A shortened but extremely relevant and timely one day conference was put on by the Heartland in DC to attempt to get the message to decision makers in time for the votes on important energy and climate legislation.

As Joe Bast indicated the purpose of the conference was to ask the tough questions about what we really know about the science and economics of global warming. For example:

Does new research indicate that the likely human effect on climate is less than previously thought?

Would reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the United States have any effect on global temperatures?

There were 46 co-sponsors including Icecap. There were 18 speakers in the climate and economics of the legislation now being considered in congress. All talks will be posted on the Heartland.org website ASAP and linked to on Icecap.

The speakers on the climate showed the models are failing and why - my favorite take-away was Willie Soon’s comment ‘garbage in and gospel out’. Dr. Richard Lindzen and Dr. Roy Spencer showed the models dismal failures relate to the assumptions that clouds and water vapor deliver a strong positive feedback whereas satellite data shows the feedback is clearly negative. Lord Monckton got the same results through detailed analysis the of climate sensitivity (to greenhouse gases) which he showed was much smaller than the IPCC and other modelers conveniently assume. 

The economists painted a very frightening picture of the cap-and tax Waman Markey bill. It is officially called a cap-and-trade to disguise the fact that it is a tax and as Michigan Democrat Dingell noted a “huge tax”. We heard numbers ranging as high as $4,600 per year per family including energy and cost of goods and service that will be forced to rise because of the changes made. Even James Hansen and Ralph Nader oppose cap-and tax as give-aways to special interests without doing any measurable good. At the conference, we heard that the changes even if adopted globally (highly unlikely) would not appreciably reduce carbon emissions nor affect global temperatures in any measurable way.

It would mark the biggest BAILOUT by far. The auto bailout cost 7 billion, the Geitner bailout (so-called stimulus) 787 billion. The Waxman Markey bill could exceed $9.4 trillion according to the Marshall Jeff Kueter with little if any measurable effect on global temperatures.

Though prospects for passage in the house are generally considered likely, there are questions about the senate. Please contact your representative and attend town hall meetings and let them and the other constituents what this bill is really all about and why it is based on faulty science and should be rejected. And remember to call it what it really is - a Cap-and-Tax plan. 

Economist Dr. Gabriel Calzada of King Juan Carlos University in Madrid reviewed the dismal performance of cap-and-trade mandates in Spain, where unemployment has reached a daunting 18 percent, carbon emissions are higher today than before cap-and-trade was installed, and fraud and misrepresentation of emission abatement programs are rampant.

Calzada dismissed claims that such policies have created “green jobs” in the Spanish economy and presented data that showed Spanish businesses have spent billions of dollars on carbon credits and abatement programs, resulting in two jobs being lost in the regular economy or never being created for every one job created in the “green economy.”

Read the Heartland’s Dan Miller’s detailed summary here. Presentations will be posted here ASAP. 

Read one of the few media stories about the conference in the Virginia Pilot here.

One of the attendees, an Australian Senator, Stephen Fielding came to hear an alternative to the dogma spit out by the Australian global warming community. The meeting left him questioning global warming hype as reported here.

Professor Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, a prominent proponent of man-made global warming fears, appears to be backing off of his boast that he could “slaughter” skeptical scientists in a global warming debate. In a May 24, 2009 interview, Schneider publicly boasted any skeptical scientist would be “slaughtered in public debate” against him.

But after many dissenting scientists happily took up the debate challenge, it now appears Schneider is shying away from any such debate.

“I certainly will not schedule some political show debate in front of a non-scientific audience,” Schneider told the San Francisco Examiner in a follow up June 1, 2009 article.

“A presidential like debate format with shallow staccato jibes and no nuanced arguments, no--confusion only in that style. I never do those anymore,” Schneider explained.

Former Colorado State Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. publicly accepted Schneider’s global warming debate challenge just days after it was issued. “I would be glad to debate Dr. Schneider...he represents a narrow perspective on climate science,” Pielke Sr. said on May 24, 2009. [Editor’s Note: Climate Depot was copied on many emails from scientists writing to Professor Schneider accepting his debate challange and Climate Depot also received numerous notes from many scientists eager to accept Schneider’s debate challenge in the past week.]

“If [Climatologist] Roger [Pielke Sr.] wants a debate, he can set one up at the American Meteorological Society meeting or the American Geophysical Union meeting and if dates work I’ll be happy to go and will encourage others like Ben Santer or Kevin Trenberth to join in. That I would do,” Schneider now asserts. Read more here.

In other words, like the sports teams that prefer to play in the friendly confines of their home park than at a hostile away team’s stadium, Schneider insists on having the debate at one of the conferences attended by grant toting scientists and thus have a crowd of fellow alarmists to cheer him on and TO MAKE IT A FAIR FIGHT, wants to team up with Trenberth and Santer against Roger Pielke Sr.

