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Both President Obama and Hillary Clinton have rolled out new plans to combat global warming by increasing power generated by renewable energy sources. But who’s going to pay for them? We decided to find out what America thinks.
Most voters still consider global warming a serious problem. In response, President Obama earlier this month announced an energy plan that requires a 32% drop in carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 2030 and a 28% increase in the amount of power generated by renewable sources by 2025. But just 33% of voters think his plan will do a lot to combat global warming, and 56% expect it to increase energy costs.
At the same time, 56% also think Clinton’s equally ambitious plan to increase the amount of electricity generated by renewable energy sources will be good for the economy.
But are voters willing to shell out to put these plans into action? Not really. Forty-one percent (41%) say they’re not willing to pay anything more in taxes and utility costs to generate cleaner energy and fight global warming. Another 24% are willing to spend only $100 more per year.
Of course, it probably doesn’t help that 52% think there is still significant disagreement within the scientific community about global warming. Just 34% believe scientists are in general agreement over how serious a problem it really is.
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Note in Europe where the greens pushed an agenda like the one the EPA and the Clinton DNC plans call for, energy prices skyrocketed, driving many into energy poverty (especially pensioners). High energy drove industry to relocate in countries with lower energy costs. Countries like Spain had unemployment reach over 27%.
Two must see videos from the Doctors of Disaster Preparedness meeting:
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Climate: The Real ‘Worrisome Trend’
It’s not climate change. It’s science being manipulated to drive and justify energy policy.
Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow, Master Resource
My philosophy when I taught college was to show my students how to think - not what to think. As Socrates said, “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.”
I told my students that data is king, and models are only useful tools. Any model’s output or any theory needed to be examined and validated using data, and must always be used with caution.
The great Nobel Laureate Physicist Richard Feynman taught students: If a theory or educated guess or hypothesis disagrees with experiment or data or experience,
“it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, or what your name is...If [your hypothesis] disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.’
Einstein schooled his fellow scientists:
“A model or a hypothesis cannot ‘prove’ anything. But data can invalidate a hypothesis or model. It takes only one experiment to prove me wrong.”
The “greenhouse theory” being used to change the world fails the test in many ways.
Applying Feynman and Einstein to “climate science”
First of all, many scientists question CO2 as being ‘the climate driver’ and a danger to humanity.
Dr. Patrick Moore, PhD Ecologist and co-founder of Greenpeace, testified before a US Senate committee in February 2014.
“When modern life evolved over 500 million years ago,” he pointed out, “CO2 was more than 10 times higher than today, yet life flourished… It also flourished when an Ice Age occurred 450 million years ago when CO2 was 10 times higher than today.”
What then makes it an absolute law of nature that carbon dioxide levels above 350 parts per million (0.035 percent of Earth’s atmosphere) will be catastrophic, as so many alarmists now say?
The “more than 350 ppm CO2 will cause planetary disaster “hypothesis” was put to the test with observations. A large team of unbiased climate scientists and I examined the three main tenets of the model-based “science” that EPA uses to justify its energy and climate regulations. We reported to the Supreme Court in a brief that each one has failed the test.
* There has been no warming for close to 19 years, according to satellite and weather balloons measurements, despite an increase of over 10% in atmospheric CO2.
* The strong warming that all the climate models forecast in the tropical high atmosphere and the tropical oceans simply does not exist.
* Even NOAA and the IPCC have now admitted that there has been no upward or downward trend in droughts, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes. Only snow has increased - and the models had projected that snowfalls would be the only extreme weather event that would decline.
However, pressured by the White House, the EPA, NOAA and NASA continue to use these faulty models to predict a dire future and move us away from fossil fuels. And thanks to unprecedented funding of billions of dollars, university scientists are gladly supporting this effort and the dire forecasts.
This is something Eisenhower warned about in his Farewell address:
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present - and is gravely to be regarded.”
NOAA recently warned of an increase in heat waves and heat wave deaths. The reality is the heat peaked in the first half of the twentieth century and has been declining since then. In fact, 23 of the 50 states’ all-time record highs occurred in the 1930s, with 38 coming before 1960. There have been more all-time cold records than heat records since the 1940s. As the graphs demonstrate, the number of 95-degree F days and widespread heat waves has been trending down since the 1930s. For every continent, the all-time heat records were set in the 1800s to mid 1900s.
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Dubious “Dangerous Warming” Claims
Also totally ignored is the inconvenient fact that cold kills more people than heat. A rigorous study published last year in the medical journal Lancet examined more than 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 areas: cold countries like Canada and Sweden, temperate nations like Spain, South Korea and Australia, and subtropical and tropical ones like Brazil and Thailand. It found that 20 times more people worldwide died from cold than from heat.
Government reports, writers of opinion pieces, and bloggers posting graphs purporting to show rising or record air temperatures or ocean heat, are misleading you. This is not actual raw data. It is plots of data that have been “adjusted” or “homogenized” (ie, manipulated) by scientists - or it is output from models that are based on assumptions, many of them incorrect.
UK Meteorological Office researcher Chris Folland makes no apologies for this.
“The data don’t matter,” he claims. “We’re not basing our recommendations [for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions] upon the data. We’re basing them upon the climate models.”
“Rather than seeing models as describing literal truth,” added Oxford University climate modeler David Frame, “we ought to see them as convenient fictions which try to provide something useful.”
But models are useful and valid only if their outputs or forecasts are confirmed by real-world observations. What’s more, these data plots were prepared by the same organizations that are responsible for producing the model forecasts. The fox is running the hen house.
Actual, original data have been changed so much and so often that they are almost unrecognizable from the original entries. For example, the 0.7 degree Celsius (1.3F) of cooling between 1940 and the 1970s - which had the world worried about another Little Ice Age - has simply “disappeared” in these corrupted-computer-model re-writes of history.
Important perspectives on warming claims
In 1978, the late Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame warned audiences, “The worst winter in a century” occurred last year. “Climate experts believe the next ice age is on its way. According to recent evidence, it could come sooner than anyone had expected. At weather stations in the far north, temperatures have been dropping for 30 years. Sea coasts, long free of summer ice, are now blocked year-round.”
Within a few more years, though, temperatures began to rise - and suddenly “climate experts” were warning that fossil fuels were going to warm the planet uncontrollably. Arctic sea coasts, they began to say, had far less ice and were in danger of being ice-free year-round.
To underscore their concern, they exaggerate warming charts, by stretching the scale, to make any recent warming look far more significant than it actually is. Moreover, the claimed 1-degree-plus-or-minus warming needs to be put into perspective.
Here in the north, air temperatures often change more than 30 degrees F in a single day, monthly average temperatures vary more than 50F from January to July, and highest and lowest temperatures can vary as much as 125 F.
If you plot these normal temperature variations on a graph that also shows the global temperature change between 1850 and 2015 (based on data gathered by the institution that the UN trusts the most - the UK Hadley Center, or HADCRUT), the asserted average planetary warming is virtually imperceptible. It is certainly not “dangerous.”
Part 2 Policy and Intent
Who is pushing this end-of-hydrocarbon-energy to prevent an end-of-world-calamity agenda? The list is long and includes politicians and UN globalists (look up Agenda 21) who seek more power and control over every aspect of your life.
Scientists, environmentalists, green NGOs and corporations are all chasing the $1.5 trillion per year that feeds the climate crisis and renewable energy industry. The lengthy list also includes scientifically illiterate population control socialists and Hollywood cause seekers, who are all supported by environmental journalists who never question any “green” causes or scare stories.
Many use the “precautionary principle” to justify drastic actions that perversely have truly drastic consequences, intended or unintended. Eco-fanaticism has already pummeled Europe.
Impacts of bad policy
In the past ten years, the price of electricity in Europe has climbed by an average of 63 percent.
Polling indicates that 38% of British households are cutting back essential purchases like food, to pay high and rising energy bills. Another 59% of homes are worried about how they will pay energy bills when the Paris accord is enforced. Poor and middle class families are impacted worst of all.
Families and businesses in the “Blue States” in the Northeast already pay the highest electricity prices in the United States - twice that of some other states. The changes the EPA and this administration are pushing could double those rates - and the rates in other states.
The thousands of dollars that an average Northeastern family saved on gasoline and heating oil in 2015, thanks to fracking and drilling on private land, was truly welcomed as the only ‘raise’ that many families got in many a year.
