Dr. James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has announced that 2010 was the “hottest year on record” - by 0.01 degrees. His claim has been widely touted in the press as strong evidence that the climate is rapidly heating - due to human generated CO2 emissions. Dr. Hansen has also stated : “I would not be surprised if most or all groups found that 2010 was tied for the warmest year.”

But most groups do not support his claim. The other independent source of surface temperatures HadCRUT, shows 2010 cooler than 1998. The graph below shows the month to month differences. Blue represents months where 2010 was cooler than 1998.

Enlarged.

The next graph shows the HadCRUT temperature anomalies for each year since 1998. Last year was not a remarkable year, and was not as warm as 1998.

Enlarged.

Similarly, full year satellite temperatures from RSS show 2010 monthly and annual anomalies lower than 1998.

Enlarged.

Satellite data from UAH also shows 2010 slightly cooler than 1998.

The graph below shows 2010 monthly temperatures for each of the four primary data sets. As you can see, the month-to-month behavior of GISS global temperatures during 2010 was out of kilter with other data sources.

Enlarged.

Note that GISS (blue) showed a large temperature spike in March - which was not seen by others. And from July through November, GISS increased sharply while everyone else showed temperatures dropping - due to a near record cold La Nina. La Nina is indicated by ocean temperatures well below normal across much of the Pacific Ocean.

The November spike was followed in December by the largest month-to-month drop in the 130 year GISS record. What sudden change in the climate could have caused a sharp December drop after four months of rise? A plausible explanation is that the August-November reported GISS temperatures were too high, and that December came back more in line with reality.

NOAA shows that ocean surface temperatures across much of the Pacific have been the coldest on record since July (yet GISS temperatures rose sharply during that time.)

COMPARISONS VS. 1998

The HadCRUT graph below shows that 2010 was not a remarkable year for temperatures, and was cooler than 1998. In fact, HadCRUT also shows that temperatures have not warmed appreciably (if at all) since 1998.

Enlarged.

By contrast, Dr. Hansen claims that temperatures have increased steadily since the mid-1970s. “Global temperature is rising as fast in the past decade as in the prior two decades”

However, even his own data shows no significant trend since 1992, and chances are that the GISS January, 2011 anomaly will be one of the lowest of the past decade.

Enlarged.

The UK Met Office explicitly contradicts Dr. Hansen’s claim: “In the last 10 years the rate of warming has decreased.”

See reasons why Hansen is so hot and much more here.

The EPA’s Lisa Jackson in her opening statement in front of congress this week said:

“Based on the best peer-reviewed science, EPA found in 2009 that manmade greenhouse gas emissions do threaten the health and welfare of the American people.” [THIS IS A REFERENCE TO the DECEMBER 2009 Endangerment Finding: see links BELOW to select comments submitted to the EPA]

Lynn Goldman of the APHA in testimony stated the following:

“Climate change is already dramatically affecting the health of people around the world especially in the developing world. According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 166,000 deaths and about 5.5 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs, a measure of overall disease burden) were attributable to climate change in 2000.”

And concluded:

“Growing scientific consensus shows us that the climate is changing in ways that increasingly affect the health of people around the world. Because climate influences how people live, breathe and eat as well as the availability of water, populations everywhere, including the United States, may already be experiencing the health impacts of these changes. This is especially true among our most vulnerable populations, children, the elderly and the poor.

We cannot afford to delay or ignore addressing the health impacts of climate change.”
Reality Check:

Dr. Indur Goklany in Global public health: Global warming in perspective. Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 14 (3): 69-75 (2009) responded to the quoted report.

“The methodology used in the WHO reports (Table 1 below, enlarged) to estimate mortality (and burden of disease) from global warming essentially is to assign fractions of deaths occurring from real causes (e.g., diarrhea and malaria) to hypothesized underlying risk factors (e.g., global warming). Thus, malnutrition (hunger) accounted for 52% of the DALYs attributed to global warming; diarrhea (from food and waterborne disease), 26%; malaria, 18%; flooding, 3%. In addition to 154,000 deaths in 2000 from diarrhea, malaria, dengue, flooding, and malnutrition assumed to result from climate change (global warming), the study from which this estimate was obtained added 12,000 deaths from presumed climate-change-induced cardiovascular disease. This estimate of 166,000 deaths in 2000 attributable to global warming was also the basis for the estimate provided in a 2005 review article in, which was then picked up and repeated in various influential publications.

