Restricting and taxing energy use to prevent speculative climate disasters would be disastrous. “Electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” under cap-and-trade,” President Obama has admitted. “Industry will have to retrofit its operations. That will cost money, and they will pass that cost on to consumers.” Cap-and-trade, Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) eagerly observed, is “the most significant revenue-generating proposal of our time.”

Not one congressman even read the numbingly complex 1427-page Waxman-Markey global warming bill, before the House of Representatives voted on it. A new version of the Kerry-Boxer Senate bill provides no details about how carbon allowances would be allocated under a mandatory emissions reduction program.

The process recalls Churchill’s description of Russia: “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Here we are dealing with estimates wrapped in assumptions inside speculation - based on assertions that Earth faces a manmade climate disaster.

The only thing known with certainty is that cap-tax-and-trade will inflict intense pain for no environmental gain - on regions, states, communities, industries, companies and families. It is a complicated regulatory scheme that penalizes businesses and people who use electricity and other forms of energy derived from oil, gasoline, natural gas and coal.

Cap-tax-and-trade would place limits on how much carbon dioxide America would be allowed to generate, and the limits would decrease drastically over time. Companies and utilities would be issued permits, saying how much CO2 they can put into the air each year. If they cannot stay within that limit, they will have to switch to wind, solar, nuclear or geothermal energy (assuming those sources can be built, in the face of regulation and litigation); capture the CO2 and store it somewhere (via technologies that do not yet exist); or buy more permits from US or foreign companies that don’t need as much energy (through a new international financial, trading and carbon derivatives market).

Cap-and-trade restricts and taxes hydrocarbon energy use. Because 85% of America’s energy is hydrocarbons, prices will soar for everything we heat, cool, drive, make, grow, eat and do. The impacts will be especially painful in scores of states that depend on coal for 50-98% of their electricity, refine petroleum for the nation’s vehicles, and manufacture products that improve, enhance and safeguard our lives.

The complex system will be administered by profit-seeking carbon management and trading firms, regulated and policed by thousands of government bureaucrats, and paid by every family, driver, business, school district, hospital, airline, traveler and farmer.

The ostensible goal is to stabilize planetary temperatures, climates and weather patterns that have never been stable, by slashing carbon dioxide emissions 83% below 2005 levels by 2050.

The last time America emitted that amount of CO2 was 1908! Once we account for the far lower population, manufacturing, transportation and electrification levels of a century ago, 2050 carbon dioxide emissions would have to equal what the United States emitted after the Civil War!

That would require monumental changes in lifestyles and living standards. It would mean politicians and unelected pressure groups, bureaucrats and judges will limit or dictate home building, heating, cooling and lighting decisions; transportation and vacation choices; how food can be grown and shipped; what kinds of products can be purchased and how they must be manufactured; and how much energy must come from subsidized, unreliable renewable sources. 

Restrictions and taxes on fossil fuels will hit our manufacturing heartland especially hard, as it is heavily dependent on coal and natural gas. The American Council for Capital Formation calculated that Waxman-Markey would spike Indiana’s electricity prices nearly 60% by 2030 - increasing school and hospital energy costs 28-42% and causing numerous jobs to be exported to Asia, where there will be few restrictions on CO2 emissions. Numerous other states would be similarly hard hit, says ACCF.

Other experts have calculated that cap-and-trade would destroy millions of American jobs, raise energy costs for the average US family by $1,400 to $3,100 per year and send overall food and living costs upward by $4,600 annually. Will you be able to afford that?

Poor families may get energy welfare. Wealthier families can absorb these costs. But cap-and-trade will severely affect middle class families. They would be forced to pay skyrocketing energy and food costs, by cutting their college, retirement and vacation budgets. Hospitals and school districts would have to raise fees and taxes, or cut services. Cities and states would have to cover rising welfare and unemployment costs, as tax revenues dwindle. Tourism-based businesses and economies would get hammered. 