However, that too will be a memory, if the EPA’s plans are not blocked by the courts - or a President Trump. Moreover, if elected president, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both plan to eliminate fracking, as well as most conventional oil and gas drilling and production.
With a Hillary Clinton administration and newly Democrat Congress promising to kill fracking and eliminate, hyper-regulate and/or over-tax fossil fuels, energy costs per family would increase thousands of dollars a year. This happened in Europe when the greens took control.
Moreover, soaring energy prices ripple through the entire economy, affecting the cost of all goods and services - including products and services provided by factories, hospitals, schools, small businesses and the shipping of food and other products. Soaring energy prices kill jobs and depress living standards, as companies and communities find they must come up with thousands to millions of extra dollars every year, just to keep the lights, heat and air conditioning on and machinery humming.
That means more industries will head overseas, where energy costs and workers’ wages are far lower, while millions of Americans will be relegated to part-time positions, service jobs at far less than they had been getting, or welfare and unemployment benefits for the newly and perhaps permanently jobless.
Meanwhile, the United States will be expected to send billions of dollars to poor countries and emerging economies, as climate change “reparation, mitigation and adaptation” payments, under the new Paris climate treaty. And those now relatively poor nations, including China and India, will be still burning fossil fuels and taking away our jobs, to lift their people out of poverty.
All the sacrifices by Americans, Europeans and families in other now-developed, now-rich countries will be for naught.
This is what the so-called “progressives” want and are marching in the streets to get.
The Climate Alarmists’ Real Goals
Former Washington State Democratic governor Dixy Lee Ray saw the second Treaty of Paris coming many years ago.
“The future is to be [One] World Government with central planning by the United Nations,” she said. “Fear of environmental crises - whether real or not - is expected to lead to compliance.”
Last year, UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres stated bluntly:
Our aim is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to change the global economic system… This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history.
In simpler terms, she intends to replace free enterprise, entrepreneurial capitalism with UN-controlled, centralized, socialized One World government and economic control.
In November 2010, IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer presented an additional reason for UN climate policies.
“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy,” he said. It is not. It is actually about how “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”
In addition to everything else that is wrong, destructive and simply perverse about energy and climate policies, these are truly scary developments. And to top it all off, the Obama administration’s Justice Department is now seriously considering the idea of joining state attorneys general in prosecuting companies, organizations and individuals who dare to think independently and refute claims that human-driven global warming is the greatest danger of all to our future well-being.
All of this sounds a lot more like pre-world war two Germany than the United States of America. It is certainly a trend that we should worry about far more than any honestly conceivable threat from any nearly imperceptible human contribution to the climate changes that have always buffeted humanity and our planet.
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Joseph D’Aleo is a Certified Consulting Meteorologist and Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. He was a college professor and First Director of Meteorology at the Weather Channel. He has authored books and papers on how natural factors drive seasonal weather and long-term climate trends.
We with a large team of scientists and economists and lawyers recently published a detailed scientific brief to the courts battling bad science. It was the 5th such brief the last 5 years, all of them pro-bono like with these postings elsewhere like Master Resource, Patriot Post and the local weeklies in New England as we try to educate as many people as we can to the truth and the pains associated with the punitive regulations and policies pushed by the radical environmentalists and politicians. Please help us if you can through your donations (button on the left).
The warning signs have been there for some time now - persistent failures of the wheat crop in Norway for example. The North Atlantic is cooling. The cooling trend was evident at the time of an expedition to investigate this phenonemon three years ago. The rate of cooling has now steepened up since then based on the latest data collated by Professor Humlum of the University of Oslo. From that data set, this graph shows the heat loss since 2004 for the top 700 metres of the water column:
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Figure 1: Monthly heat content anomaly in the uppermost 700 metres of the North Atlantic
As Figure 1 show, North Atlantic heat content peaked in 2004. The decline since the peak has been steeper than the rise. What would be the reason for 2004 being the peak year? Part of the answer may be that 2004 was the second peak of Solar Cycle 23 with a big increase in the proton flux. Another part of the answer may be that there was a big fall in the Ap Index in 2005 down to solar minimum-like levels followed, a couple of years later, by a discontinuity as the level fell through the floor of the established minimum level of activity. That is shown in this graph:
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Figure 2: Ap Index 1932 - 2016
We might not care too much about the animals that live in the North Atlantic water column but the temperature of the surface is the main control on the climate of Europe. So what has that been doing?
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Figure 3: Time series depth-temperature diagram along 59 N across the North Atlantic Current from 30W to 0W.
As Figure 3 from Professor Humlum’s work shows, summer heating is penetrating to half the depth it used to 10 years ago and in winter earlier this year sub 8C water was at the surface for the first time in more than ten years. That cooling trend is quantified in the following graph:
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Figure 4: Average temperature along 59N, 30 to 0W, 0 to 800m depth
This is data from the main part of the North Atlantic Current. The average temperature has fallen 1.0C from 2006 to 2016. That is a trend of 1.0C per decade but with 60% of the cooling in the last two years. Europe’s climate has responded with snow down to 2,000 metres in August in Germany this year. And how much lower can the North Atlantic temperature go? The lowest point on Figure 1 was in 1973 during the 1970s cooling period and corresponds to a fall of a further 1.5C. At the decadal trend since 2016, we would get there in 2031. At the trend of the last two years, we would get there in 2021.
That is supported by what is happening to solar activity. Over those last two years the F10.7 flux has been in a steep downtrend:
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Figure 5: F10.7 Flux 2014 - 2016
Figure 5 shows that the F10.7 flux is in a steep, orderly downtrend that will take it to the immutable floor of 64 about three years before solar minimum is due. After that comes Solar Cycle 25. Back in 2003, esteemed solar physicists Ken Schatten and Kent Tobiska warned that:
“The surprising result of these long-range predictions is a rapid decline in solar activity, starting with cycle #24. If this trend continues, we may see the Sun heading towards a “Maunder” type of solar activity minimum - an extensive period of reduced levels of solar activity.”
They got the decline of Solar Cycle 24 right and the North Atlantic cooled in response. If they get the “Maunder’ part of their prediction correct too, then it will be some years before North Atlantic cooling bottoms out.
By P Gosselin on 14. July 2016
Here in the north German flatlands, my wife this morning commented that it felt like fall this morning. Indeed it was a bit nippy outside.
As already forecast here, snow hit the German higher elevations, but with snow falling to as low as 1500 early this morning, so reports meteorologist Dominik Jung in a press release at wetter.net here.
Here’s an excerpt:
Camping in the snow? What a summer!
Camping im Schnee!
Snow fell this morning down to elevations of only 1500 meters. Photo: wetter.net.
Wiesbaden (wetter.net) 14 July 2016 - have you ever thought of camping in the snow and in the middle of July? As warned already on Monday by wetter.net, this forecast came true in the Alp countries of Switzerland and Austria!
The snowfall elevation really dropped over night. In some places early this morning snowflakes were falling at 1500 meters.
For mid July such a low elevation snowfall is extremely rare. Clearly snow is not real unusual in June or late August at these elevations, but in July it is truly an unusual event to witness. This summer is not only behaving like fall, but even like winter.
Not only did snow fall in Switzerland, but also in Austria. The popular Grobglockner high Alps pass was in parts covered by snow this morning. And it is still snowing. Most people were certainly expecting something totally different this summer vacation. Summer 2016 is doing whatever it wants.
Just days earlier in Austria the mercury were at levels between 30 and 35C, but now it is snowing down to elevations of 1500 meters in mid July.”
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Jung writes that the cool weather has also gripped parts of Germany and is accompanied by heavy rains in the regions near Poland. The cause of the cold spell is a low situated over Poland.
Not only Switzerland and Austria were surprised by winter, but so were parts of northern Italy. Severe Weather at Facebook here also posted a photo of snow blanketing the Alps in Northern Italy yesterday, well below the tree line.
Incredible!
Update
Eight more spotless days late in June brought the monthly total to 12. July started with 4 sunspotless days before for July 5th, it jumped to 23.
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So Constant And Unspotted Didst Thou Seem (Shakespeare 1)
Guest essay by David Archibald
The image of the Sun today is spotless.
