El Nino/La Nina effect (SOI) predicts global cooling by the end of 2010

A July 2009 paper by McLean, de Freitas and Carter showed that global average temperatures followed the Southern Oscillation Index (El Nino/La Nina) with a 5-8 months lag. The graph below shows that when the SOI is shifted forward by 7 months the two plots change direction together (except when volcanic eruptions caused cooling).

The chart above (enlarged here) shows a projection of temperatures to Feb 2011. The chances are that the present warm spell will end quite suddenly before the end of this year. Over the next few months the SOI will indicate whether or not the cooling will continue beyond Feb 2011. Evidence from studies on past climate and sunspot cycle related effects gives a strong indication that the cooling will continue.

Where can I find more information?
The paper is here and contains more graphs (see especially Figure 7)

Wasn’t this paper disputed?
Yes, but because the critics failed to understand the process ("derivative") that was used to match the peaks and valleys in the two sets of data and derive the 7 month delay. Therefore they refused to accept that the above plot is actual temperatures and SOI. (They are). The response by the authors is here.

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A few thoughts on the peer review process
Jo Nova

The Response by the Authors (here) tells the story of how their paper was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR). Prior to publication on July 23 2009 they received glowing referee reviews, but afterwards the usual ClimateGate Team leapt into action for speedy damage control.

Within a couple of weeks Foster et al (Grant Foster, James Annan, Phil Jones, Michael Mann, Jim Renwick, Jim Salinger, Gavin Schmidt and Kevin Trenberth) submitted their critique of it to the editor of JGR Atmospheres. At the same time as this, it was posted on the Internet - formatted in JGR style, as if it had already been accepted by JGR.

About then new editor was appointed at JGR (Editor-2).

The editor asks for suggestions (from Forster) for unbiased expert reviewers and Forster et al suggested six. But all six were well known to Phil Jones. Jones comments to friends that “All of them know the sorts of things to say - about our comment and the awful original, without any prompting.” So much for independent impartial reviewers.

Editor-2 was advised twice of the existence of these Climategate emails but was not concerned. Nor was he concerned that the paper had been published already on the internet (on August 7), and worse, with the JGR page header, in clear breach of the JGR rules.

Editor 2 invites McLean et al to reply to the critique of them (as is the norm), but then rejects the McLean reply. There are few official guidelines that a reply has to meet, and there were no obvious problems with the science, yet McLean et al was not allowed to even reply to the criticism.

Yet the three reviews of our response that we were provided with were scientifically insubstantial. Only one reviewer mentioned the time lag that we established, despite its pivotal importance to our findings. And two reviewers focussed mainly on the derivative technique that Foster et al.’s comment falsely implied was the basis of our conclusions.

So the guys who pervert the system by suggesting friends as reviewers, and who breach the rules by falsely prepublishing, are given a free pass to the printing press, and the team who ought to be entitled to defend their own work are shut out for no clear reason.

This is the state of modern peer review: A few anonymous unpaid reviewers, whose names are suggested by the reviewees themselves; this is rigorous? Who are we kidding. We have tighter controls and better standards for peer reviewing Cab Sav.

This graph has the monthly trend lines from 1986 to date. Notice in particular how drastic some trends are. Like November, for instance. ( You can click here to get a much larger and readable version).

GHCN V2 All Data Anomalies 1800-2010 1986 Trends

I can’t help but think that this is something of a “Jumping The Shark” graph. The drastic and extreme change of trends, especially in some months, along with the divergence between months, just looks crazy. Yet that’s what is in the data. There is no adjustment, homogenizing, filling in, UHI adjustment, etc. done by me. This is the straight GHCN “Unadjusted” data set. It is converted to anomalies by having each thermometer compared only to itself, and for each month being compared only to itself. There is no seasonal averaging nor any kind of blending done. Simple, direct “self to self” comparisons for each thermometers in each month.

Compare with the graph of the data prior to 1986. In this graph there is a minor warming of winter months as we rise out of The Little Ice Age, but substantially no warming happening in Summer. A very natural state of affairs.

GHCN V2 All Data Anomalies 1800-2010 pre-86 Trends

That is just a crazy change of trend between these two graphs. Notice that I’ve stretched the vertical size of the second graph so that what little divergence there is within those trend lines would be more visible.. This change of trend between the graphs happens well after CO2 has had plenty of time for “effect”, yet could not warm the summers prior to 1986. It looks very non-physical.