Switching to renewable energy does not merely increase costs and reduce reliability. It also affects the environment. Ethanol mandates would mean growing corn or switchgrass on farmland the size of Montana, and using vast amounts of water, fertilizer, diesel fuel, natural gas and insecticides.

Wind and solar power would mean covering millions of acres of scenic, habitat and farm land with huge turbines and solar panels. Hundreds of millions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, fiberglass and “rare earth” minerals would be needed to build them and thousands of miles of new transmission lines to get the expensive renewable electricity to distant cities. Because the turbines and panels only work 10-30% of the time, back up natural gas generators would also be needed, meaning still more raw materials.

Even worse, all this pain would bring no benefits. Using global warming alarmists’ own computer models, climatologist Chip Knappenberger calculated that even an 83% reduction in US carbon dioxide emissions would result in global temperatures rising just 0.1 degrees F less by 2050 than not cutting US carbon dioxide emissions at all.

That’s because CO2 emissions from China, India and other countries would quickly dwarf America’s job-killing reductions. These nations are building a new coal-fired power plant every week and putting millions of new cars on growing networks of highways - to modernize, reduce poverty, improve human health, and ensure that families, offices, schools and hospitals have electricity. Germany plans to build 27 new coal-fired power plants by 2020, and Italy expects to double its reliance on coal by 2015.

Moreover, the 0.1 degree temperature reduction assumes rising CO2 causes global warming - a belief that thousands of scientists vigorously challenge, because there is little actual evidence to support the thesis.

Of course, some will gain from penalizing, taxing and hyper-regulating our economy. Al Gore and others involved in emission trading stand to make billions, from trillions of dollars in cap-and-trade transactions. Coastal states and companies that don’t rely on coal will benefit, as will companies that get excess or low-cost emission permits and can sell these allowances for handsome profits. Well-paid bureaucrats will have “green jobs” - as will scientists, eco-activists and renewable energy companies, who will share $6-10 billion annually in taxpayer cash, as long as they continue to conduct biased climate research, issue dire warnings about global warming cataclysms, and build wind and solar projects. 

Besides massive pain for no gain, cap-tax-and-trade will create an intrusive Green Nanny State that destroys jobs, reduces personal freedoms, and hobbles economic opportunities and civil rights. Our Earth is cooling. Our economy is in the tank. Congress and the White House need to stop hyperventilating about global warming, and let the free market get our economy back on track.

See PDF here. See also these two posts “Modelers History of Climate Change” here and “Al Gore, Junk Science Huckster” here.

Paul Driessen is senior policy adviser for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), which is sponsoring the All Pain No Gain petition against global-warming hype. He also is a senior policy adviser to the Congress of Racial Equality and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power - Black Death.

One such example below is from PSU meteorology grad Herb Stevens who has been in television meteorology at The Weather Channel, in local television in Albany and then throughout the northeast as the “Skiing Weatherman”. Herb serves as a forecaster and advisor to ski areas and golf courses across the country and was a caddy on the PGA tour. See plea at end of letter.

November 23, 2009

Dear Dr. Spanier:

In recent days, nearly a thousand emails from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit have been released for public scrutiny. They were obtained either through the actions of a hacker, or an inside whistleblower. While not condoning any illegal activities, I have read most of the emails and have found a good number of them to be very disturbing due to the participation of Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center. Based on the content of the emails, Dr. Mann, whose scientific methodologies have already been discredited with respect to his “hockey stick” temperature graph, seems to have been involved in an ongoing pattern of data manipulation, intimidation of scientific journal editors, constraint of the peer review process, and attempted avoidance of compliance with the Freedom of Information Act. As a Penn State meteorologist who has been active in the public discussion of climate change for more than ten years, I can attest to the fact that Dr. Mann’s reputation, and by extension that of Penn State, has been significantly sullied in recent years. These new revelations of Dr. Mann’s methods and actions will only exacerbate the situation and serve to darken the shade of the black eye currently sported by the University’s Earth Sciences Department.