This is the first spotless day of the 24-25 solar minimum. Not a great deal can be read from that. According to Wilson, for cycles 9-14, sunspot minimum followed the first spotless day by about 72 months, having a range of 62-82 months; for cycles 15-21, sunspot minimum followed the first spotless day by about 35 months, having a range of 27-40 months. So we could still be six years from minimum making Solar Cycle 24 about 13 years long. Longer is weaker in the following cycle, and colder.
When the Sun goes blank we still have what the professionals use - the F10.7 flux:
Figure 1: F10.7 Flux 2014 - 2016
Figure 1 shows that the F10.7 flux has been in a couple of parallel downtrends since early 2015. The Interplanetary Magnetic Field is still going the other way though:
Figure 2: Interplanetary Magnetic Field 1966 - 2016
Cloud droplet nucleation initiated by galactic cosmic rays has been getting a favourable press again, so let’s see how that’s going:
Figure 3: Oulu Neutron Count 1964 - 2016
Figure 3 shows a strong rise in the neutron flux that has its source in the constant flux of galactic cosmic rays entering the solar system. The count is now higher than that during the downramp of Solar Cycle 20 of the 1970s cooling period - very promising.
Solar wind flow [pressure] is one of the factors that modulates that constant flux:
Figure 4: Solar Wind Flow Pressure 1971 - 2016
Solar wind flow pressure appears to have peaked for this solar cycle. Perhaps the most interesting story with respect to the Sun at the moment is the increasing hemispheric asymmetry. The following graph shows that using very fresh data up to 2nd June:
Figure 5: Solar Polar Magnetic Field Strength by Hemisphere 1976 - 2016
Asymmetry has reached a new peak for the modern instrument record and is still climbing:
Figure 6: Solar Polar Magnetic Field Strength Differential
Polar magnetic field strength is translated into sunspot number and sunspot area. Unfortunately NASA hasn’t updated hemispheric sunspot area since December 2015 with that data shown in this post. They may be too busy on Muslim outreach to do basic science.
1 Shakespeare in the movie adaptation of Henry V
David Archibald is the author of Twilight of Abundance (Regnery)
Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker has, at least for now, abandoned his D.C.-filed subpoena that attempted to gain access to decades worth of climate research and materials from climate change “deniers” at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Walker, a big global warming alarm-sounder, filed the subpoena demanding communications, emails, statements and other documents related to CEI;s work on climate change policy. All this came, of course, after Walker and other politicians intent on pushing the global warming agenda attended a super-shady backdoor meeting with climate activists, where they pledged to shred the U.S. Constitution by drafting and passing laws that “prohibit false and misleading statements to the public, consumers, and investors regarding climate change.”
Ironically, and in typical liberal fashion, the group then attempted to cover up the closed-door session by deliberately concealing it from the press.
Because that’s not “false and misleading.”
Less than two months after filing the subpoena, Walker issued an order asking that it be revoked - for the moment. CEI noted in a press release issued Monday that the attorney general could still issue a lawsuit under a separate subpoena filed in the Virgin Islands that targets a host of other anti-climate change groups and companies.
In response, CEI states they’re moving forward with a motion for sanctions against Walker, alleging that neither subpoena should have been filed as they violate the free speech rights of anyone who doesn’t agree with global warming doomsdayers:
CEI is going forward with our motion for sanctions because Walker’s withdrawal only strengthens our claim that this subpoena was a constitutional outrage from the very beginning, violating our right to free speech and our donors’ right to confidentiality, and threatening the right of all Americans to express views that go against some party line. This subpoena was an abuse of process, plain and simple, and we’re determined to see that Walker faces sanctions for his illegal actions that he refuses to recognize.
The subpoena against CEI is part of a larger attack by Left-wing climate change bell ringers and politicians to go after Exxon Mobil, whom the doom-and-gloom activists say has been lying to the public about the company’s contributions to climate change. The group includes New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who, at a March press conference held together with climate change witch-hunter Al Gore, announced a joint investigation into Exxon Mobil launched by his office and a slew of other state AGs, including those from California and Vermont.
You can read Walker’s original subpoena against CEI here.
In the week prior to the administration signing what should constitute an international climate treaty, one think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, was subpoenaed for casting doubt on the agreement’s associated science of climate catastrophe.
As disturbing as such thuggery from state attorneys general would be in any case, the premise of the subpoena is faulty. The Competitive Enterprise Institute did not cast doubt on the dubious climate science. The actual data cast the doubt. The think tank and others have simply pointed out what the data show.
It looks like thoughtcrime has now moved from George Orwell’s novel “1984” to the twisted reality of our judicial system. Pointing out facts should never be a real crime.
The Heritage Foundation’s new Paris-bubble-popping science summary is also a case of letting the numbers tell a story. A story many never hear in the media-hyped spectacle that is international climate policy.
For instance, the chart above shows reconstructed average world temperature data for the past 500,000 years. Depending on the magnification and size of your monitor, each pencil dot would span something on the order of 1,000 years. The myriad 10-degree Celsius temperature flips all happened before man-made carbon dioxide could have had any impact - the final temperature spike started at the end of the last ice age.
Now see if you can follow this: The “science thought police” insist that even though none of the temperature variations for the first 499,950 years had anything to do with human activity, virtually none of the temperature increases of the past 50 years had anything to do with nature. Got it?
A question some overzealous attorneys general might be asking right now is, “Where did this ‘denier’ data come from?” The answer is: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center website (to be very clear, it is part of the federal government).
If those who merely point to data that are inconsistent with an imminent climate crisis are thought criminals, how much more subpoena worthy would be those who actually created the data? This expands the thoughtcrime conspiracy to an entirely new set of perps.
Should the hyperventilating attorneys general subpoena the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in its entirety or just the researchers? If donors to think tanks are subpoenaed simply because the think tanks pointed to this data, should not the U.S. Treasury be subpoenaed for actually funding these doubt-creating data?
In any event, it seems disingenuous to wave off huge past temperature changes as entirely natural while branding as science-denying fraudsters those who assert that natural forces are likely still to be playing a significant role. This is a problem for the U.N. Climate Agreement and its signers.
If natural forces have played a significant role in the moderate and unsteady temperature increases of the past 60 years, then what’s the climate hysteria about? If there is no need for hysteria, there is no need for the Paris climate agreement.
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Lord Monckton on the Alex Jones Show on the Climate Cops who are increasingly in panic about the increasing public support for the exit of UK from the EU.
By MICHAEL SUNUNU Union Leader Opinion
Climate alarmists appear to be getting desperate. For three decades, they have been forecasting the end of days, yet Mother Nature hasn’t cooperated. We were told Arctic ice would be gone by now. It isn’t. We were told our children wouldn’t experience snowfalls. They will. We were told hurricanes would ravage our coastlines. It’s been 10 years since a major hurricane made landfall in the U.S.
Now the bogeyman is sea level rise. Claims of accelerated sea level rise are all fear and little fact. Professed climate expert Dr. Cameron Wake recently declared homes along the water in Portsmouth were in such danger that their owners should sell now. He stated we could see sea level rise six feet over the next 80 years. “I don’t mean to be hyperbolic here, but that’s the picture,” Wake stated.
Yes, the Earth is warming. It has been warming since the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-1800s. There have been periods of cooling, warming, and relatively flat temperatures. The trend has been slowly increasing temperatures, but that is what Mother Nature has been doing for almost 200 years. Sea level has also been rising. Again, records show it has been rising for 200 years.
Any intelligent review of climate data - temperature data, sea level data, hurricane data, global sea ice data, drought data, snow cover data, etc. - shows very little change in long-term trends and no acceleration or rapid changes that can be associated with carbon dioxide levels.
And that is why statements such as Dr. Wake’s are irresponsible.
Looking specifically at sea level rise, there is substantial evidence to refute the outrageous claims made by alarmists. For several hundred years global sea level has risen about 1.5 to 2.5 mm per year +/- 0.5 mm. This is a change of 6-10 inches over a century, not even close to Dr. Wake’s fear mongering of six feet. More importantly, there has been no change in that long-term trend. The Wismar, Germany, record is one of the longest and most complete records of sea level rise in the world. It not only shows a long-term trend of 1.4 mm/year, but it shows no change in that trend (no acceleration over the past 50 years) since carbon dioxide levels have gone from 325 to 400 parts per million.