I’ve chosen to make this segment break in 1986 for this graph as that is when a lot of the newer “duplicate number” or “modification history” flags first start to show in the data (the older series overlap, then exit with The Great Dying Of Thermometers that starts in 1990 in a big way.)

The nature of these graphs, and how they are made, is discussed in the posting of yesterday, here.

That posting has the graph entire from start to end, along with trend lines for the data as a composite from start to end, so you can compare the two segments with the total by using the graphs in both postings.

I suppose one could try to claim that a 24 year segment was just too short to give a valid trend, but then one would have to explain why a 30 year segment is long enough to define “climate"… and why it’s usable for defining “climate change” but not usable for showing how atypical the present segment of the data looks when presented.

IMHO, these two graphs highlight a significant “brokenness” in the GHCN data series.

Update: This Just In
From Verity Jones (Digging in the Clay), I’ve been handed an early peek at a “Pivot Chart” she has started. This is just the first 50 or so lines done, but it shows how the data suddenly change in 1986 or so with the change of the “modification history number” AKA “Duplicate Number”. 50 down, only 6800 to go…

Down the left side are the Station IDs, across is ‘years’. A colored box shows where there is data. If I understand what this says correctly, it is showing “The Splice” where one set of stations lead in, we get a different set (mostly) in the ‘cold period’ from 1951 to about 1980 ish, then a swap is made about 1986-1990 to yet another set.

“A Splice is a terrible thing to waste.”

Exactly what the change is that happens at that moment in time is yet to be determined. Read much more here.

Icecap Note: Here is an average of all stations from 1701 in the raw GHCN (V2) data set.  We know that the ‘anomaly’ method used doesn’t do simple averages but departures from some established averages (each data center does it differently) and they look at the geographic distribution and also that in the the early record stations were sparse. However, the simple plot does capture the rise out of the Little Ice Age into the warm 1700s, the cooling of the early 1800s and late 1800s and early 1900s, warming in the 1920s-1940s, cooling mid-century and then warmth. The raw data certainly doesn’t suggest anything extraordinary about the current time.

Enlarged here.

3 Aug. 2010 - Update: The number of dead fish and other water-dependent wildlife has increased to about 6 million. Millions of fish and thousands of alligators, turtles, dolphins and other river wildlife are floating dead in numerous Bolivian rivers in the three eastern/southern departments of Santa Cruz, Beni and Tarija. The extreme cold front that hit Bolivia in mid-July caused water temperatures to dip below the minimum temperatures river life can tolerate. As a consequence, rivers, lakes, lagoons and fisheries are brimming with decomposing fish and other creatures.

Unprecedented: Nothing like this has ever been seen in this magnitude in Bolivia. Inhabitants of riverside communities report the smell is nauseating and can be detected as far as a kilometer away from river banks. River communities, whose livelihoods depend on fishing, fear they’ll run out of food and will have nothing to sell. Authorities are concerned there will be a shortage of fish in markets and are more concerned by possible threats to public health, especially in communities that also use river water for bathing and drinking, but also fear contaminated or decaying fish may end up in market stalls. They’ve begun a campaign to ensure market vendors and the public know how to tell the difference between fresh and unhealthy fish.

In university fish ponds and commercial fisheries the losses are also catastrophic.

In a blistering letter published earlier in the week, the head of Texas’s environmental agency and the State’s attorney general told the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): “Texas has neither the authority nor the intention of interpreting, ignoring, or amending its laws in order to compel the permitting of greenhouse gas regulations.”

The letter, by Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) Chairman Bryan Shaw and Attorney General Gregg Abbott, comes hard on heels of EPA’s denial of 10 petitions (including one from the State of Texas) to reconsider EPA’s endangerment rule. That rule - the agency’s response to the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA - is both trigger and precedent for potentially dramatic and far-reaching Clean Air Act restrictions on fossil energy production and use.

More pertinently, Shaw and Abbott sent their letter on August 2, 2010, the deadline EPA had set in its Final Tailoring Rule (p. 31582) for States to explain how they plan to apply Clean Air Act permitting programs to stationary sources of greenhouse gases. Instead, the Texas officials all but told EPA to go jump in the lake.