In my opinion, Dr. Mann should be relieved of his duties based solely on the deceptive methods used in the creation of the hockey stick. If any of the matters seemingly revealed in the CRU emails have a shred of truth to them, then your course of action should be very simple...Dr. Mann must be terminated from his contract with The Pennsylvania State University.

I sincerely request that you look into this matter, recognizing that Dr. Mann’s presence on the faculty is undoubtedly responsible for a sizable amount of grant money. The money be damned. I would hope that you hold the members of the faculty to the standard so eloquently stated in the 4th verse of our Alma Mater..."May no act of ours bring shame, to ONE heart that loves thy name...May our lives but swell thy fame, Dear old State, dear old State.”

Thank you for your consideration of this matter.

Respectfully,

Herbert E. Stevens
North Kingstown, RI
Meteorology-1975

I appeal to all graduates of Penn State, and especially those of you who studied atmospheric sciences...If you believe as I do that Dr. Mann’s presence on the faculty has become a liability to the reputation of our alma mater, please let your feelings be known to President Graham Spanier. His email address is president@psu.edu. Thank you very much.

Also see this post by another Penn State grad and well known meteorologist Joe Bastardi on Climategate and Mann-made Global Warming here.

Excerpts from Introduction: Arctic Warming - What Warming?
The claim that the summer of 2007 was apocalyptic for Arctic sea ice has recently gone around the globe, because the coverage and thickness of the sea ice in the Arctic has been declining steadily over the past few decades. For many scientists this situation appears to be related to global warming (Bronnimann, 2008). In 2003 a USA research center formulated it this way already: “Recent warming of Arctic may affect worldwide climate”. Not everyone agreed but quarrel: What Arctic Warming?

Although there is hardly a convincing reason to neglect the recent warming in the Arctic and the extent of ice melt during the summer season, it is not necessarily clear yet, whether the current discussion is based on a sound and comprehensive assessment. Climate research should not only deal with Arctic warming based on observations made during the last few decades, but at least be extremely interested in other climatic events that occurred in modern times, especially if somehow in connection with the situation in the Arctic. Why?

On the 2nd of November 1922, The Washington Post published the following story: Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt”. The corresponding report in the Monthly Weather Review of November 1922 had also stated that the ice conditions in the Northern North Atlantic were exceptional; in fact, so little ice has never before been noted. Only 16 year later the meteorologist C.E.P. Books thought it necessary to explain the situation more complex:

In recent years attention is being directed more and more towards a problem which may possibly prove of great significance in human affairs, the rise of temperature in the northern hemisphere, and especially in the Arctic regions. (Brooks, 1938) At the time of the writing of these lines in 1938, the Arctic had got as warm as in the first decade of the 21st Century. How much do we know about the mechanism that caused the previous arctic warming? Not very much, as Bronnimann et a. acknowledged: “Our understanding of the climate mechanism operating in the Arctic on different timescales is still limited” (Bronnimann, 2008). Is it reasonable and fair to dramatize the shrinking sea ice during a recent time period, if one is not fully aware of what happened in the early years of the last century?

The focus is clear: What role did the ocean play? The investigation will prove that it had been substantial, by time, intensity and duration. But once these aspects have been thoroughly elaborated, the discussion will be extended to the question: Why? After all, the first arctic warming began at the end of the World War One in the winter of 1918-19, and died away when the Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939. That is worth a discussion, even if it is not the purpose of this paper to offer conclusive evidence in this respect.

The Arctic Is Screaming?
The world should know: The Arctic is Screaming noted newspapers recently. No one had heard the Arctic crying, but was there something that should have signaled horror? It is true; the annual arctic sea ice cover had been decreasing during the summer season for a couple of years. The remaining minimum ice cover around September produced record after record: the record from 2005 was beaten by 2006, which was beaten by 2007. That was the point when the emigre in polar science Mark Serreze informed the press: “The Arctic is screaming”. As a senior scientist at the government’s snow and ice data Center in Boulder, Colorado, Mark Serreze should know what he is talking about, or had it been his scream? At least the time for setting a scream was timely. Special legislation for polar bears was already on the way, as it was assumed that the dwindling sea ice would not leave the bears without ice floats but affecting wildlife widely.