Long-term records from the Netherlands, Hawaii, Sydney, San Francisco, Panama, Trieste and all around the globe covering almost every major body of water show different rates of sea level rise but no changes in the long-term trends. The different rates of change are partly due to the raw data not accounting for glacial isostatic adjustment (the changes in land and sea floor “height” since the glaciers retreated 10,000 years ago), insolation and other regional factors. More importantly, the long term hasn’t changed in more than 100 years. We are not seeing accelerated sea level rise.
Here in New Hampshire, the Seavey Island (Piscataqua) sea level data go back to 1921 with a few brief breaks in the record. That data show that over the last 90 years, sea level in the Portsmouth area has gone up approximately 100 mm. Since the late 1960s, sea level in Portsmouth has basically been flat.
The Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level in Liverpool, England, has been compiling sea level records since 1933. It is not the only global data set for sea level, but it is comprehensive and has a substantial number of long dated data sets. You can browse the data yourself and see how the alarmists fear mongering about sea level is not justified.
In reality, the alarmists such as Dr. Wake do not have a good understanding of our climate. No one does. We don’t fully understand how the sun impacts our climate. We do not understand what causes El Ninos to form and fade. We don’t understand how the atmosphere and our oceans interact. We don’t even understand how cloud formation works and what drives it. That lack of understanding doesn’t appear to have stopped the alarmists from peddling their fears. But their claims cannot stand up to scrutiny anymore. The facts are damning.
Michael Sununu is a consultant in Exeter who has been writing about climate change issues for the past 15 years.
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Tracking climate change? Use the daily highs
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (April 29, 2016)—Scientists using long-term surface temperature data to track climate change caused by greenhouse gases would be best served using only daily high temperature readings without the nighttime lows, according to new research at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Using temperature data from Alabama going back to 1883, scientists in UAH’s Earth System Science Center developed and tested various methods for creating stable, reliable long-term climate datasets for three portions of inland Alabama.
In addition to creating some arcane mathematical tools useful for creating climate datasets, the team also found daytime high temperature data is less likely to be contaminated by surface issues - such as deforestation, construction, paving and irrigation - than nighttime low temperatures.
“If you change the surface, say if you add buildings or warmer asphalt, you can enhance night time mixing of the lower atmosphere,” said John Christy, the ESSC director and a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at UAH. “That creates a warming caused by vertical mixing rather than changes in greenhouse gases.”
Summer high temperatures are particularly useful in this regard, because summer temperatures tend to be more stable, while cold season temperatures are subject to larger swings due to natural variability. These often wild swings in temperature introduce “noise” into the data, which can mask long-term trends and their causes.
Results of this research were published recently in the American Meteorological Society’s “Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology.”
Basically, under pristine natural conditions, in most places a cool layer of air forms close to the ground after the sun sets. This layer of denser, cooler air creates a boundary layer that keeps out warmer air in the deep layer of the atmosphere above it.
Then people move in. People tend to do all sorts of things that mess with the local climate. Breezes blowing around buildings can cause nighttime turbulence, breaking apart the cool boundary layer. Streets, parking lots and rooftops absorb heat during the day and release it into the atmosphere at night, also causing turbulence. Irrigation increases dry soil’s ability to hold heat and releases a powerful greenhouse gas (water vapor) into the lowest levels of the atmosphere over dry and desert areas.
That’s the short list.
When the cool layer of air near the surface is disturbed, warmer air aloft is drawn down to the surface.
All of those cause real changes in the local climate, raising local surface temperatures, especially at night, by amounts large enough to be noticed both by weather station thermometers and by people living in some of those areas.
But none of those changes has anything to do with widespread climate change in the deep atmosphere over large areas of the globe, such as might be seen if caused by increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
“Over time this might look like warming or an accumulation of heat in the temperature record, but this temperature change is only caused by the redistribution of warmer air that has always been there, just not at the surface,” said Richard McNider, a distinguished professor of science at UAH.
So how can climatologists use existing long-term surface temperature records to accurately track the potential effects of enhanced CO2?
Take the nighttime boundary layer (and all of the things we do to interfere with it) out of play, say Christy and McNider.
“We prefer to take temperature measurements in the deep layer of the atmosphere, which is why we use instruments on satellites,” Christy said. “But the satellite data only goes back to the last few days of 1978. We use the surface record because it is longer, and we really want to look at data that goes back much further than 1978.
“Because of the natural mixing of the atmosphere caused by daytime heating, daily maximum temperatures are the best surface data to use to look at temperatures in the deep atmosphere. At the surface, the daytime maximum temperature just represents more air than the nighttime low.”
The new temperature datasets extend the existing climatology for three regions of interior Alabama (around Montgomery, Birmingham and Huntsville) by a dozen summers, all the way back to 1883. Summers in Alabama have been cooling, especially since 1954. Interior Alabama’s ten coolest summers were after 1960, with most of those after 1990.
As might be expected given that cooling, climate models individually and in groups do a poor job of modeling the state’s long-term temperature and rainfall changes since 1883. The researchers conclude the models - the same models widely used to forecast climate change - show “no skill” in explaining long-term changes since 1883.
Phil Klotzbach on the passing of Dr. William (Bill) Gray
It is with deep sadness that I write to announce the passing of Dr. William (Bill) Gray to the tropical meteorological community. He was one of the most influential meteorologists of the past 50 years. He was also an incredible advisor, a fantastic mentor and a great friend. I will post a eulogy that I have written for him shortly (ICECAP note: called A Lighter Shade of Gray it was posted here). I have appended his formal obituary below.
Phil Klotzbach
DR. WILLIAM GRAY
William Mason Gray (Bill) passed away peacefully surrounded by his family on April 16th, 2016 at the age of 86. He had remained active in his hurricane and climate change research up until the time of his death. He was well known for his seasonal Atlantic Basin hurricane forecasts and his strong disagreement with the scientific basis of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.
Bill was born in Detroit, Michigan on the 9th of October, 1929. He was the eldest son of Ulysses S. Gray and Beatrice Mason Gray. The family moved to Washington D. C. in 1939 where Bill grew up in the northwest section of the district. He graduated from Wilson High School and George Washington University (1952) and was very active in high-school football and baseball. A knee injury at 21 prevented a desired career in professional baseball.
Bill received a 2nd Lt. commission in the Air Force in 1953 and served as a weather forecast officer for four years, the majority of which was overseas (Azores, England). He remained active in the Air Force Reserves after joining CSU as a weather officer until 1974 when he retired as a Lt. Col. After his active Air Force duty in 1957, he obtained an MS (Meteorology) and Ph.D. (Geophysical Sciences) from the University of Chicago. He then joined the newly-formed Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University in 1961.
Bill married Nancy Price (from Oshkosh, Wis.) on the 1st of October, 1954. They had four children, Sarah, Anne (deceased), Janet, and Robert. Nancy Gray was very active for many years in Fort Collins community affairs and politics (including serving as Mayor of Fort Collins in 1980-’81) before her death in 2001.
Bill was a faculty member at Colorado State University from 1961 through his formal retirement in 2005. But after retirement, he continued his hurricane and climate research as a Professor Emeritus until his recent passing. Gray initiated seasonal hurricane forecasts for which he became well known with extensive media coverage in the 1980’s and 90’s. Gray graduated 70 masters and Ph.D. students. Many of his ex-graduate students have become very prominent leaders in the field of tropical meteorology today.
His last graduate student, Phil Klotzbach has very successfully continued these seasonal forecasts since 2006. He worked many years with the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO). He initiated and organized the first WMO International Workshop on Tropical Cyclones in Bangkok in 1985. He traveled the world and maintained collaborations with prominent researchers in the field of tropical meteorology throughout his career. To recognize his leadership and distinguished service in the field of tropical meteorology, he received many professional awards, including the first “Robert and Joanne Simpson Award” (2014) from the National Tropical Weather Conference.
Gray had strong disagreement with the science behind the human-induced global warming hypothesis (AGW) and devoted the major portion of his recent years to research.
Gray is survived by his two daughters, Sarah (of San Diego) and Janet (of Fort Collins) and his son Robert and two grandsons Mason and Liam (of San Diego). Details about a celebration of his life as well as donations in his memory will be forthcoming and posted on the Bolender Funeral Chapel (Fort Collins) website.