That is, the analysis was guided more by the need to satisfy a policy agenda than rigorous scientific methodology. As a result, as the above quotation implicitly acknowledges, the estimates for global warming are based on, at best, poorly validated models.”

And in Deaths and Death Rates from Extreme Weather Events: 1900-2008. Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 14 (4): 102-09 (2009), he shows global death and death rates declining (below, enlarged).

In the study he concludes: “Current deaths and death rates from extreme weather events for both the U.S. and the globe are, in general, lower than in previous decades. Predictably, annual death rates have declined more rapidly than annual deaths, confirming results from previous studies. This indicates that the total risk of death from such events has actually declined, notwithstanding any increases in the number or intensity of extreme weather events that some claim to have occurred. Globally as well as for the United States, the aggregate contribution of extreme weather events to the mortality burden is currently minor - on the order of 0.06%.”

Also see:

Discounting the Future, Regulation 32: 36-40 (Spring 2009).

Is Climate Change the “Defining Challenge of Our Age”? Energy & Environment 20(3): 279-302 (2009).

PDF

Here are some of the comments filed to the EPA on their endangerment finding. Here was a submission that combined many different comments I made to the EPA. Here also is a powerful letter to the EPA signed by 35 scientists that challenged the science used in making their endangerment finding on 18 major points. 

Here is an excellent summary of all the issues with wind power, why it hasn’t worked and won’t work for meeting future energy needs and why environmentalists and politicians push it despite that fact to achieve other agendas. It is a must read.

Why are governments still mollycoddling wind power?

Wind power should compete on an equal basis with all other electricity generation options.

Europe Pulling the Plug on Green Energy Subsidies

“The Spanish and Germans are doing it. So are the French. The British might have to do it. Austerity-whacked Europe is rolling back subsidies for renewable energy as economic sanity makes a tentative comeback. Green energy is becoming unaffordable and may cost as many jobs as it creates.

But the real victims are the investors who bought into the dream of endless, clean energy financed by the taxpayer. They forgot that governments often change their minds.” Eric Reguly, The Globe and Mail, 27 Jan 2011. Reported in CCNet 28 Jan 2011.

See the full report and copy and distribute to friends and family. It should make you and them rethink wind as a solution and start objecting to those in power who push it.

A legislative bid for New Hampshire to pull out of a 10-state, regional greenhouse gas initiative turned into an ideological war Thursday over the credibility of the science of climate change.

But Gov. John Lynch tried to steer the debate to one of dollars and cents, warning that repeal of the 3-year-old law would hit businesses and consumers in the wallet.

“Withdrawing from RGGI would be a blow to our economy and to our state’s efforts to become more energy efficient and energy independent,” Lynch wrote to the House Science Technology and Energy Committee, which hosted an all-day hearing on the repeal bill (HB 519) in Representatives Hall.

New Hampshire became the last of the states in the region to sign onto RGGI, which makes polluters buy allowances for carbon dioxide emissions that studies show contribute to greenhouse gases.

Jessica O’Hare, program associated at Environment New Hampshire, said this form of cap-and-trade encourages businesses to change New Hampshire’s status as one of the top five states in consumption of oil per capita. “It helps New Hampshire reduce our reliance on oil and other fossil fuels,” O’Heare said. “This will make the state more economically secure and reduce pollution.”

Joseph D’Aleo, a Hudson meterologist and climatologist said CO2 is not a pollutant but a beneficial gas and these programs have no measurable effect on climate. “RGGI represents the epitome of all-pain-and-no-gain scenario,” D’Aleo said.

Eric Werme, a Boscawen software engineer and climate enthusiast, agreed and said ocean currents have had much more to do with affecting climate and warming of the planet than any man-made program to encourage reduction of emissions.

“I consider it premature for government to try and influence any restriction on CO2 emissions at this point,” Werme said.