“Greenland’s ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer’s end was half what it was just four years earlie. At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions”, the NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally was cited. But even this prediction could be topped by arctic experts claim to a conference meeting that, if the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly, as it recently did, than any sea ice throughout the Arctic Ocean could have entirely disappeared by the summer of 2040.

In this context, the CNN could observe that scientists have been asking themselves these questions: Was the record melt seen all over the Arctic in 2007 a blip amid relentless and steady warming? Or has everything sped up to a new climate cycle that goes beyond the worst case scenarios presented by computer models? Nobody has given any answer. But Mark Serreze says: the Arctic is screaming. Is it impossible to find out?

It should not be impossible, as the present arctic warming since 1980 is not the only one. There was another warming period for the region north of 62o North since 1920 until 1945, for which the high-latitude temperature increase was stronger in the late 1930s early 1940s than in recent decades (Polyakov, 2002). The first Arctic warming started 90 years ago, from about 1920 to 1940. In winter 1918-19 the air temperatures exploded at the remote archipelagos Spitsbergen, which the Norwegian call: Svalbard. In 1930 the Norwegian scientist. B. J. Birkeland regarded the rise as maybe the biggest ever observed in one place. Birkeland could presumably repeat the claim today with justification. But would he or his colleagues come up with the exclamation the Arctic is screaming today? Definitely not, although he and his colleagues might wish to scream: How could it be that you know so little about “our arctic warming” to understand “your arctic warming”.

One may only recall a report by the New York Times in 1932 to realize what it could mean when the substance of claims are not clear: “Next great deluge forecast by scientists - Melting polar ice caps to raise the level of the seas and flood the continents”. Is that very different from current claims? At least, C.E.P. Brooks (1938) had that to say with regard to this warming period: “There have been great climatic oscillations before this, even since the last Ice Age, about the causes of which we are quite ignorant”. It seems little has changed when now confronted with the mere allegation, that the warming the NYT and Brooks are talking about has been due to natural variability, even without explaining which part of nature did something, and which did not.

See larger here.
The following investigation will show that the 1st Arctic warming was not understood in the 1930s, and that little has changed to better at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, about seven decades later. What is needed is a better understanding of what had happened almost a century ago in the high northern hemisphere, and this work does not agree with NASA expert Waleed Abdalati notion: “The first step in understanding why things happen is observing what is happening”.  See how ice edge has varied in other years below (enlarged here).

See the full book, a fascinating read, downloadable here.

Two hundred years ago, Charles Lyell coined the phrase “The present is the key to the past.” In today’s highly contentious issues of global climate change, we might well add “The past is the key to the future”, i.e., to forecast future geologic events, we must understand past climate changes.  This paper documents past global climate changes in the geologic and historic past.

Recent laser imaging of the Earth’s surface provides new evidence for abrupt, fluctuating, warm and cool climatic episodes that could not have been caused by changes in atmospheric CO2.  In a paper presented at the national meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, OR, Professor Don J. Easterbrook, Professor of Geology at Western Washington University, presented new data from airborne laser imagery showing well-defined, previously unknown, multiple moraines deposited by glaciers 11,700 to 10,250 years ago. At least 9 significant, abrupt periods of warming that resulted in retreat of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet are documented by moraines from successive glacial retreats in the Fraser Lowland of NW Washington l(Fig. 1).  In addition, smaller multiple glacier recessions are found within the more prominent episodes of glacier retreat.  As indicated by the amount of glacier recession between each of the successive moraines, the warming events were of greater magnitude than those observed in recent centuries.