This is an official NCAR News Release (National Center for Atmospheric Research) Apparently, they have solar forecasting techniques down to a “science”, as boldly demonstrated in this press release.  Anthony Watts

Scientists Issue Unprecedented Forecast of Next Sunspot Cycle
BOULDER - The next sunspot cycle will be 30-50% stronger than the last one and begin as much as a year late, according to a breakthrough forecast using a computer model of solar dynamics developed by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Predicting the Sun’s cycles accurately, years in advance, will help societies plan for active bouts of solar storms, which can slow satellite orbits, disrupt communications, and bring down power systems.

The scientists have confidence in the forecast because, in a series of test runs, the newly developed model simulated the strength of the past eight solar cycles with more than 98% accuracy. The forecasts are generated, in part, by tracking the subsurface movements of the sunspot remnants of the previous two solar cycles. The team is publishing its forecast in the current issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

NCAR scientists Mausumi Dikpati (left), Peter Gilman, and Giuliana de Toma examine results from a new computer model of solar dynamics. (Photo by Carlye Calvin, UCAR)

The Sun goes through approximately 11-year cycles, from peak storm activity to quiet and back again. Solar scientists have tracked them for some time without being able to predict their relative intensity or timing. “Our model has demonstrated the necessary skill to be used as a forecasting tool,” says NCAR scientist Mausumi Dikpati, the leader of the forecast team at NCAR’s High Altitude Observatory that also includes Peter Gilman and Giuliana de Toma. Forecasting the cycle may help society anticipate solar storms, which can disrupt communications and power systems and affect the orbits of satellites. The storms are linked to twisted magnetic fields in the Sun that suddenly snap and release tremendous amounts of energy. They tend to occur near dark regions of concentrated magnetic fields, known as sunspots.

The NCAR team’s computer model, known as the Predictive Flux-transport Dynamo Model, draws on research by NCAR scientists indicating that the evolution of sunspots is caused by a current of plasma, or electrified gas, that circulates between the Sun’s equator and its poles over a period of 17 to 22 years. This current acts like a conveyor belt of sunspots.

The sunspot process begins with tightly concentrated magnetic field lines in the solar convection zone (the outermost layer of the Sun’s interior). The field lines rise to the surface at low latitudes and form bipolar sunspots, which are regions of concentrated magnetic fields. When these sunspots decay, they imprint the moving plasma with a type of magnetic signature. As the plasma nears the poles, it sinks about 200,000 kilometers (124,000 miles) back into the convection zone and starts returning toward the equator at a speed of about one meter (three feet) per second or slower. The increasingly concentrated fields become stretched and twisted by the internal rotation of the Sun as they near the equator, gradually becoming less stable than the surrounding plasma. This eventually causes coiled-up magnetic field lines to rise up, tear through the Sun’s surface, and create new sunspots. The subsurface plasma flow used in the model has been verified with the relatively new technique of helioseismology, based on observations from both NSF- and NASA-supported instruments. This technique tracks sound waves reverberating inside the Sun to reveal details about the interior, much as a doctor might use an ultrasound to see inside a patient.

Predicting Cycles 24 and 25

The Predictive Flux-transport Dynamo Model is enabling NCAR scientists to predict that the next solar cycle, known as Cycle 24, will produce sunspots across an area slightly larger than 2.5% of the visible surface of the Sun. The scientists expect the cycle to begin in late 2007 or early 2008, which is about 6 to 12 months later than a cycle would normally start. Cycle 24 is likely to reach its peak about 2012.

By analyzing recent solar cycles, the scientists also hope to forecast sunspot activity two solar cycles, or 22 years, into the future. The NCAR team is planning in the next year to issue a forecast of Cycle 25, which will peak in the early 2020s. “This is a significant breakthrough with important applications, especially for satellite-dependent sectors of society,” explains NCAR scientist Peter Gilman.

The NCAR team received funding from the National Science Foundation and NASA’s Living with a Star program. The date of this NCAR News Release is March 6, 2006. See full story and the many comments here.

We all know that the financial stakes are enormous in the global warming debate - many oil, coal and power companies are at risk should carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases get regulated in a manner that harms their bottom line. The potential losses of an Exxon or a Shell are chump change, however, compared to the fortunes to be made from those very same regulations.

Some of the climate-change profiteers are relatively unknown corporations; others are household names with only their behind-the-scenes role in the climate-change industry unknown. Over the next few weeks, in an extended newspaper series, you will become familiar with some of the profiteers, and with their machinations. This series begins with Enron, a pioneer in the climate-change industry.

Almost two decades before President Barack Obama made “cap-and-trade” for carbon dioxide emissions a household term, an obscure company called Enron - a natural-gas pipeline company that had become a big-time trader in energy commodities - had figured out how to make millions in a cap-and-trade program for sulphur dioxide emissions, thanks to changes in the U.S. government’s Clean Air Act. To the delight of shareholders, Enron’s stock price rose rapidly as it became the major trader in the U.S. government’s $20-billion a year emissions commodity market.