Tailoring Absurdity

EPA adopted the Tailoring Rule to fix a problem of its own making. By adopting the endangerment rule, EPA obligated itself to establish greenhouse gas emission standards for new motor vehicles. The standards make carbon dioxide (CO2) a “regulated air pollutant,” which in turn makes any “major stationary source” of CO2 “subject to regulation” under the Clean Air Act’s Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) pre-construction permitting program and Title V operating permits program.

The problem is that literally millions of hitherto unregulated entities qualify as “major” sources of CO2 under those programs. The “major” source “applicability threshold” for PSD is a potential to emit 250 tons per year (tpy) of a regulated air pollutant. The threshold for Title V is even lower - a potential to emit 100 tpy. Whereas only large industrial facilities emit bona fide air pollutants in those quantities, millions of small entities never before subject to Clean Air Act permitting requirements - big box stores, office buildings, apartment complexes, restaurants, hospitals, schools - emit CO2 in the threshold amounts.

Applying the Clean Air Act to greenhouse gases thus produces what EPA itself describes as “absurd results.” For example, EPA and its State counterparts would have to process an estimated 41,000 PSD permits per year (up from 280) and 6.1 million Title V operating permits per year (up from 15,000). The ensuing “permit gridlock” would clog up environmental enforcement, stifle new construction, and force millions of firms to either operate illegally or close down. All on President Obama’s watch; all in the midst of a deep recession.

Rather than draw the reasonable conclusion that Congress did not intend to regulate greenhouse gases via the Clean Air Act, EPA decided that Congress must have intended for the agency to “tailor” - that is, amend - the Act so the agency can regulate greenhouse gases without wrecking the economy. So, while the law specifies 100/250 tpy as the applicability thresholds for the permitting programs, the Tailoring Rule sets the cutoff at 100,000 tpy over the next two years and at not less than 50,000 over the next six years.

In addition, under the Tailoring Rule, modifications to an existing source won’t be considered “significant” - that is, won’t trigger the PSD process - unless the changes increase emissions by 75,000 tpy.

The Texas environmental chairman and AG aren’t buying it:

You have declared that EPA’s decision to enact automobile tailpipe emission limits for greenhouse gases pursuant to Title II of the federal Clean Air Act renders such gases immediately “subject to regulation” for all purposes under the Act, including Title I Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) pre-construction permitting program and the Title V operating permit program. Simultaneously, however, you recognize that permitting greenhouse gases under the Act is “absurd.” . . . We agree.
They continue:

In order to avoid the absurd results of EPA’s own creation, you have developed a “tailoring rule” in which you have substituted your own judgment for Congress’s as to how deep and wide to spread the permitting burden.
And a bit later:

Instead of acknowledging that congressionally set emission limits [applicability thresholds] preclude the regulation of greenhouse gases, you instead re-write those statutorily-established limits . . . .
Problem Unsolved

Okay, now we get to the meat of the matter. PSD and Title V are mostly administered by States, not by EPA, and most State Implementation Plans (SIPs) define “major” emitting facility exactly as the Clean Air Act does. This means that even if the Tailoring Rule shields small entities from PSD and Title V regulation by EPA, it would not shield them from regulation by State agencies. EPA discussed this problem in its Proposed Tailoring Rule (p. 33542). “Virtually all of [the EPA-approved SIPs] establish the PSD permitting threshold at the 100/250-tpy level,” EPA noted. Indeed, “a few States have adopted lower permitting threshold levels.” In addition, “virtually all EPA-approved SIPs establish the significance level” for modifications triggering PSD “at zero” emissions in the case of previously unregulated air pollutants - not at 10,000 tpy, as EPA initially proposed, much less at 75,000 tpy, as the Final Rule stipulates.

Initially, EPA proposed to withdraw federal approval from those portions of SIPS incorporating the older thresholds and significance levels. This would mean, however, that the lower thresholds would “remain on the books under State law, and sources therefore remain subject to them as a matter of State law” (Proposed Tailoring Rule, p. 55343). In short, the regulatory nightmare would continue. For further discussion, see Peabody Energy’s comment on the Proposed Tailoring Rule.

Of course, States have the option to revise their SIPs and amend their clean air laws. But that could take years. Thus, notwithstanding EPA’s “tailoring,” small entities would find themselves “subject to regulation” under State PSD and Title V requirements on January 1, 2011, when the agency’s greenhouse gas tailpipe emission standards go into effect. As the Final Tailoring Rule observes, “Commenters stated that States would need to undertake a regulatory and/or legislative process to change the threshold in their state laws which they could not complete before the laws would otherwise require issuance of operating permits to GHG sources” (p. 31583).