Figure 1.  Successive terminal moraines from short-term glacier recessions caused by climatic warming between 11,700 and 10,250 years ago.

Isotope data from Greenland ice cores and show a consistent pattern of fluctuating warm and cool periods over the past 500 years (Fig. 2).  The average period of warming/cooling oscillations over the past 500 years is 27 years, remarkably similar to the period of alternation between warm and cool Pacific Decadal Oscillation. 

Figure 2. Paleotemperatures derived from oxygen isotope measurements of the GISP2 Greenland ice core.  Red peaks are times of warming and blue are times of cooling.  The average time period for each climatic oscillation is 27 years. 

During the past century, two episodes of global warming and two of global cooling have occurred (Fig. 3), all of which can be tied to glacial oscillations, oceanic temperature changes, atmospheric temperature changes, and solar variation.

Figure 3. Coincidence of Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), global temperature, and glacier fluctuations in the North Cascades.  Glaciers advanced during the 1880-1915 cool period when the PDO was cool, then when the PDO switched to its warm mode, global temperatures warmed, and glaciers retreated from ~1915-1945.  The PDO changed from warm to cool ~1945-1977, global temperatures cooled and glaciers advanced once again.  In 1977, the PDO switched from cool to warm mode, global temperatures warmed, and glaciers retreated.  In 1999, the PDO changed back to its cool mode and global cooling began.

What we can learn from this geologic climate changes is that the past is indeed the key to the future.  In 1999, the year after the warmest year of recent times, I projected the climate pattern from the past century and past 500 years into the future and predicted that we would be due for 25-30 years of global cooling beginning about 2000.  The PDO changed from its warm to cool mode in 1999 and since then we have had global cooling, quite moderate to flat (interrupted by two warm El Ninos) and intensifying since 2007.

Figure 4. Projection of climate changes of the last 4century and past 500 years into the future.  The black curve is temperature variation from 1900 to 2009; the red line is the IPCC projected warming from the IPCC website in 2000; the blue curves are several possible projections of climate change to 2040+ based on past global cooling periods (1945-1977; 1880 to 1915; and 1790 to 1820).  The lack of sun spots during the past solar cycle has surpassed all records since the Dalton Minimum and some solar physicists have suggested we may be headed for a Dalton or Maunder type mimimum with severe cooling. See more in PDF here.

A couple of months back, there was a discussion taking place over at Joe Romm’s ClimateProgress blog concerning a report that the earth’s ability to take-up atmospheric carbon dioxide was declining. A declining CO2 sink, of course, meant that things climatological were going to be even worse than expected, because a growing proportion of anthropogenic CO2 emissions were going to remain in the atmosphere, thus pushing the rise of CO2 concentrations and the degree of climate change higher.

At the time, an alert reader pointed out to Joe Romm that there was in fact, no indication from data and observations that a larger percentage of human CO2 emissions were ending up in the atmosphere. In fact, the data showed that the fraction of CO2 emitted into the atmospheric by human activities has remained constant for the past 40 years.

This fact runs directly counter to the idea that the earth’s natural CO2 sinks are weakening - instead it indicates that natural sinks have been expanding as anthropogenic CO2 emissions have increased. After all, in order to keep the airborne fraction of CO2 emissions constant over time, increasing anthropogenic CO2 emissions must be countered by an increasing CO2 sink.

Joe Romm was a bit dismissive (to say the least) of this line of argument. Here was one such exchange (Comment 13 of this thread):

Comment 13. Chip Knappenberger says:
Mr. Romm,
I am not sure how you justify this statement:"At the same time that CO2 emissions are soaring, CO2 sinks are saturating.” Take your numbers for the rate of CO2 increase each year and divide them by the numbers for the annual global CO2 emissions each year (available from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center here) and see what you get. Hint: the ppm/emissions ratio shows no trend at all which means that there is no decline in the CO2 sink - otherwise, this ratio would be increasing.
Chip Knappenberger
[JR: It is Dr. Romm, Chip, and, hint, it is what the scientific literature says. Try reading it, some time. Start with the Global Carbon Project.]

