that a claim that warming could endanger “up to 40 percent” of the Amazon rainforest came from an anti-smoking activist and had no scientific basis whatever.
“The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” writes Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations in The American Interest. “The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics.”
Some decades hence, I suspect, people will look back and wonder why so many government, corporate and media elites were taken in by propaganda that was based on such shoddy and dishonest evidence. And taken in to the point that they advocated devoting trillions of dollars to a cause that was based on flagrant dishonesty and dissembling.
There was some basis for concern. If carbon dioxide emissions were the only factor affecting global climate, it is clear that increased emissions would tend to produce warmer temperatures over time. Those temperatures could create problems that rational societies would want to address.
But carbon dioxide emissions are not the only factor affecting global climate. Solar activity and water evaporation and countless other things do, too. Climate scientists do not fully understand those things and how they interact. It is rational for society to want to learn more.
Unfortunately, the cadre of climate scientists who have dominated public discussion and have controlled the IPCC have been demonstrated to be far, far less than trustworthy. Like the theorists who invented epicycles to explain away the failure of Ptolemaic theory to account for astronomical observations, they have distorted science in the interest of something that resembles religious dogma.
The secular religion of global warming has all the elements of a religious faith: original sin (we are polluting the planet), ritual (separate your waste for recycling), redemption (renounce economic growth) and the sale of indulgences (carbon offsets). We are told that we must have faith (all argument must end, as Al Gore likes to say) and must persecute heretics (global warming skeptics are like Holocaust deniers, we are told).
People in the grip of such a religious frenzy evidently feel justified in lying, concealing good evidence and plucking bad evidence from whatever flimsy source may be at hand.
The rest of us, and judging from polls that includes most of the American people, are free to follow a more rational path. In his State of the Union Address, Barack Obama alluded to “the overwhelming evidence on climate change.” But he felt obliged to add, “even if you doubt the evidence”—an admission that the evidence is less than overwhelming. On a par with, it seems, the claims of trial lawyers and the assurances of used car salesmen. Read story here.
By Brian Winter, USA TODAY
States are slashing funds for environmental programs, threatening their ability to meet federal standards for clean air and water.
All but two states, Montana and North Dakota, have made significant cuts to initiatives ranging from toxic waste cleanup to sewage treatment, says Steve Brown, executive director for Environmental Council of the States, which unites state agencies.
The budget crunch is so severe that some states are struggling to implement and enforce new rules set by the Environmental Protection Agency. Brown cites a recent requirement for states to regulate waste discharges from more than 60,000 commercial ships that ply U.S. coastal waters.
“That’s a huge undertaking ... and a lot of states are very nervous about how they’re going to find the money for it,” Brown says. He says states could also have difficulty enforcing an expected decision by the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide emissions.
Brown says he met with EPA officials last month to determine whether federal grants or other measures could help close the gap.
“We’re all still pretty much in a head-scratching mode about what to do,” he says.
The cuts could pose a significant risk to public health, says Elgie Holstein of the Environmental Defense Fund, a non-profit group. “These programs are often the difference between drinking clean or dirty water, or breathing clean or dirty air.”
State officials are finding it easier to cut environmental initiatives than funds for schools or hospitals, says Barry Rabe, a political science professor at the University of Michigan. Among the cuts:
•Pennsylvania has cut state funding for its Department of Environmental Protection by 30%. A $15 million energy efficiency grant program for homes and businesses was among the cuts.
•In Massachusetts, an 18.1% cut for the state’s environmental agency could delay cleanup of toxic mercury and other newly classified pollutants, agency spokesman Edmund Coletta says.
•California suspended or cut funds for dozens of environmental projects including a $12 million plan to prevent stormwater runoff into the Santa Monica Bay.
See full story here.
----------------------
House Ag Chairman Co-Sponsors Bid to Block EPA Regulations
A trio of House lawmakers yesterday introduced a bill to block U.S. EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, marking the latest in a string of bipartisan attacks against forthcoming climate rules.