The climate-change industry - the scientists, lawyers, consultants, lobbyists and, most importantly, the multinationals that work behind the scenes to cash in on the riches at stake - has emerged as the world’s largest industry. Virtually every resident in the developed world feels the bite of this industry, often unknowingly, through the hidden surcharges on their food bills, their gas and electricity rates, their gasoline purchases, their automobiles, their garbage collection, their insurance, their computers purchases, their hotels, their purchases of just about every good and service, in fact, and finally, their taxes to governments at all levels.

These extractions do not happen by accident. Every penny that leaves the hands of consumers does so by design, the final step in elaborate and often brilliant orchestrations of public policy, all the more brilliant because the public, for the most part, does not know who is profiteering on climate change, or who is aiding and abetting the profiteers.

Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, keen to engineer an encore, saw his opportunity when Bill Clinton and Al Gore were inaugurated as president and vice-president in 1993. To capitalize on Al Gore’s interest in global warming, Enron immediately embarked on a massive lobbying effort to develop a trading system for carbon dioxide, working both the Clinton administration and Congress. Political contributions and Enron-funded analyses flowed freely, all geared to demonstrating a looming global catastrophe if carbon dioxide emissions weren’t curbed. An Enron-funded study that dismissed the notion that calamity could come of global warming, meanwhile, was quietly buried.

To magnify the leverage of their political lobbying, Enron also worked the environmental groups. Between 1994 and 1996, the Enron Foundation donated $1-million to the Nature Conservancy and its Climate Change Project, a leading force for global warming reform, while Lay and other individuals associated with Enron donated $1.5-million to environmental groups seeking international controls on carbon dioxide.

The intense lobbying paid off. Lay became a member of president Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development, as well as his friend and advisor. In the summer of 1997, prior to global warming meetings in Kyoto, Japan, Clinton sought Lay’s advice in White House discussions. The fruits of Enron’s efforts came soon after, with the signing of the Kyoto Protocol.

An internal Enron memo, sent from Kyoto by John Palmisano, a former Environmental Protection Agency regulator who had become Enron’s lead lobbyist as senior director for Environmental Policy and Compliance, describes the historic corporate achievement that was Kyoto.

“If implemented this agreement will do more to promote Enron’s business than will almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring of the energy and natural-gas industries in Europe and the United States,” Polisano began. “The potential to add incremental gas sales, and additional demand for renewable technology is enormous.”

The memo, entitled “Implications of the Climate Change Agreement in Kyoto and What Transpired,” summarized the achievements that Enron had accomplished. “I do not think it is possible to overestimate the importance of this year in shaping every aspect of this agreement,” he wrote, citing three issues of specific importance to Enron which would become, as those following the climate-change debate in detail now know, the biggest money plays: the rules governing emissions trading, the rules governing transfers of emission reduction rights between countries, and the rules governing a gargantuan clean energy fund.

Exxon Mobil Corp., the world’s largest refiner, said the transition away from oil-derived fuels is probably 100 years away.

Petroleum-based fuels including gasoline and diesel, as well as hydrocarbons such as coal and natural gas, will remain the dominant sources of energy for factories, offices, homes and cars for decades because there are no viable alternatives, Chief Executive Officer Rex Tillerson told reporters today after Exxon Mobil’s annual shareholders meeting in Dallas.

In the U.S., which burns a quarter of global oil supplies, consumers probably face higher fuel prices if lawmakers impose greenhouse-gas rules that inflate fuel-production costs, Tillerson said. A plan introduced by Democrats this month would allocate a limited number of emission credits to refiners and electricity producers, with the aim of curbing greenhouse gases.

“The oil-gas-refining side of the business received a very, very small amount of the allocations, which means that sector will bear more of the costs more immediately,” Tillerson said. “If we’re going to place a price on carbon, let’s do that in the most efficient way. A carbon tax is more efficient than a tax that’s applied by way of a cap-and-trade mechanism.”

Tillerson, 57, said lawmakers are hurrying to restrict greenhouse gases when many scientific questions surrounding the global warming issue remain unresolved.

“The point of conflict that I find more often than not are the projections that some make regarding how serious the problem may become and at what pace of acceleration it may occur,” Tillerson told investors at the shareholders meeting. “All of those models have deficiencies in the way they’re constructed and the assumptions that go into the models and the limitations of the data.”

Tillerson, a University of Texas-trained engineer, said climate change is a “serious risk-management issue” for Exxon Mobil. The company will continue to fund scientific research into climate science and the impact of greenhouse gases on the atmosphere, he said.

“We’re going to be very forthright in not accepting something that is not completely scientifically proven,” Tillerson said. “We’re not skeptics. We’re just approaching this the way we would approach any scientific challenge, and it’s a serious challenge.” Read more here.