Semantics Rule?

So what is EPA’s solution? Instead of changing the definition of “major stationary source,” EPA is changing the definition of “subject to regulation.” The agency, “by interpretation,” now defines “subject to regulation” as not including a “major source” of greenhouse gases unless the source has a potential to emit 100,000 tpy on a CO2-equivalent basis. EPA crows that “we find no substantive difference” between how the initially-proposed rule and how the final rule “tailors” the permitting requirements. EPA says that States similarly, “by interpretation,” can redefine “subject to regulation,” allowing them to exempt small sources from PSD and Title V without changing their SIPs or laws:

Whether we add [higher] GHG thresholds directly to the definition of “major source” (as we proposed), or alternatively, expressly add and define the term “subject to regulation” [so that it only applies to sources emitting at least 100,000 tpy], both approaches revise the definition of “major source” to implement the Tailoring Rule. Accordingly, we adopt the later approach to facilitate state implementation of the final rule through an interpretation of existing state part 70 programs.

If you are confused as to how redefining “subject to regulation” can produce the same substantive result as redefining “major source” yet not similarly require States to change their SIPs or laws, you are not alone. It’s this attempt to turn law into a semantic game that the Texas officials refuse to play.

They write:

In the Tailoring Rule you have asked TCEQ to report to you by August 2, 2010 whether it would “interpret” the undefined phrase “subject to regulation” in TCEQ Rule 116.12 consistent with the newly promulgated definition of EPA Rule 51.166 in all its specifics and particulars. . . .In other words, you have asked Texas to agree that when it promulgated its air quality permitting program rules for pollutants “subject to regulation” in 1993, that Texas really meant to define the term “subject to regulation” as set forth in the dozens of paragraphs and sub-paragraphs of EPA Rule 51.166, first promulgated in 2010.
TCEQ Rule 116.12 was last amended in 2006. It “adopts” the Clean Air Act “by reference” - but only as the Act existed at the time of adoption. To adopt subsequent changes made by EPA, TCEQ would have to amend Rule 116.2 through a formal rulemaking process. Adopting such changes by mere act of “interpretation” would delegate more authority to EPA than the Texas Constitution allows. 

In addition, the Texas officials argue, “TCEQ is also precluded from adopting EPA’s newly-minted definition of “subject to regulation” by the “express terms of the Texas Government Code, which requires public notice of agency rulemaking.” They explain:

When the TECQ promulgated Rule 116.12 in 1993, or even when it last amended the rule in 2006, it had no intention of enacting a permitting program for greenhouse gases. Consequently, TCEQ had no reason to (nor did it) give public notice of any such intent. Obviously, Texans concerned with greenhouse gas permitting could not have known to participate and comment on the decision to require permits for pollutants “subject to regulation” in 2006, when the EPA first discovered greenhouse gases were “subject to regulation” in 2010. It should go without saying that the nearly infinite expansion of Texas’ permitting programs to include greenhouse gases with no state-level rulemaking at all would not satisfy Texas or federal law requiring notice and an opportunity to be heard.

Of course, one could say that the whole point of the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, which pushed the agency to issue an endangerment rule, and the ensuing cascade of CO2 controls was to bypass the democratic process and confront the public with regulatory fait accompli.

Another Bite at the Apple?

It will be interesting to see how all this plays out. If Texas sticks to its guns, EPA may simply take over the Texas PSD program, in whole or in part, through a federally-imposed Federal Implementation Plan (FIP). Florida, for example, told EPA it could not make the regulatory changes in time, so EPA would just have to take over the Florida program. EPA reportedly is working on a “backstop rule” authorizing the agency to take over State permitting of greenhouse gases on a temporary basis (Environmental NewsStand, August 5, 2010, subscription required).

However, what if Texas still refuses to cooperate? Would EPA sue? Such a case might work its way up to the Supremes. The Court might then have to face the core issue it ducked in Mass. v. EPA - whether Congress intended for EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act as a whole, including -PSD, Title V, and the national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) program. The Court would have an opportunity to reconsider Mass. v. EPA in light of the absurd results to which it has led. A long shot - but a consummation devoutly to be wished.