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I have followed Bill and his approach for tropical forecasting for many years, I used it as a model for my snow and seasonal forecasting efforts. I have attended numerous conferences and discussed the THC, AMO and climate cycles at length with Bill.
I was honored to be asked along with Neil Frank and Bill Read and Phil Klotzbach to participate in the conference and tell the attendees about our experiences with Bill over the years and then awarding him the first ‘Robert and Joanne Simpson Award’ at the National Tropical Weather Conference in 2014.
Here I am with Bill along with two other long time heroes Neil Frank and John Coleman at the first night of the conference.
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I will never forget the man, his legacy, his intellect, energy and enthusiasm and his friendship. We will sincerely miss him.
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”
Great Testimony to the Senate by Alex Epstein. Annoying comments and criticism of him and Catholic Priest by the unhinged and clueless Barbara Boxer are handled well.
The following appears this week in my regional Weeklies here in New England.
The Real Worrisome Trend
By joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow
My philosophy when I taught college was to teach my students how to think not what to think. As Socrates said “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel”. I told my students that data was king and that models were only useful tools. Any model idea or any theory needed to be examined and validated using data and always used with caution.
The great Nobel laureate Physicist, Richard Feynman taught students “If a theory disagrees with experiment (or data), it’s wrong...that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, or what your name is...If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.” Einstein schooled his fellow scientists: “A model or a hypothesis cannot ‘prove’ anything. But data can invalidate a hypothesis or model. It takes only one experiment to prove me wrong”.
The Greenhouse theory being used to change the world fails the test in many ways:
Dr. Patrick Moore, PhD Ecologist and co-founder of Greenpeace in US Senate Testimony on February 25, 2014 testified
“When modern life evolved over 500 million years ago, CO2 was more than 10 times higher than today, yet life flourished...then an Ice Age occurred 450 million years ago when CO2 was 10 times higher than today.”
A large team of unbiased climate scientists and I examined the three main tenets of the model-based science used by the EPA in justifying their regulations. We reported to the Supreme Court in a brief that each one has failed the test. There has been no warming for close to 19 years in the satellite and weather balloons measurements despite an increase in CO2 of over 10%. The strong warming in all the climate models that is forecast in the tropical high atmosphere and the tropical oceans does not exist.
And finally even NOAA and the IPCC admitted there has been no trend in drought, flood, hurricanes, and tornadoes. Only snow has increased (which the models suggested would be the only extreme declining).
Still the EPA and NOAA and NASA, pressured by the administration, continues to use these models to predict a dire future and move us away from fossil fuels. And thanks to unprecedented funding of billions of dollars, the universities are gladly supporting this effort. This is something Eisenhower warned about in his Farewell address:
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present - and is gravely to be regarded.”
NOAA recently warned of an increase in heat waves and heat wave deaths. The reality is the heat peaked in the first half of the 20th century and has been declining. In fact 23 of the 50 states all time record highs occurred in the 1930s with 38 before 1960. There have been more all time cold records than heat records since the 1940s. The number of 95F days and widespread heat waves have been trending down since the 1930s.
For every continent the all time heat records were set in the 1800s to mid 1900s. Totally ignored is the inconvenient fact that cold kills more people than heat. A rigorous study published last year in the medical journal Lancet examined more than 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 areas: cold countries like Canada and Sweden, temperate nations like Spain, South Korea and Australia, and subtropical and tropical ones like Brazil and Thailand. They found 20 times more people worldwide died from cold than from heat.
Writers of opinion pieces, or bloggers posting graphs showing us that temperatures are rising or ocean heat increasing are misleading you. This is not data but plots of data adjusted by models that make assumptions, many of them shown to be incorrect.
Quote by Chris Folland of UK Meteorological Office:
“The data don’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations [for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions] upon the data. We’re basing them upon the climate models.”
Quote by David Frame, climate modeler, Oxford University:
“Rather than seeing models as describing literal truth, we ought to see them as convenient fictions which try to provide something useful.”
What’s more these plots are done by the same organizations that are responsible for producing the model forecasts. The fox is running the hen house. The data has been changed to be almost unrecognizable from its original form. The 0.7 degree Celsius (1.3F) cooling from 1940 to the 1970s that had the world worried about an ice age has disappeared in these model-corrupted re-writes of history.
Leonard Nimoy talks about global cooling in the late 1970s.
The claimed 1 degree warming (virtually all adjustments) needs to be put into perspective. On a daily basis here in southern New Hampshire, air temperatures change 30F degrees, monthly average temperatures vary over 50F from January to July and can vary as much as 125F in any given year.
If you plot on this scale the global temperature change from the source the UN trusted the most - the UK Hadley Center the claimed warming is virtually imperceptible and certainly not dangerous.
Who is pushing this agenda? The list is long and includes politicians and UN globalists (look up Agenda 21) seeking more power and control over every aspect of your life. Scientists, environmentalists, green NGOs and corporations are chasing the 1.5 trillion dollars/year that is feeding the green monster. The list also includes the scientifically illiterate cause seekers in Hollywood, eco-fanatics and population control socialists that are all supported by the never questioning environmental journalists.
Many use the ‘precautionary principle’ to justify drastic action that perversely has truly drastic ‘unintended consequences’. Eco-fanaticism has decimated Europe. In the past 10 years the price of electricity in Europe has climbed by an average of 63 percent. Polling indicates that 38 percent of British households are cutting back essential purchases, like food, to pay for high-energy bills. Another 59 percent of homes are worried about how they are going to pay energy bills when the Paris accord is enforced.
You may not realize it but we in the ‘blue’ northeast pay the highest electricity prices in the nation - twice that of some other states. The changes the EPA and this administration are pushing could double the rates. The money we saved on gasoline and heating oil this year, thanks to fracking and drilling on private land, was welcomed and the only ‘raise’ many of us got in many a year. That too will be a memory, if the EPA’s plans are not blocked by the courts.
Dixy Lee Ray, former liberal Democrat governor of Washington State saw the Paris accord coming many years ago:
“The future is to be (One) World Government with central planning by the United Nations. Fear of environmental crises - whether real or not - is expected to lead to - compliance”
IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer in November 2010 admitted
“one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.” Instead, climate change policy is about how “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth...”
UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres last year said
“Our aim is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to change the global economic system (destroy capitalism).”
On top of all of that is this truly scary development. The Obama administrations Justice Department is now seriously considering prosecuting companies, organizations and individuals who dare to think independently and refute their claims that global warming is the greatest danger of all to our future wellbeing. That sounds a lot more like pre-world war two Germany than the United States of America.
Now that is a trend we should worry about.
American Energy Alliance
On March 29th, EPA filed its response to the D.C. Circuit Court on why the agency’s regulations of carbon dioxide from power plants is legal. There’s no shortage of whoppers to highlight in EPA’s briefs. Here are a few:
It’s just the market trend, man.
EPA insists the rule “follows existing industry trends without resulting in any fundamental redirection of the energy sector."Further, EPA argues, “these trends are due largely to falling prices for renewables and gas, as well as the aging of existing coal-fired plants.” If this is true, it raises a simple question: why has EPA devoted so much time and resources to this regulation if it is only “follow[ing] existing industry trends?”
The administration and their allies have worked hard to argue they aren’t killing the coal industry. Of course, the intent is to distract the American people from the fact that it is EPA’s unrelenting regulatory agenda that has caused much of coal’s challenges. The list of EPA regulations targeting coal is long, and includes the cross-state air pollution rule, the Mercury and Air Toxics Rule (MATS), PM 2.5 regulations, the cooling water intake rule, regional haze regulation, and the ozone rule. These regulations have resulted in dozens of gigawatts of coal generating capacity closing. The MATS regulation alone was responsible for 40 GW of coal closing. EPA is correct that their carbon rule is “following existing industry trends”, but it is EPA that created the trends through regulatory edicts.
Yes, the hydraulic fracturing revolution, which has resulted in low natural gas prices, is also a challenge for coal. Even still, electricity from existing coal plants remains cheaper than electricity from new natural gas power plants.
Lastly, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said this rule was “a big step forward on climate change.” How can this rule be a big step forward if it is just following existing industry trends? McCarthy and EPA are not telling the truth when they say that the rule is merely following industry trends.
Hey DC Circuit, don’t worry that EPA is stretching the Clean Air Act beyond recognition - they’re saving the planet!