But Kenneth Colburn of Stonyfield Farm Yogurt in Londonderry, said the program has already led to $21 million worth of energy efficiencies and 1,130 jobs. Repeal of the program would hurt the state economically, he warned. “This will increase costs on New Hampshire businesses and citizens and provide them with no accompanying benefit whatsoever,” said Colburn, a former state director of air resources.

“This is hardly the New Hampshire way, and would detract from rather than contribute to the New Hampshire advantage.” Lynch maintained since RGGI began, it has cost consumers $11 million and delivered $28 million in benefits.

Current Air Resources Director David Scott said RGGI is a modest program that encourages and does not punish businesses regarding their emissions.
“RGGI was never meant to solve the climate change issue; it was meant to be a modest, unique program and it has been,” Scott added. Post here.

Icecap Note: with required purchase of allowances the costs for electricity/energy prices rise, which has a ripple effect, translating into higher costs for manufacturing and transportation and for running retail and service business and thus higher costs for all goods and services. That is a stealth tax. Like in the Federal Goverenment, the ‘benefits’ go to inflated bureaucracies and subsidized industries - like alternative energy and energy efficiency corporations. The state does not need to tax indiustry and consumers to provide these businesses relief, just reduce their tax liability. If their businesses make sense, they will survive. In many of the other states in the northeast under RGGI, money from allowances goes into the general fund, to fund state business and reduce huge deficits. It is on top of state taxes. Attached are the two presentations submitted to the committee here and here. Here was a great introductory statement by Andrew Manuse, a legislator to the committee.

The Bangor Daily news reported NH last year raided the funds to help pay for other state spending. They are not alone. You can’t trust bureacrats to spend tax dollars wisely or as they originally promised.

As noted previously on GlobalWarming.Org, Obama’s “Clean Energy Standard” would effectively impose the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill’s emission reduction target on the electric power sector.

Under Obama’s proposal, “By 2035, 80% of America’s electricity will come from clean energy sources” (i.e. from wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, “clean coal,” and natural gas). Similarly, an estimated 81% of U.S. electricity would come from such sources in 2030 in the Energy Information Administration’s “Basic Case” analysis of the Waxman-Markey bill.

There is one difference though. Emission reductions accomplished via Soviet-style production quota (mandates) such as a clean energy standard would likely be more costly than emission reductions accomplished via market-like mechanisms such as cap-and-trade. National Journal reporter Amy Harder spotted this issue last Friday:

“One of the things that happens implicitly when you set a standard is that you have in fact put a price on carbon, but it’s the clumsiest way to do it,” said Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners, an energy consulting company. “You’re not looking for an efficient, market-based solution. You’re looking for just enough to meet the standards solution.”

Get the picture? The public rejected cap-and-trade, punishing at the polls several Members of Congress who voted for Waxman-Markey. Instead of abandoning a policy designed to make our electric rates “necessarily skyrocket,” Obama offers a more costly version of the same agenda.

Cap-and-trade is dead because the public finally caught on that it is a stealth energy tax, a big reason being that it makes coal - the most economic electricity fuel in many markets - uncompetitive. Coal generated 44.5% of all U.S. electricity and almost 64% of U.S. baseload power in 2009, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Obama’s clean energy standard too would make coal generation uneconomic. “Clean” essentially means “anything but coal.” Instead of pricing the carbon emissions from coal, as a cap-and-trade program does, Obama’s new policy would simply prohibit “conventional coal” from competing with other energy sources in 80% of the nation’s electricity market. Existing coal plants could continue to operate within the 20% segment that is deemed “unclean” - unless, of course, EPA’s war on coal succeeds in forcing those plants into premature retirement.

Unless CCS gets a whole lot cheaper soon, Obama’s clean energy standard will effectively ban the construction of new coal-fired power plants. That is a long-standing goal of the Sierra Club and other eco-litigation groups. However, it is emphatically not what either major party campaigned for in last year’s congressional races.

On the day after Election Day, Obama told the Washington press corps: “Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way.  It was a means, not an end.  And I’m going to be looking for other means to address this problem.” Obama’s proposed clean energy standard would skin the cat known as the American ratepayer every bit as much - and perhaps more - than cap-and-trade.

See full post.