As the BP oil spill slips off the front pages, replaced by daily reports of Lindsey Lohan’s release from jail; as Chelsea Clinton’s marriage is no longer news; as the war in Afghanistan loses traction with the public; and as Barack Obama pauses to review his declining approval rates, it is time once again to ask, whatever happened to global warming?

Here’s an update. On the basis of legitimate-not government funded-science, it is as dead as Marley’s ghost.

There actually was global warming. It began around 1850 as a Little Ice Age receded from America and Europe. From about the 1500s on, it caused the Thames to freeze over in London, widespread crop failures, the fall of the French monarchy, and the tribulations of Washington’s troops in Valley Forge, among many other notable historic events. The Earth continued to warm, very moderately, until the 1990s.

That warming period is over. The Earth’s overall temperatures have been falling for the past decade and, since the Earth is at an end of an interglacial cycle between full-blown ice ages, we better hope it doesn’t tip over into a new one any time soon. The current cooling is attributed to another well known cycle, that of sunspot activity. Fewer sunspots means a cooler climate on Earth.

Plainly stated, there isn’t a damned thing anyone on Earth can do about this latest cooling, nor was the alleged “global warming” due to “anthropogenic” causes, i.e., anything and everything attributable to human beings.

Putting aside the fact that the creatures of the Earth exhale carbon dioxide after breathing in oxygen and that various technologies based on coal, oil and natural gas generate it along with natural events like forest fires, carbon dioxide (CO2) plays virtually no role whatever so far as the climate is concerned.

It is, however, along with oxygen, the most important gas in the Earth’s atmosphere since it is the “food” on which all vegetation, from forests to jungles, crops of every description, and grandma’s favorite potted plant depends. No CO2 means no life on Earth.

Despite this, a huge global warming industry has emerged thanks to the lies put forth by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The release in November 2009 of thousands of emails between a very small band of so-called climate scientists who provided the IPCC its falsified data was immediately dubbed “Climategate.”

“Global warming”, a hoax and a fraud, had nothing whatever to do with climate and everything to do with the creation of a scam called carbon trading.

By assigning a value to the amount of CO2 emissions produced by the production of electricity and the manufacturing of everything, “carbon credits” can be bought and sold on exchanges set up to trade in them. There is money to be made in “alternative energy” production such as solar and wind farms, or in biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel. To justify this, any use of coal or oil has to be demonized.

The worst part of all this is the role that governments have played in furthering this greatest of all Ponzi schemes wherein carbon becomes a commodity.

Here’s where it gets very interesting for a cash-strapped United States of America where jobs are disappearing faster than ever since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In an interesting paper published by the Science & Public Policy Institute, “Climate Money”, some astonishing and appalling facts are laid out by Joanne Nova, its author.

“The U.S. government has spent over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, education campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks.”

“Carbon trading worldwide reached $126 billion in 2008. Banks are calling for more carbon trading. And experts are predicting the carbon market will reach $2-$10 trillion making carbon the largest single commodity trade.”

Based on her analysis of the money allocated to the global warming scam, “In total, over the last 20 years, by the end of fiscal year 2009, the U.S. government will have poured in $32 billion for climate research-and another $36 billion for development of climate-related technologies. These are actual dollars, obtained from government reports, and not adjusted for inflation.”

Among the billions spent by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, otherwise known as the Stimulus Act, $7 billion was allocated to “carbon sequestration experiments.” That is taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and burying it.

This is as idiotic as it gets, especially when one considers that, despite $30 billion spent on pure science research, “no one is able to point to a single piece of empirical evidence that man-made carbon dioxide has a significant effect on the global climate.”

All that money, taxes paid by Americans, has been a complete and total waste.

It’s time to stop, but it will not stop if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has his way and pushes through a stripped-down version of the former Cap-and-Trade bill that had been pronounced dead on arrival in the Senate.

There are powerful vested interests devoted to fleecing the American taxpayer and they, not you, are represented in Congress and, in particular, in the Obama White House. This is why the Environmental Protection Agency is doing everything it can to secure the authorization to regulate “greenhouse gas emissions.”

If that should occur energy costs will, as President Obama has said, “skyrocket.” It will mark the irreversible economic decline of the nation.