The closest EPA comes to mentioning any actual benefits from the rule is with broad and vague references to fighting climate change. For example, this is one of their more outlandish and meaningless statements: “substantially reducing [greenhouse gas] emissions now is necessary to avoid the worst impacts [of man-made global warming].”
The rule says that “climate change is already occurring”, but then fails to state that according to EPA’s own climate model, this regulation would lower global temperatures by 0.019 degrees Celsius by 2100. Other estimates found it would only reduce sea levels by 2 sheets of paper by 2050. In the face of this preposterous benefit (especially given the costs), EPA’s only reply is that they’re not doing it to avoid climate damage; it’s all about showing leadership, as EPA Chief Gina McCarthy testified last week.
When asked about the lack of climate benefits from the regulation, she admitted that the point of the regulation was “having had enormous benefit in showing sort of domestic leadership as well as garnering support around the country for the agreement we reached in Paris.”
Last we checked, the Clean Air Act was written to reduce pollution - not to show “leadership.” Showing other countries that the U.S. is willing to drive up electricity prices and harm U.S. citizens isn’t a compelling benefit. But what do we know? After all, we would like to grow the economy and improve the welfare of Americans.
EPA is “very conservative” in their renewable estimates.
Perhaps EPA’s most egregious change from the proposed carbon rule to the final rule is EPA’s assumption of a doubling of renewable generation to fill the void of coal taken off-line and reduced reliance on natural gas. Therefore, it’s only fitting that EPA’s defense of the approach is equally ludicrous.
First, wind and solar are intermittent sources of energy, which means they cannot be relied on to provide sufficient electricity at a given point when the grid needs it. Conversely, coal and natural gas are baseload sources of power, precisely because they can be scaled up or down at any given time to meet energy needs. This is a critical difference between renewables and fossil fuels that permanently makes the former unable to actually replace the latter.
The cherry-picking method used to manufacture these projections has been written about extensively. (Quick explanation: EPA’s methodology of choosing a five-year window (2010-2014) to assess renewable capacity from five difference sources that was added to the grid each year was a reasonable approach. The questionable decision-making came when they chose to take the year with the greatest capacity added for each source to forecast new generation brought online in the future. This demonstrated a clear bias toward substantially rosier assumptions than their “conservative approach” claims and has been criticized for the unrealistic outcome expected from applying this maximum capacity for each source across most of the compliance period). The most consequential assumption pertained to onshore wind. The abnormal amount of wind capacity installations in 2012 as the result of the potential expiration of the wind production tax credit was a clear outlier in all trends and reasonable forecasting for future years. Yet EPA assumed this abnormal production would be the norm in wind capacity additions from 2024-2030.
For some context of the incredible amount of wind generation assumed, the land mass needed for just the turbines EPA believes will be constructed from 2022 to 2030 would be over 5.2 million acres- greater than the combined land area of Rhode Island, Delaware, and Connecticut. This is addition to the 4.2 million acres of wind turbines expected to be installed as of 2021- another questionable projection. The land use assumptions alone are mind-blowing, not to mention the new transmission requirements needed to support this wind fleet.
The EPA’s defense is that it could have used the 2012 amount for every year in from 2022 to 2030 but chose to take the “conservative approach” of assigning the average generation from the 2010 to 2014 timeframe for the first two years of compliance (2022 to 2023).[5] This somehow alleviates their cherry-picked projections for the other seven years of the compliance window.
Finally, it should be noted that EPA is an environmental regulator and not an energy regulator. As such, the court should give EPA no deference to EPA’s claims that “technological advancements, dramatic cost reductions, and renewable industry expansion” will occur. This is clearly outside their expertise and subject to severe academic criticism.
It’s not about energy (even though we’ve promised to bankrupt the coal industry).
One of the EPA’s more incredulous claims in its briefs is that the carbon rule “is not an energy rule” and that “like any pollution limits for the power plant industry, the rule will indirectly impact energy markets.”
EPA makes this claim responding to the argument that the regulation intrudes on state sovereignty by directly regulating energy markets. Because the rule usurps state control, EPA is left with a meek defense that acknowledges the impact but denies any intent. But their intent to bankrupt coal and prevent new coal plants from being built cannot be denied. The agency’s boss, President Obama, promised to bankrupt coal and make electricity prices “skyrocket” in his 2008 presidential campaign, and has demonized the fuel on countless other occasions.
We’re the EPA dammit, give us deference!
While denying any attempt to regulate energy, the EPA spends significant time defending its right to receive Chevron deference for many of the questionable assumptions and interpretations it made in formulating the rule. Yet several of these judgment calls require expertise and familiarity with energy regulation, not environmental regulation.
For example, EPA used a model to predict the cost, transmission requirements, siting, and construction lead times of the new generation.[8] They chose to use data and renewable cost estimates from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) rather than “the governmental entity charged with forecasting electricity generation and demand” - the Energy Information Administration (EIA). The Institute for Energy Research has written about the importance of this choice and how it demonstrates EPA’s strong bias toward renewable energy.
Finally, while seeking to substitute baseload energy (coal) with intermittent energy (wind), EPA does so by looking at wind’s capacity factor (i.e., expected annual generation) instead of the actual generation capacity the grid operator can depend on being available when it is most needed. EPA claims to have understood this point and used the actual generation capacity in their model, but one has to wonder the reason for citing the higher capacity figure in the first place while knowing its inadequacy in meeting demand.
All of these are important judgment calls that EPA is not qualified to make, and have the potential to substantially change the rule. Yet by doing so, it’s pretending to be the national energy czar it professes not to be.
What’s the limiting principle?
At the heart of the EPA’s carbon rule is it’s novel interpretation that the Clean Air Act allows it to go “outside the fence” in its regulatory reach. The technical conversation centers around ambiguous sounding terms like “generation shifting”, but the leap from regulating only power plants to regulating the entire electric grid is a seismic shift in EPA’s authority. If the DC Circuit agrees with the no-holds-barred approach to EPA’s newfound authority, what can the agency not regulate? Won’t the EPA be given reign over the entire U.S. economy? After all, practically every economic activity produces some carbon dioxide.
This is about power and politics. Period.
If there’s any doubt as to what EPA’s obsession with killing the use of natural gas, oil, and coal is truly about, look no further than the press release issued yesterday by New York AG Schneiderman, former Vice President Al Gore and their coalition of state and industry partners. These are the same group of actors that have intervened on EPA’s behalf in the ongoing carbon rule litigation. The press release announces their “historic state-based effort to combat climate change.”
Interestingly, the ONLY initiative outlined is opening potential investigations into companies and individuals who have expressed dissenting views on climate change. If the world were literally burning before us, as this “coalition” believes, would persecution of those who disagree really be the first (most important) step to putting out the fire? Ultimately, the whole movement is about growing government, handing the keys to the city to environmental special interests, and above all, enriching billionaires who have substantial investments in the renewable industry. After all, Al Gore doesn’t have anything to do with law enforcement, but he does have a lot to do with getting rich off global warming alarmism.
April 4th, 2016 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
Exactly 9 years ago this week, the eastern U.S. was plunged into below-freezing weather after an unusually warm March just got things growing. The result was about $2 billion in agricultural losses across 16 states.
Similar to that Easter 2007 event, the current forecast for late this week has temperatures into the lower 20s as far south as South Carolina; both Saturday and Sunday morning should see below-freezing temperatures into Alabama and Georgia (forecast graphics courtesy of Weatherbell.com):
Morning low temperatures forecast from the GFS model for Saturday and Sunday (9-10 April 2016). Graphics courtesy of Weatherbell.com.
The state with the greatest losses in 2007 was Georgia, with about $400 million in damage to blueberries, peaches, pecans, and livestock grasses.
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Tuesday and Wednesday morning will have extreme cold worst further north, with records so late in the season too.
Despite efforts by the administration and corrupted scientific societies to indoctrinate teachers about AGW, some good news. Roughly half reject the alarmists claims.
H. Sterling Burnett, Townhall | Apr 01, 2016
I recently found hope in an unexpected place: public schools.
A national survey of 1,500 public middle and high school science teachers, representing all 50 states, found just half of those who discuss climate change in the classroom have partaken of the climate alarmists’ Kool-Aid and are brainwashing students to believe humans are causing catastrophic climate change. The survey was conducted by the National Center for Science Education and published in the widely read academic journal Science.