The measure from Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and Missouri Reps. Ike Skelton (D) and Jo Ann Emerson (R) would amend the Clean Air Act to prohibit EPA from regulating greenhouse gases based on their effects on global climate change.
The bill would also advance several of the farm state lawmakers’ other priorities by stopping EPA from calculating land-use changes in foreign countries for determining U.S. renewable fuels policy, and broadening the definition of renewable biomass.
“It appears the clean energy bill moving through Congress is stalled,” Skelton said. “Let us set that bill aside and pass this scaled-back energy legislation.”
This bill, Skelton said, “represents a responsible way to move forward on energy legislation, gets the EPA under control, provides good things for American farmers and builds upon bipartisan objectives that will help curb climate change and make our nation more energy independent.”
The effort comes as EPA prepares to begin regulating greenhouse gases next month with its final tailpipe standard. That rule will trigger stationary source regulations, and the agency is expected to continue crafting greenhouse gas standards for other sectors.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision that EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
The bill is the latest congressional efforts to stall EPA climate rules. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is planning to seek a vote next month on a disapproval resolution that would effectively veto EPA’s determination that greenhouse gases threaten human health and welfare.
In the House, Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.) has introduced a separate bill to strip EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions unless it receives explicit authority to do so by Congress.
Indirect land use, biomass
In addition to blocking climate regulations, the new bill seeks to block EPA from considering greenhouse gas emissions from international “indirect” land-use changes when implementing the renewable fuel standard, or RFS. The 2007 energy bill expanded the RFS and increased goals for the use of ethanol and other biofuels in U.S. transportation fuels, reaching 36 billion gallons a year in 2022. The standard requires EPA to assess the “lifecycle” emissions of biofuels—weighing the emissions from growing crops, producing fuels made from them, and distributing and using the fuels.
EPA proposed last year to measure emissions from indirect land-use changes associated with biofuels—such as land that is deforested in other countries because of increased crop growth in the United States. The agency concluded, depending on the time frames modeled, that traditional corn ethanol could have a slightly larger emissions footprint than gasoline when land-use changes are factored in.
But those draft regulations drew the ire of biofuels advocates and farm-state lawmakers—including Peterson and Emerson—who maintained the agency was unfair to ethanol.
Last summer, Peterson reached an agreement with the Democratic authors of energy and climate legislation to include language to bar EPA from considering including emissions from indirect land-use changes abroad for five years (E&E Daily, June 24, 2009). But that bill has languished as climate talks have stalled in the Senate.
Meanwhile, the White House completed its review of EPA’s proposal for implementing the RFS earlier this week, paving the way for the agency to finalize the rule (E&ENews PM, Feb. 2). “I’m proud to help sponsor this bill because if Congress doesn’t do something soon, the EPA is going to cram these regulations through all on their own,” Peterson said in a statement yesterday.
Emerson has also sought to bar EPA from measuring emissions from indirect land-use changes as part of the overall calculation of biofuels emissions. During consideration of the EPA fiscal 2010 appropriations bill last year, Emerson introduced a failed amendment that would have blocked EPA from considering the indirect emissions (E&E Daily, June 19, 2009).
The new measure would also expand the definition of what classifies as “renewable biomass” that can be used for biofuels under the RFS. The definition largely mirrors an amendment that Peterson negotiated to include in the House-passed energy and climate bill, although language barring the use of components of federal forests and conservation areas was notably absent in the bill introduced yesterday (Greenwire, June 25, 2009). Peterson and Skelton voted for the House climate and energy bill (H.R. 2454); Emerson voted against it.
By Tux Turkel, Staff Writer, Portland Press Herald
As Maine rushes to embrace wind power, unnamed critics posting on Internet sites and reader comment pages contend that money and political connections—reaching all the way to the governor’s office—are greasing the skids.
A repeated theme, for instance, focuses on Gov. John Baldacci and Kurt Adams, former chairman of the Maine Public Utilities Commission. Adams served as Baldacci’s chief counsel. The governor appointed him chairman of the PUC in 2005. Adams left in 2008 to be a top executive at First Wind, the state’s most active wind-power developer. Posters allege that Adams has since benefited from his connections with Baldacci to gain permits and generous taxpayer subsidies for big wind projects.