Closing Out Climate Dissent
By Dr. Bob Carter

The phenomena of disinvitation and the brotherhood of silence

Scientists who venture to make independent statements in public about environmental myths soon come to learn about two post-modern-science tactics used to suppress their views - namely, disinvitation and the application of a brotherhood of silence. How these tactics work is explained in this article.

The modus operandi

A member of the organising committee for one or another conference comes to one of my talks, or chances to meet a friend who has attended. Enthusiasm thereby arises for me to speak at the conference that is being planned. Prompted by the member, the conference committee approves an invitation, which I accept. Later, the Council or governing body of the society in question gets to “rubber stamp” the conference program and someone says: “Bob Carter as a plenary speaker! You must be joking”. The disinvitation follows, sometimes well after the talk has been written and travel booked.

In a variation on this, earlier this year I was invited by our ABC to contribute an opinion piece about climate change to their online blog site, The Drum. The piece was duly written and tendered, only to be declined.

Similarly, strong control has long been exercised by public broadcasters ABC and SBS against the appearance of independent scientists on their TV and radio news and current affairs programs. I first encountered this in 2007, when I participated in a broadcast discussion about Martin Durkin’s epoch-making documentary film, The Great Global Warming Swindle. Before the broadcast I had the astonishing experience of being successively invited, disinvited, prevaricated with and then finally invited to participate again, as competing interests inside the ABC battled, as they obviously saw it, to control the outcome of the panel discussion.

I have generally viewed these and similar experiences over the years as amusing irritations that go with the territory of scientific independence. But the matter starts to become offensive, and indeed sinister, when it transpires that scientists from CSIRO, and other IPCC-linked research groups in Australia, have been behind particular disinvitations; or, even more commonly, have refused to participate in public debate on climate change.

Read more ohow the message is controlled here.

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Least-worst climate policy?
By Jennifer Marohasy

A centrepiece of Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s revised policy on climate change is the creation of a 150-strong Citizens’ Assembly to “examine the evidence on climate change, the case for action and a market based approach to reducing pollution”.

Richard Denniss, Executive Director of the Australia Institute, has described it as the single worst idea that has ever been floated by an elected government in a federal election. According to John Chen, University of Sydney, it is simply a short term strategy aimed at kicking the climate change issue into the long grass for the length of the campaign.

The electorate is polarized on the issue of climate change and the Citizen’s Assembly would provide a venue for people to talk, including about their fears and aspirations. This is perhaps not a bad solution for the biggest so-called moral issue or our times and perhaps a good fit particularly for so-called aspirational politicians.

Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, says Ms Gillard must drop the Citizen’s Assembly and take real action. But there is nothing in his $3.2 billion Direct ‘Action Plan for Climate Change and the Environment’ that will seriously address the issue.

Former Chief Government Climate Advisor, Professor Ross Garnaut, says Abbott’s plan is delusional - and I concur.

Of course there is much support for one of its key policies, the sequestration of 10 million tonnes of soil carbon at $10 per tonne including from Michael Keily’s deep-green carbon coalition and also Barnaby Joyce’s deep-brown farm lobby. But there is no easy, inexpensive way to, accurately measure soil carbon, or the amount sequestered. The only way the program could go ahead would be if the government was prepared to trust that farmers were sequestering carbon when, where and how their paperwork said so.

Much of the rest of Tony Abbott’s climate change plan also reads like something Julia Gillard’s Citizen’s Assembly might have drafted. Under a heading explaining how their proposed Emissions Reduction Fund will work it is explained that, unlike Labor’s emissions trading scheme, the Coalition will not penalise businesses for continuing to operate at business-as-usual levels. If Mr Abbott becomes Prime Minister, “only businesses that undertake activity with an emissions level above their business as usual level will incur a financial penalty”. Following this logic, if my house were a business, I would incur a financial penalty every hot summer, cold winter and each time my 21 year old daughter visited.

I mean if Mr Abbott was true to his election slogan of “direct action”, not to mention traditional Liberal Party values, he would already have his Shadow Minister for Environment and Heritage, Greg Hunt, meeting with Westinghouse to get cracking on some plans and policy for a few new nuclear power stations.

Mr Abbott made this exact point in December 2008 explaining that: “If the Greens were fair dinkum about reducing CO2, they wouldn’t reject out-of-hand the nuclear option. Currently, nuclear energy is the only way to generate base load power without CO2.”