Approximately 75 percent of science teachers in the survey reported they discuss global warming in the classroom, typically for less than an hour or two over the course of an academic year. Of those who do, just over half promote alarmists’ erroneous claim 97 percent of scientists have determined human fossil fuel use is causing catastrophic climate change. About 30 percent of science teachers who discuss climate change say humans may be partly to blame, but they also acknowledge natural factors have played a role. About 10 percent of science teachers deny humans play any role in climate change, and about 5 percent of those who discuss climate change in the classroom don’t discuss causes at all.
Refreshingly, while nearly 68 percent of those surveyed said they personally believe humans are causing global warming, many say they have left their personal opinions out of the classroom, choosing to advance the scientific method and present a balanced view of the evidence.
Based on the experiences I have had while working to keep partisanship on both sides of the climate change debate out of social studies textbooks Texas approved for adoption in 2014 and while battling to prevent sound climate science from being written out of West Virginia’s science curriculum standards in 2015, I have long feared the battle for the hearts and minds of America’s youth on climate issues had been lost. The recent national survey results should give new hope to climate change realists everywhere.
Climate change is occurring. In fact, Earth’s climate is always changing, but there is a significant scientific debate currently ongoing about whether human activities are responsible for all, some, or none of the recent changes to Earth’s climate. Despite claims to the contrary made by some global warming alarmists, scientists do not even agree on whether a warmer climate would be harmful or beneficial.
What’s taught about climate change in our nation’s classrooms should reflect the limited nature of what we can say with confidence concerning future climate and the causes driving any changes that do occur. Thankfully, it appears nearly half the science educators teaching climate change in the classroom agree the children under their care deserve being taught this truth.
If this survey provides an accurate picture of what’s really happening in U.S. classrooms, there is still time for proponents of a sound, balanced, nuanced understanding of climate science and public policy to make their case to public school science teachers.
A concerted outreach effort should be made by climate realists to engage teachers in the climate change debate. The effort should focus on persuading the 50 percent of teachers who deny any uncertainties exist concerning the human causes and catastrophic consequences of climate change to be more open-minded; to recognize natural factors contribute to climate change; that a changing climate will likely result in both benefits and costs; and that proposals currently being pushed by governments to combat global warming come at a high price and have almost no impact on rising temperatures or weather conditions.
Teachers who provide a balanced presentation of the climate change facts should be given high-quality teaching materials and access to classroom speakers who will present a realistic view of climate science and policy. Teachers who make an effort to teach sound, balanced science should be rewarded and supported.
Encouraging science teachers to cling to the scientific method, which demands the constant exercise of reasonable skepticism and testing theory against observed facts - all in the face of media hype and pressure from environmentalists to teach alarmist dogma in the classroom - might be the most long-lasting way to ensure misanthropic climate policies are not foisted upon an unaware, misinformed public now and in the future.
If your school-aged child is not asking you why you’re contributing to the destruction of Earth, thank his or her science teacher for sticking to a fair-and-balanced view of climate science. If your child is repeating frequently used false claims made by climate alarmists, kindly provide the child (and his or her teacher) with the scientific facts.
Investor’s Business Daily
Fraud: While the global warming alarmists have done a good job of spreading fright, they haven’t been so good at hiding their real motivation. Yet another one has slipped up and revealed the catalyst driving the climate scare.
We have been told now for almost three decades that man has to change his ways or his fossil-fuel emissions will scorch Earth with catastrophic warming. Scientists, politicians and activists have maintained the narrative that their concern is only about caring for our planet and its inhabitants. But this is simply not true. The narrative is a ruse. They are after something entirely different.
If they were honest, the climate alarmists would admit that they are not working feverishly to hold down global temperatures - they would acknowledge that they are instead consumed with the goal of holding down capitalism and establishing a global welfare state.
Have doubts? Then listen to the words of former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer:
“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.
So what is the goal of environmental policy?
“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer.
For those who want to believe that maybe Edenhofer just misspoke and doesn’t really mean that, consider that a little more than five years ago he also said that “the next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.”
Mad as they are, Edenhofer’s comments are nevertheless consistent with other alarmists who have spilled the movement’s dirty secret. Last year, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, made a similar statement.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said in anticipation of last year’s Paris climate summit.
“This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”
The plan is to allow Third World countries to emit as much carbon dioxide as they wish - because, as Edenhofer said, “in order to get rich one has to burn coal, oil or gas” - while at the same time restricting emissions in advanced nations. This will, of course, choke economic growth in developed nations, but they deserve that fate as they “have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community,” he said. The fanaticism runs so deep that one professor has even suggested that we need to plunge ourselves into a depression to fight global warming.
Perhaps Naomi Klein summed up best what the warming the fuss is all about in her book “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.”
“What if global warming isn’t only a crisis?” Klein asks in a preview of a documentary inspired by her book. “What if it’s the best chance we’re ever going to get to build a better world?”
In her mind, the world has to “change, or be changed” because an “economic system” - meaning free-market capitalism - has caused environmental “wreckage.”
This is how the global warming alarmist community thinks. It wants to frighten, intimidate and then assume command. It needs a “crisis” to take advantage of, a hobgoblin to menace the people, so that they will beg for protection from the imaginary threat. The alarmists’ “better world” is one in which they rule a global welfare state. They’ve admitted this themselves.
by James Delingpole 28 Mar 20161132
Climate change is the biggest scam in the history of the world - a $1.5 trillion-a-year conspiracy against the taxpayer, every cent, penny and centime of which ends in the pockets of the wrong kind of people, none of which goes towards a cause remotely worth funding, all of it a complete and utter waste. Here is an edited version of a speech on this subject I gave last week to the World Taxpayers’ Associations in Berlin.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen; Guten Abend meine Damen und Herren. May I say how grateful I am to Staffan Wennberg and the World Taxpayers Associations for inviting me to speak in Berlin. This is my first time here since 1978. I was a schoolboy then. I learned my first German: “Was trinken wir? Schultheiss Bier.” Now I’m grown up and married with children even older than I was then. Yesterday I went on a tour and I couldn’t help noticing there seem to have been one or two changes.
When I last came I have to confess that the Wall was the highlight of my trip. So echt Cold War. So Spy Who Came In From The Cold! I remember taking the U-bahn underneath the wall, passing through the East German side, and seeing empty grey platforms where the train never stopped, and lurking in the shadows grim looking guards with machine guns. And you know how they say: “If you’re not a communist by the time you’re 18 then you’re heartless and if you’re not a capitalist by the time you’re 40 then you’re brainless.”?
Well I’m afraid I skipped that first stage and went straight to the second. All it took was that little glimpse of East Germany - a place so horrible that if you tried to escape they would shoot you with machine guns - to give me an abiding preference for free markets. Small Government. And low taxes. Low taxes. To many of us here, I suspect, it seems so obvious why low taxes are a desirable thing.
We know, as Bastiat says: “The State is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” We’ve seen the performance of low-tax economies like Singapore and Hong Kong and compared it to the performance over the years of high-tax economies like Cuba, North Korea or France. And drawn the obvious conclusions. It’s obvious to us. The evidence supports it. Why isn’t it obvious to the rest of the world?
Well one of the big problems I think is that over the years taxation has acquired a moral dimension it never had originally. When bad King John sent his tax collectors round 13th century England, everyone knew it was to fund his unpopular wars with France. No one said as they handed over their hard-earned groats:"Well at least it’s going to make a better society.”
But today you hear it a lot. You hear people say things like “I don’t mind paying a bit extra in tax if it gives us a better health service.” Celebrities who try to reduce their taxes in complicated offshore schemes are pilloried in the newspaper.
Companies like Google, Starbucks and Amazon which avoid paying taxes find themselves boycotted and the subject of angry campaigns on Twitter. There’s an idea abroad that if you don’t pay your taxes you’re not being clever and canny - as you would have been considered in John’s day. Rather you’re shirking your moral duty to create a better world.
Well I disagree with this. I couldn’t disagree with it more strongly. I believe that far from being a moral force for good, taxes are - almost invariably - a force for greed, corruption, profligacy and waste.