The charge has become more persistent over the past year, as the pace of energy development has picked up in Maine, fueled by federal stimulus money, efforts to cut reliance on oil and strong support for renewable energy by both Baldacci and President Obama. But in interviews with the Maine Sunday Telegram, Adams and a spokesman for Baldacci say their conduct has been legal and appropriate, and that organized opponents of wind development are using innuendo to influence public opinion.
The connections aren’t secret, they say, and the charges lack specific—or accurate—accounts of any wrongdoing. “Opponents are using a modern-day whisper campaign to discredit policies they don’t agree with,” said David Farmer, Baldacci’s deputy chief of staff.
These tactics are defended by Brad Blake, a spokesman for the Citizens’ Task Force on Wind Power, a Maine group fighting industrial wind projects. A Cape Elizabeth resident with a camp near Lincoln, where First Wind proposes a wind farm, Blake last month posted an online comment following a story on wind power in the Bangor Daily News. “How about equal amount of space to exposing the corrupt relationships that are driving this folloy (sic) in Maine: Baldacci-Kurt Adams-First Wind. Juliet Browne (First Wind lawyer)—her husband, Rep. Jon Hinck—expedited wind permitting law. Larry Summers—D.E. Shaw-First Wind—Obama’s $40.4 million gift to rescue Stetson II. Ad nauseum (sic)!”
Blake’s posting, which he made under his real name, was similar to others circulated on the Internet, chiefly by unnamed commenters. His posting was later copied to another Web site and repeated by another poster. In a recent interview, Blake acknowledged he isn’t able to document any illegal activity. But he said his goal is to draw attention to the wind industry’s ambitions to install hundreds of turbines in Maine, and the officials who appear to be promoting the agenda. “There’s a lot of I-help-you, you-help-me maneuvering behind the scenes, between people who want to move things in a certain direction,” he said.
DEVELOPER: STIMULUS FUNDS OFFERED TO ALL
Both Farmer and Adams point out that Maine is a small state, where business and government leaders have access to one another and interests sometimes overlap. Some posters draw the First Wind genealogy more broadly, connecting Rep. Jon Hinck, D-Portland, who co-chairs the Legislature’s Utilities and Energy Committee, and his wife, Juliet Browne, a Portland lawyer who helps First Wind and other developers through the maze of the state’s permitting process.
In interviews, Hinck and Browne defended their conduct and said their actions present no conflict of interest. Even Lawrence Summers, a former treasury secretary who worked at an investor group that supports First Wind and now is President Obama’s economic adviser, is linked to what some see as the wind industry’s inside track in Maine.
The relationship between Adams and Baldacci has attracted the most scrutiny. Adams disputes that he has used his friendship with Baldacci to advance First Wind’s projects in Maine. As chief development officer, Adams said, he spends most of his time on new projects in Hawaii and the West. “First Wind has a Maine team that doesn’t need my help,” he said.
Adams said he took steps to avoid a conflict of interest when he left the PUC in 2008. The timing was bad. The agency was preparing to consider one of its biggest energy cases—the still-pending Central Maine Power transmission line upgrade request. But Adams and his family live in Yarmouth, next to CMP’s transmission corridor. His wife, also a lawyer, is fighting the expansion.
After receiving opinions from the attorney general and from his personal lawyer, Adams reluctantly concluded he couldn’t stay at the PUC without recusing himself from the CMP case. Long interested in renewable energy, he learned of a management opening at First Wind, was hired and was later promoted to his current position. Internet posters, he said, string together relationships to draw conclusions that aren’t supported by fact.
For instance: First Wind’s 57-megawatt project on Stetson Mountain in Washington County won $40 million in federal stimulus funds in September. Commenters call it a bailout for a project that’s not economically viable without taxpayer subsidies. They assume the project benefited through a relationship with Summers, director of Obama’s National Economic Council. Summers previously was a managing director at D.E. Shaw & Co., a global hedge fund that has a big financial stake in First Wind. But Adams said the stimulus money was available to any wind project that came on line during a certain time period. First Wind has said the $40 million will be reinvested in new projects.