So what is the Green’s climate change policy? Bob Brown advocates a net zero greenhouse gas emissions target, as soon as is feasible and by no later than 2050, with a minimum of 40 percent reduction on 1990 levels by 2020. This is much more serious than the five percent on offer from both the Coalition and Labor. The Greens also have a serious plan for achieving this with a proposed two-year $20 billion interim carbon tax.

Mr Brown’s policy, if it was implemented, could have a significant economic impact and a consequential real impact on Australia’s carbon emissions. But of course, even Christine Milne knows, it would have no global effect on climate change. Why? Because shutting down Australia completely would not impact on the global climate; our total national emissions are, unfortunately, just not significant enough in the global scheme of things. Read more here.

was at the Heartland Climate Conference in Chicago in May, when I had the pleasure of meeting Steve Goreham, the author of “Climatism!”.  Steve holds an MS from the University of Illinois, and an MBA from the University of Chicago.  He has just been appointed Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America (www.climatescienceamerica.org).  A few years ago he became interested in the climate debate, and has made an extended study both of the science, and of Climatsm as a social, political and economic phenomenon.  The result of his work is this book, one of the most comprehensive yet accessible studies I have seen.  While he doesn’t spare the scientific rigour, he writes in a wonderfully accessible way, and if you have any interest in the subject you’ll find it difficult to put down.

Unlike some authors, Goreham devotes a substantial chunk of the book - the first 137 pages - to the science, and naturally includes a range of very useful references which will be invaluable to those of us who get involved in debates on Climate.  I thought I knew the subject pretty well, but he’s come up with some points that are new to me.  For example, I hadn’t realised that an isotope analysis of atmospheric CO2 enables us to calculate the percentage of it that is man-made.  The answer comes out at a mere 4%, whereas the IPCC assumptions give a figure of 27%.

Amongst the science, though, Goreham is not averse to a homely analogy.  He breaks out the sequence of arguments used by the Climatists to “prove” that CO2 is the problem, starting with “CO2 is a greenhouse gas” (true) right through to “Therefore man-made CO2 emissions cause climate change” (false).  And his homely analogy uses peanut butter.  Consider: peanut butter is a fattening food.  Sales of peanut butter in the US in recent decades show a strong growth trend.  Obesity levels over the same period also show a strong growth trend.  Therefore it is clear that peanut butter is the cause of obesity, and that we can cure America’s obesity epidemic by the simple expedient of banning peanut butter.

It’s so absurd it’s laughable.  And yet it exactly parallels the Climatist case.  But sadly while the economic damage from banning peanut butter would be small and localised, the economic damage from seeking dramatic cuts in CO2 emissions is currently running (says Goreham) at $150 billion a year.  That’s not peanuts.  Yet as Goreham repeatedly reminds us, out of every 10,000 molecules in the atmosphere, only four are CO2.  We’re asked to believe that this trivial amount of a harmless trace gas has more impact on global climate than the Sun, or than astronomical cycles.

The remainder of the book looks at Climatism as a political, social and economic phenomenon - at the causes and objectives of Climatism, and the remedies it proposes.  There is too much material to summarise here, but Goreham sees Climatism (rightly, in my view) as heir to a long and shameful tradition of disaster predictions, all associated with “solutions” which are anti-growth, anti-capitalist, anti-freedom, and (quite literally in some cases) anti-humanity.  He starts with Malthus, the Anglican Minister whose 1798 paper “On Population” argued that famine was inevitable as populations grew geometrically.  He writes of the Eugenics movement, which held similar views and enjoyed a vogue in the early 20th century, but was finally discredited by Nazi racial policies in the Second World War The story moves on to the sixties, and the modern environmental movement.  Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb” predicted global famine in the seventies.  Ehrlich made a series of disaster predictions on food, disease and the end of fossil fuels, which from the perspective of 2010 are quite simply risible.

The Club of Rome played a dishonourable part in the story.  In 1974, it said “The Earth has cancer, and the cancer is man”.  Warming to their theme, in a 1991 report the Club of Rome declared “The real enemy, then, is humanity itself”.  Which brings us to modern times, with the UN, the EU, the IPCC, the Kyoto Protocol, and most recently the Copenhagen Climate Conference.  From the point of view of organisations like the UN and the EU, climate hysteria validates their existence, and legitimises their pursuit of global governance, which is so dear to their hearts.  When David Miliband suggested getting the public to love the EU by re-branding it as “The Environmental Union”, he rather gave the game away.

Climatism is based on duff science.  It is just not true.  Yet it remains the greatest threat to our prosperity, to our democracy and to our freedom.  If you have any doubts on these points, please read the book.

A team of scientists at George Washington University and Howard University have devised a theoretical means of splitting CO2, turning the demon gas into either solid carbon or into carbon monoxide, CO. The CO could be used to generate hydrocarbon fuels with the aid of hydrogen—a by-product of their theoretical process “STEP”
(Solar Thermal Electrochemical Photo).

By using the sun’s visible light and heat to power an electrolysis cell that captures and converts carbon dioxide from the air, a new technique could impressively clean the atmosphere and produce fuel feedstock at the same time. The key advantage of the new solar carbon capture process is that it simultaneously uses the solar visible and solar thermal components, whereas the latter is usually regarded as detrimental due to the degradation that heat causes to photovoltaic materials. However, the new method uses the sun’s heat to convert more solar energy into carbon than either photovoltaic or solar thermal processes alone.

...the process uses visible sunlight to power an electrolysis cell for splitting carbon dioxide, and also uses solar thermal energy to heat the cell in order to decrease the energy required for this conversion process. The electrolysis cell splits carbon dioxide into either solid carbon (when the reaction occurs at temperatures between 750C and 850C) or carbon monoxide (when the reaction occurs at temperatures above 950C). These kinds of temperatures are much higher than those typically used for carbon-splitting electrolysis reactions (e.g., 25C), but the advantage of reactions at higher temperatures is that they require less energy to power the reaction than at lower temperatures.

... The experiments in this study showed that the technique could capture carbon dioxide and convert it into carbon with a solar efficiency from 34% to 50%, depending on the thermal component. While carbon could be stored, the production of carbon monoxide could later be used to synthesize jet, kerosene, and diesel fuels, with the help of hydrogen generated by STEP water splitting._Physorg_via_BrianWang

If humans develop the ability to control the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere through technological means, there would be little reason for the widespread hysteria which is seen in the UN, the EU, and in the Obama Pelosi regime. Likewise, as humans develop better technological methods of weather control—controlling solar insolation, cloud formation, and precipitation—the modern over-hyped concern about the use of fossil fuels should eventually subside.

The below graphic demonstrates the historically very-low levels of atmospheric CO2 found in our current atmosphere. Clearly the biosphere of Earth evolved under generally much higher levels of CO2. Modern high-tech greenhouses use expensive CO2 generators to boost the levels of CO2 to up to 3 X atmospheric levels—for more optimal growth of a wide variety of plant life. Below, enlarged here.

The modern obsession with “pre-industrial levels of CO2” displays a profound ignorance of this planet’s atmospheric and biological history, as the graphic above demonstrates. Closer inspection of the motives of the leaders of the carbon hysteria orthodoxy demonstrates monetary payoffs via carbon trading, international carbon ransom payments, and other economic maneuvers of questionable legality and wisdom.

It is a good idea to develop the means to control basic atmospheric parameters, in order to provide for rapid recovery from unanticipated geologic or extraterrestrial events. Anyone who has looked at the details of Earth’s carbon cycle intelligently and critically will not be alarmed at anthropogenic use of carbon. But the universe holds many surprises for a young race of slightly evolved apes, and it does not hurt to be prepared for as many of those surprises as we can anticipate—if the results are potentially severe.

More: We need all the fossil fuels we have in order to transition into a cleaner, more abundant, and more sustainable energy future. If we cut ourselves off at the neck now (via Obama Pelosi style energy starvation) we will not be able to develop the advanced technologies that will allow us to spread the miracle of Earth’s ecosystems through the solar system and beyond. If we follow the political scams that are making the faux environmental movement wealthy and powerful, we may as well call it quits as a species and a planet. Because sooner or later something devastating is going to happen to this planet—either via innate geological processes, or via an extraterrestrial event. If we follow the witless way of Greenpeace, WWF, Sierra Club, etc. that will be the end, because we will have abandoned technology and space in order to “save the planet.” But what we will have actually done, is to allow the only known source of life and intelligence in the universe to die without a struggle. That is not only stupid, but it is cowardly. See post here.