As PJ O’Rourke once noted: ‘Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.’ Nowhere is this truer in the field of the environment which, I sincerely believe - and I’ve been doing a lot of research into this - must count among the biggest wastes of tax money in the history of the world.
Last year Climate Change Business Journal calculated that the total annual spend on the climate change industry is $1.5 trillion a year. All those carbon traders, climate researchers, renewables and biofuels experts, environment correspondents, professors of climate science at the University of East Anglia and the Potsdam Institute, sustainability officers on local councils, and so on, add up the cost of their grants and salaries and $1.5 trillion per year is the ballpark figure you reach.
So what does $1.5 trillion look like in a global economic context? Well, it’s roughly the amount we spend every year on the online shopping industry. $1.5 trillion on the global warming industry; $1.5 trillion on the online shopping industry. But there’s a key difference between these two industries. One exists to provide buyers and sellers what they want - to their mutual benefit; the other is a sham.
Buying stuff on the internet: it’s really useful, isn’t it? It has had a dramatically transforming effect on our quality of life, the way you can order a book at 11 o’clock on a Sunday night and have it appear on your doorstep the very next day. But how did this marvellous industry spring up? Was it because of all the special incentives and tax breaks granted by wise governments? Nope of course not. They weren’t necessary. The online shopping industry sprung up and grew and grew because it was what people wanted, where they chose - of their own volition - to spend their money. Now compare and contrast the global warming industry - which I call a Potemkin industry - because that’s what it is: a fraud; a sham; a conspiracy against the taxpayer.
Do you want to have a guess how much that industry would be worth if it weren’t for all the money funnelled into it via government grants and taxpayer levies and subsidies and regulatory capture? Pretty close to zero, I’d say. Take wind farms - my hobby horse. The cost of intermittent, unreliable wind energy is roughly twice the market rate for onshore wind; three times the market rate for onshore. Nobody’s going to pay that kind of money in the open market. The only way it’s going to happen if people are mandated by the government to do so: which is what of course has happened across Europe and in the US.
Warren Buffett has said it: “wind farms don’t make sense without the tax credit.”
They’re inefficient; they kill birds and bats; they spoil views; they’re environmentally unfriendly - rare earth minerals from China; they’re hazardous; they’re expensive; they’re ugly (well I think they are...)
And in few countries is the damage these monstrosities have done more obvious than in Germany, home of the hateful Energiewende. Energiewende means Energy Transition. It has been a disaster, as Rupert Darwall noted in a recent Telegraph article.
In 2004, the Green energy minister, Jurgen Trittin, claimed that the extra cost of renewable energy on monthly bills was equivalent to the cost of a scoop of ice cream. Nine years later, CDU minister Peter Altmaier said Energiewende could cost around 1 trillion Euros by the end of the 2030s. The cost of feed-in tariffs and other subsidies is currently 21.8bn a year; 20bn is being spent on a new north-south high voltage line and investment in other grid infrastructure is likely to double that number.
They cause real people real misery. In 2013, 345,000 German households could not pay their electricity bills because Energiewende had made them so expensive. That’s the financial damage they’ve caused. What about the environmental damage? Here we are in Germany, the Greenest nation on earth. Aren’t Greens supposed to care about animals? Well they don’t about bats, clearly.
Bats are special. The reason they’re so heavily protected by so many laws is that they are a K-selected species. That is, they reproduce very slowly, live a long time and are easy to wipe out. Having evolved with few predators - flying at night helps - bats did very well with this strategy until the modern world. But now we have all those eco-friendly wind turbines. Or as I call them bird-slicing, bat-chomping eco-crucifixes. A recent study in Germany by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research showed that bats killed by German turbines may have come from places 1000 or more miles away. This would suggest that German turbines - which one study claims kill more than 200,000 bats a year - may be depressing populations across the entire northeastern portion of Europe.
Why would anyone put up such things. One reason and one reason only: follow the money. Where does the money come from? Us!
Who made the decision to spend that money? Not us. Oh definitely not us. Had it been us we might have done a bit of basic due diligence. Like, OK, so these wind turbines are necessary you say to save the planet from the threat of catastrophic and unprecedented man-made global warming? Correct.
So has the planet ever been as warm in human history as it is today? Well, only in the Minoan warming period and the Roman warming period and the Medieval warming period. Just those. Right. And presumably back then all that CO2 heavy industry was burning was a real problem? No just kidding...Out of interest how much has the planet warmed in the last few years?
About 0.8 degrees C since 1850.
Right so since the end of the Little Ice Age (so called because it was characterised by unpleasant cold) and years like the infamous Year Without A Summer (1816), the planet has heated by less than the temperature increase you’d get on a spring day between say breakfast and mid-morning coffee time?
Ah yes but the computer models…
Indeed the computer models. Those amazing models which have been predicting catastrophic, runaway warming, when there has been no significant warming since 1998 - so for eighteen years there has been no global warming? Ah yes but the temperatures of February 2016…
Look I could go on like this forever. I’ve been listening to these increasingly desperate excuses for decades. Perhaps some of you here believe them - if so, there’s a bridge I’d like to sell you…
But it really doesn’t matter whether you believe in global warming or not because here’s the reality: All that money we’re being to spend on the global warming industry - that $1.5 trillion I mentioned earlier siphoned straight out of taxpayers’ pockets - it isn[t going to make the blindest bit of difference. No, I exaggerate. It will make a teeny weeny bit of difference. Bjorn Lomborg has done the calculations. You’re going to love this, if you havent heard this before. These figures are just amazing.
So recently you’ll recall there was a big UN climate conference in Paris COP 21 and all the leaders of the world flew in to save the planet from global warming. But before they turned up, each delegate nation made a voluntary agreement as to how much it was going to cut its carbon emissions. Not compulsory, note. So these countries are free at any stage to abandon their carbon reduction targets - as funnily enough South Korea did last week. This is how much - best case scenario - that various countries are prepared to do to combat climate change.
So Lomborg added up all the countries INDCs - that stands for Intended Nationally Determined Contributions - and worked out, using the climate alarmists[ own models, what effect all this would have on global temperature. Do you want to know how much? (Oh this is the optimistic scenario by the way, not the pessimistic one). If all the countries do their bit then the total reduction in global warming - by the year 2100 will be 0.170 degrees Centigrade. As a climate sceptic friend of mine pointed out at the time, you’d experience a bigger temperature increase than that just walking down from the top to the bottom of the Eiffel tower.
So there’s your deal folks: you - and taxpayers like you - are paying $1.5 trillion a year to reduce the world’s temperatures by the end of this century by 0.170. It’s so perfectly ridiculous it’s almost funny.
And I suppose on a personal level I shouldn’t complain. I call climate change ‘the gift that goes on giving’ because day in day out I get an endless stream of stories to write about the corruption, incompetence, skullduggery of the climate alarmism industry. But, putting my career aside for the moment, is this really a world we’d like to live in? Can it be right that people who have worked hard for their money should have it taken from them and then wasted in so spectacular fashion?
And it’s not just the waste that’s so bad it’s worse than that. If it were simply a form of taxpayer-funded welfare scheme for otherwise unemployable environmental sciences graduates that would be one thing. But this is causing real, lasting harm in any number of ways.
The corrupting effects on science - and the scientific method - which at times are almost redolent of Lysenkoism of the Stalin era. The brainwashing of schoolchildren such as you might have found with the Young Pioneers. The economic damage caused by the misallocation of resources, as so frequently happens in Communist countries. The pollution caused by diesel (introduced, on EU recommendation, because it’s supposedly more CO2-friendly) which calls to mind Chernobyl or the poisoning of the Aral Sea. The human suffering of those 345,000 German households I mentioned who can’t pay their electricity bills.
Does this authoritarianism and corruption and incompetence remind you of anything? Well it has often been said - and there is much anecdotal evidence to support this - that after the Berlin Wall came down the left had a bit of a problem. Capitalism had won the economic argument. Where could the left go next?
But the solution was there waiting them - the green movement. In the guise of saving the world’s environment they could advance all their usual obsessions - control, regulation, state intervention, puritanism, compulsory immiseration - though this time with a smiling, fluffy face. Watermelons they call them: green on the outside, red on the inside.
So the Berlin Wall came down but it never really went away. And sometimes I look at the world and what has been happening with the rise and rise of green lunacy and I ask myself: did the right side really win the Cold War or is it just an illusion?