Just in case JR (Dr. Romm) really is interested in what the latest scientific literature on the topic says, there is a new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that directly examines this issue. The paper is by Wolfgang Knorr a senior researcher in the Department of Earth Sciences at the U.K.’s University of Bristol, and is aptly titled with the question “Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing?” (see Science Daily coverage here).

Dr. Knorr carefully analyzed the record of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and anthropogenic land-use changes for the past 150 years. Keeping in mind the various sources of potential errors inherent in these data, he developed several different possible solutions to fitting a trend to the airborne fraction of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. In all cases, he found no significant trend (at the 95% significance level) in airborne fraction since 1850. (Note: It is not that the total atmospheric burden of CO2 has not been increasing over time, but that of the total CO2 released into the atmosphere each year by human activities, about 45% remains in the atmosphere while the other 55% is taken up by various natural processes - and these percentages have not changed during the past 150 years)

Figure 1. The annual increase in atmospheric CO2 (as determined from ice cores, thin dotted lines, and direct measurements, thin black line) has remained constantly proportional to the annual amount of CO2 released by human activities (thick black line). The proportion is about 46% (thick dotted line). (Figure source: Knorr, 2009)

The Abstract of the paper directly addresses Romm’s concerns, but, unfortunately, Knorr finds no support for Romm’s take on the issue: “Several recent studies have highlighted the possibility that the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems have started loosing part of their ability to sequester a large proportion of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions. This is an important claim, because so far only about 40% of those emissions have stayed in the atmosphere, which has prevented additional climate change. This study re-examines the available atmospheric CO2 and emissions data including their uncertainties. It is shown that with those uncertainties, the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has been 0.7 plus or minus 1.4% per decade, i.e. close to and not significantly different from zero. The analysis further shows that the statistical model of a constant airborne fraction agrees best with the available data if emissions from land use change are scaled down to 82% or less of their original estimates. Despite the predictions of coupled climate-carbon cycle models, no trend in the airborne fraction can be found.”

The University of Bristol press release is even more explicit: “New data show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now.”

This suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO2 than had been previously expected.
The results run contrary to a significant body of recent research which expects that the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans to absorb CO2 should start to diminish as CO2 emissions increase, letting greenhouse gas levels skyrocket. Dr Wolfgang Knorr at the University of Bristol found that in fact the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has only been 0.7 plus or minus 1.4% per decade, which is essentially zero.

Further, Knorr noted that we still have a good bit of work to do to completely understand why this is the case, especially if we want to be able to predict the future course of atmospheric CO2 concentrations (a necessity if we want to predict future climate change). Knorr concludes: Given the importance of the [the anthropogenic CO2 airborne fraction] for the degree of future climate change, the question is how to best predict its future course. One pre-requisite is that we gain a thorough understand of why it has stayed approximately constant in the past, another that we improve our ability to detect if and when it changes. The most urgent need seems to exist for more accurate estimates of land use emissions. Another possible approach is to add more data through the combination of many detailed regional studies such as the ones by Schuster and Watson (2007) and Le Quere et al. (2007), or using process based models combined with data assimilation approaches (Rayner et al., 2005). If process models are used, however, they need to be carefully constructed in order to answer the question of why the AF has remained constant and not shown more pronounced decadal-scale fluctuations or a stronger secular trend.

In other words, like we have repeated over and over, if the models can’t replicate the past (for the right reasons), they can’t be relied on for producing accurate future projections. And as things now stand, the earth is responding to anthropogenic CO2 emissions in a different (and perhaps better) manner than we thought that it would. Despite what Joe Romm would have you believe. See more here.

Reference: Knorr, W., 2009. Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing? Geophysical Research Letters, 36, L21710, doi:10.1029/2009GL040613.