“That’s the way the stimulus act is supposed to work,” Adams said. The appearance of conflicts of interest is nothing new in Maine, he said, where many of the same people move between public service and private life. But Maine has a very transparent government, in Adams’ view, with a citizen Legislature and a permit process that allows plenty of public scrutiny.
He said he has come to take the online accusations in stride and no longer reads them regularly. “It’s a price you pay,” he said. “This is what public life in America is today.”
LEGISLATOR’S WIFE HAS WIND CLIENTS
Unproven charges are familiar to Hinck, the Portland lawmaker, and Browne, his wife, who heads the Verrill Dana law firm’s Environmental Law Group. Browne was appointed by Baldacci to a 2007 wind-power task force. The panel recommended rules that anti-wind activists say were rushed into law by Baldacci and the Legislature to make it easier for wind projects to be approved in certain areas. Hinck, as co-chair of the Utilities and Energy Committee, helped advance the agenda of his wife’s clients, they say.
This scenario ignores reality, Browne and Hinck say. With 13 years of experience working to gain permits for a natural gas pipeline and, most recently, four major wind-power projects, Browne said she had an important perspective to offer the task force. The panel included lawmakers, environmental groups and state agencies. This balanced makeup is typical of state task forces. “It was quite transparent,” Browne said. “I said what my experience was.”
Browne’s work typically brings her in contact with the legislative committee that handles natural resource issues, which Hinck doesn’t sit on. In this instance, the resulting bill came before the energy committee co-chaired by her husband. Hinck said he voted to support the bill but didn’t do any extraordinary lobbying on its behalf. Asked if he should have recused himself from voting, Hinck said that would have been appropriate only if his wife were going to benefit directly. “I don’t think it came anywhere close to being a conflict issue,” he said.
Either way, Hinck’s vote wasn’t decisive. The bill passed without opposition in both the House and Senate. Hinck was a co-founder of Greenpeace USA and a former project leader at the Natural Resources Council of Maine. Most recently, he served on a broadly represented legislative task force that studied energy corridors in Maine.
“Opponents seem to have the notion that a task force should be made up of people with no interest in the business at hand,” he said. “I think that’s ridiculous.”
ACTIVIST: TACTICS BORN OF FRUSTRATION
This tension in not unique to small states, only more visible in places where people tend to know one another, according to Rushworth Kidder, president of the Institute for Global Ethics. Kidder, an author and ethicist who heads the nonpartisan think tank in Camden, said “networks of influence” are unavoidable at high levels of business and government. The solution is to manage conflicts of interest by being as transparent as possible about potential conflicts.
Kidder wasn’t aware of the wind-power cronyism charges. But in general, he said, accomplished people who are busy doing what they think is right in their jobs tend to have a blind spot to potential conflicts. “The last person to see it’s a conflict of interest is often the actor himself,” he said. It’s the appearance of these conflicts, real or not, that continues to feed various Web sites, including the Citizens’ Task Force on Wind Power—Maine, at www.windtaskforce.org/, and the Industrial Wind Action Group, at www.windaction.org.
The sites attract opponents of the noise, visual impact and environmental changes associated with major wind projects. But even within these social communities, not everyone agrees that “connecting the dots” is productive, according to Steve Thurston, a Vermont resident and co-chairman of the Citizens’ Task Force on Wind Power.
“I don’t think it helps to accuse people of malfeasance, unless you can prove what you’re saying,” Thurston said. Thurston has a family camp on Roxbury Pond near Rumford, near where a company led by former Gov. Angus King is planning a wind farm. Frustration leads opponents to connect public officials who seem complicit in a policy that, as Thurston sees it, will destroy the state’s mountain landscapes. “It feels like a freight train,” he said. “No matter what you do to put the brakes on, it just keeps going.” Read more here.
See another example of cronyism, see this segment with John Stossel: