By Paul Basken< Chronicle of Higher Education
An interdisciplinary group of 22 scientists, combining paleontological evidence with ecological modeling, has concluded that the earth appears headed toward catastrophic and irreversible environmental changes.
Their report, in the June 7 issue of the journal Nature, describes an exponentially increasing rate of species extinctions, extreme climate fluctuations, and other threats that together risk a level of upheaval not seen since the large-scale extinctions 65 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs.
The lead author of the report is Anthony D. Barnosky, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California at Berkeley, which coordinated the work in an 18-month project that inaugurated the university’s Berkeley Initiative in Global Change Biology.
The report’s conclusions center on a measure of the amount of the earth’s land surface that has been transformed by people, from forests and prairies to uses such as cornfields and parking lots. The percentage of transformed land now stands at 43 percent, with the world’s population at seven billion.
The scientists contributing to the report have calculated the various forms of damage that will be seen when the usage level exceeds 50 percent, as is expected around 2025, when the population reaches eight billion, Mr. Barnosky said. The scientists making those estimates include biologists, ecologists, geologists, paleontologists, and complex-systems theoreticians in the United States, Canada, South America, and Europe.
Their conclusion is that the damaging effects, when combined, appear even worse than each of the experts has seen in his or her own field, Mr. Barnosky said. “These are all driving forces that in fact are greater than what we saw in the past,” he said.
The size of the problems demands a global response, Mr. Barnosky said. “The only way out of them is cooperation between nations, between individuals on a global basis,” he said.
Yet he acknowledged that in a nation with sharp political divisions, including over environmental issues, the report may not garner much attention. “I don’t know how much it will sway the people who are just not inclined to believe any of this stuff anyway, who just basically will put their heads in the sand and say, Let’s go on with business as usual,” he said.
The authors of the report, in fact, make clear that they cannot be totally sure when the earth’s environment will reach a “tipping point” beyond which recovery to anything resembling current conditions will be impossible, or even if that will happen. “That’s the usual scientific covering-all-your-bases” statement, Mr. Barnosky said.
But for others, the warning contained in the Berkeley-led report may not be strong enough. “I suspect it’s a little too optimistic,” said Paul R. Ehrlich, a professor of population studies at Stanford University known for his 1968 book The Population Bomb.
Mr. Ehrlich said he foresees a series of dire threats to humanity, many virtually untouched by political leaders, including climate change, water shortages, and the widespread use of man-made toxins. Even a single repercussion of one of those, such as water scarcity leading to nuclear war between India and Pakistan, could devastate populations worldwide, he said.
“Generally the scientific community has spoken many times,” Mr. Ehrlich said, “but nobody’s paying any attention.”
Marita Noon
The passage of time is marked with milestones. We each know where we were when President Kennedy was shot, when the Berlin Wall came down, and on the morning of 9-11. If we continue on the current course, you’ll be telling your grandchildren where you were the night the lights went out in America.
America’s energy policy is being dominated by environmentalists’ priorities--regardless of the impact to the American economy, individual communities, or economically-challenged citizens. The plans to shut down or limit America’s abundant, available, and affordable energy are organized, coordinated, and effective. The results will be “lights out in America--a dim future.
On May 30, the Wall Street Journal alerted us to the Sierra Club’s new campaign aimed at killing the natural gas industry: “Beyond Natural Gas.” WSJ reports: “This is no idle threat. The Sierra Club has deep pockets funded by liberal foundations and knows how to work the media and politicians. The lobby helped to block new nuclear plants for more than 30 years, it has kept much of the U.S. off-limits to oil drilling, and its ‘Beyond Coal’ campaign has all but shut down new coal plants. One of its priorities now will be to make shale gas drilling anathema within the Democratic Party.”
How do they think we will power America? With intermittent, ineffective, and uneconomical wind and solar energy.
Why are the Sierra Club, et al, able to wield so much power? The Obama administration is friendly to their cause. Many of the agencies regulating domestic energy development are staffed with personnel culled from within the ranks of the environmental movement. And, they are not shy about their biases--as was revealed in the now famous “crucify” comment. They also use their vast resources to sue, and sue often. As a new report from the Kentucky Coal Association (KCA) reveals, they don’t just sue the coal miners and the coal-fueled power plants, they sue the EPA to force new standards which are often unattainable--thereby effectively stopping all use of coal. (Remember, natural gas is the next target.)
The EPA, then, goes around standard operating procedures to do the bidding of their environmental buddies.
In Kentucky, hundreds of individual coal mining permits are typically approved each year. The application process has been in place for years. Companies applying for permits know the rules and applications are submitted accordingly. If a rule change is to be made, there is a process that includes a series of public hearings and industry input--providing participation for all parties. When a new rule is implemented, it often has a phase-in period and involved parties can prepare as they know about it far in advance.
However, Lisa Jackson’s EPA isn’t constrained by rulemaking policy.
On April 1, 2010, without reason or science, public notice or opportunity for public comment, the EPA issued “Interim Guidance on Clean Water Act (CWA) procedures for Appalachian surface mines"--which initially applied to only six states: Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. Lisa Jackson acknowledged that few--if any--mines would be able to comply with the new benchmark set to limit wastewater discharges from surface coal mining to instream conductivity levels of 500 micro-siemens. Even if you do not understand the conductivity level of instream micro-siemens, you can grasp that the levels called for in the “guidance” are lower than levels found in nature.
In March 2010, 27 permits were issued under the known procedures. Since the “guidance” came out, without warning, on April 1, no new permits have been issued. One company was offered a permit with the 500 micro-siemens limit applicable to every phase of mining beginning on day one. The “virgin” stream was tested before any mining operations commenced and was found to naturally have 1200 micro-siemens. The company would have been in violation before they ever started. On July 21, 2011, the “interim guidance” was replaced with a “final guidance” which suggested that conductivity levels be 300 or less instead of the previous 500--which was already unattainable. Even expensive bottled water doesn’t meet the standards the EPA has set for discharges from coal mining.
For more than 2 years, the Appalachian economy has suffered the loss of hundreds of mines, equaling thousands of direct potential jobs, as a result of this “guidance"--which is not a “rule” but is being treated as one.
In October 2010, the KCA filed a lawsuit against the EPA contending that the issuance of the “interim guidance” violated the Administrative Procedures Act and the CWA by ignoring public notice and comment rulemaking requirements, and unlawfully usurping the state’s role in establishing water quality standards under CWA. That suit has been consolidated with a similar suit filed in West Virginia and with National Mining Association litigation and has been transferred to the federal court in the District of Columbia; the case is scheduled to be heard July 11.
Meanwhile, applications for individual coal mining permits have been denied. Shortly after the new “guidance” was issued on April 1, 2010, The Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet (KEEC) proposed to issue 21 permits for new and surface mines in Eastern Kentucky that did not include qualification for the sudden “guidance,” but met all prior imposed limitations and were consistent with previous applications that were granted permits. The state has the authority to issue permits and the EPA has oversight authority. In September 2010, the EPA issued specific objections to all 21 permit applications--thereby preventing their issuance, blocking jobs and revenues.
On July 1, 2011, the KEEC proposed another 19 permits for new or expanded surface mining in Eastern Kentucky. These permits included a number of enhancements to assure protection of aquatic life. In late September 2011, the EPA objected to all 19 permits--but did not specify the deficiencies. There are currently 36 applications pending; the other four have been withdrawn with the potential investment presumably going elsewhere.
In accordance with the CWA, if the EPA has specific objections, the applicant can request a hearing to challenge the EPA’s decision. The KEEC requested a hearing in December of 2010. Finally, after an 18-month wait, EPA has scheduled hearings for June 5 and 7. The Kentucky Coal Association estimates that just the 19 permits the EPA blocked last September have cost $123,861,000 in state coal severance taxes, 3,800 Kentucky coal jobs, and the production of 125,476,000 tons of coal--all while America is in economic crisis.
Additionally, the micro-siemens benchmark was slated to apply to six states but was pulled back to just two: Kentucky and West Virginia. Why were these states singled out? If micro-siemens were important, if clean water was really the issue, shouldn’t the “guidance” apply nationwide? Interestingly, the two states targeted for the new rules may be victims of retribution. Neither Kentucky nor West Virginia went blue in the 2008 election and are not likely to in 2012. The Democratic primaries in both Kentucky and West Virginia were an embarrassment to the Obama re-election effort. In Kentucky, “uncommitted” got 42% of the vote and in West Virginia, prisoner Keith Judd got 41%. Obama nemesis Mitch McConnell hails from Kentucky and West Virginia’s Democratic Senator Joe Manchin made waves when he ran a campaign ad in which he picked up a rifle and shot a target labeled “cap and trade bill"--which was an Obama campaign promise. Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia were removed from the micro-siemens guidance. They are blue states that are important to President Obama’s re-election. Once again, it appears that the Obama administration is putting electoral posturing ahead of energy production. (If Obama gets re-elected, you can be sure the “guidance” will apply to more states and other industries.)
The micro-siemens guidance is applied under the CWA section 402. While other industries are governed by section 402, the micro-siemens guidance applies only to coal, and only in two states. The selective application indicates that it isn’t really about the water.
The Sierra Club doesn’t want America’s abundant coal resources used in America. Their efforts have already contributed to the announced closure of 100 US coal-fueled power plants and reduced demand for coal. “Sales to Midwestern power plants have slumped, as has the market price of coal, dropping so suddenly that many local mines are cutting back hours or closing,” reports the New York Times. “The anger toward Washington is palpable.” In the May 29 NYT article, Chris Lacy, an executive at Licking River Resources Inc., said “layoffs among his 350 miners--in Magoffin County, where unemployment is already 17.5 percent --- are inevitable.” Addressing the increasing regulations against coal, Lacy says the “concerns are overblown.” He sees them as “a conspiracy by environmentalists and the Obama administration to destroy the way of life here in Kentucky.”
The Sierra Club wants to keep coal in the ground and out of international markets where coal-fueled power plants are being built faster than they are being abandoned in the US. They are filing lawsuits against mining companies to prevent extraction and claiming settlements which include their legal fees. Environmental attorneys are among the highest paid--getting double and triple what veterans’ or seniors’ advocates receive. This hurts not only the local economies, such as the one supported by Licking River Resources, but it also does harm to the US economy, as selling US products overseas helps our trade deficit.
If you are tired of the undue influence the environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club, hold over your energy use and cost--they proudly state that their attack on coal is “just the tip of the iceberg” (natural gas is next), stand with Kentucky against the singular attack. A pre-hearing rally is being held in Frankfort, KY, on June 5 from 5-7 PM between the Capitol Plaza Hotel and the Frankfort Convention Center where elected officials, pro-coal advocates, and invited guests will speak about the dangers of the EPA’s actions to Kentucky jobs. If you can’t make the rally, you can still offer written comment (Docket ID:EPA-HQ-OW-2012-0315).
If we do not stand up to these senseless attacks on the American way of life, our energy freedom, and our economic security, we will be telling our grandchildren where we were the night the lights went out in America.
By Larry Bell, Forbes, reprinted with author permission
Although global temperatures have been pretty flat despite rising atmospheric CO2 levels since the big 1998 El Nino, no one that I know disputes that climate changes. Nor do they doubt that there has been very mild warming since the mid-19th century when our planet began thawing out of the last “Little Ice Age” (predating the Industrial Revolution). And while most acknowledge that greenhouse warming may well be a contributing factor, it is also true that a great many very informed scientists believe that any human contributions to that influence are negligible, undetectable and thereby grossly exaggerated by alarmists, while far more important natural climate drivers (both for warming and cooling), are virtually ignored. Particularly consequential among these are long-and short-term effects of ocean cycles along with changes in solar activity.
The pervasive hype that we are experiencing a known human-caused climate crisis is based upon speculative theories, contrived data and totally unproven modeling predictions. Much of this emanates from politically-corrupted processes and agenda-driven report conclusions rendered by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which is trumpeted in the media as authoritative gospel.
Fritz Vaherenholt, a socialist founder of Germany’s environmental movement who headed the renewable energy division of the country’s second largest utility company, was once a big IPCC believer. Recently, however, his new book titled The Cold Sun: Why the Climate Disaster Won’t Happen, charges the organization with gross incompetence and dishonesty… especially regarding fear-mongering exaggeration of human CO2 emission influences.
After serving as an IPCC reviewer for their report on renewable energy, he was stunned by the large number of errors and wondered if the other IPCC reports on climate change “were similarly sloppy.” This concern prompted Vahrenholt to dig into the IPCC’s 2007 climate report, and he was again horrified by what he found. He concluded in an interview which appeared in the German news publication Bild that: “...IPCC decision-makers are fighting tooth and nail against accepting the roles of the oceans, sun, and soot.” Accordingly, IPCC models are completely out of whack. “The facts need to be discussed sensibly and scientifically, without first deciding on the results.”
Many would attribute the beginning of rampant U.S. global warming alarmism with star witness testimony delivered by James Hansen of NASA, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), at then-Senator Al Gore’s Committee on Science, Technology and Space during the particularly hot summer of 1988. Then and now, Hansen’s catastrophic predictions (based upon highly theoretical and unproven general circulation climate models and subjective tweaking of incomplete and unreliable surface temperature data) continue to be a huge embarrassment to NASA.
In a January 29, 2006 New York Times interview, he charged that NASA public relations people had pressured him to allow them to review future public lectures, papers and postings on the GISS website. Yet in January 15, 2009 testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works-Minority Committee, his former boss John S. Theon, retired chief of NASA’s Climate Processes Research Program, took issue with the interference charge, stating: “Hansen was never muzzled, even though he violated official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen has embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claim of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress.”
Theon also testified that: “My own belief concerning anthropogenic [man-made] climate change is that models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit”. He observed: “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modeled in the observations, nor explain how they did it…this is contrary to the way science should be done.” He then went on to say “Thus, there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy”.
On April 10, forty-nine former NASA scientists and astronauts sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, admonishing the agency in general, and GISS under Hansen’s leadership in particular, for its role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change...while neglecting basic empirical evidence that calls that theory into question. The group, which includes seven Apollo astronauts and two former directors of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, is dismayed over the failure to make an objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change, charging that NASA is relying too heavily upon complex models that have proven to be scientifically inadequate for climate predictions.
Their criticism is well founded, supported by scandalous exchanges among prominent researchers exposed in e-mail files retrieved from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at Britain’s University of East Anglia. The communications reveal conspiracies to falsify and withhold information, to suppress contrary findings in scholarly publications, and to exaggerate the existence and threats of man-made global warming. Many of these individuals have had major influence over highly publicized summary report findings issued by the IPCC.
A GISS researcher confessed in one e-mail that “[the United States Historical Climate Network] data are not routinely kept up-to-date”, and in another that NASA had inflated its temperature data since 2000 on a questionable basis."NASA’s assumption that the adjustments made the older data consistent with future data...may not have been correct.”
Another scientist warned, “It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.” Still another admits: “...clearly, some tuning or very good luck [is] involved. I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer.” Still another modeler complained: “Mike, the Figure you sent is very deceptive - there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC...”
All climate models, regardless how sophisticated, are hopelessly compromised when based upon poor global temperature records. Yet an e-mail posted by database programmer Ian “Harry” Harris reports: “[The] hopeless state of their [CRU] database. No uniform data integrity. It’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found...There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy [surface temperature recording] stations...and duplicates...Aarrggghh! There truly is no end in sight. This project is such a MESS. No wonder I needed therapy!!”
Responsible science is expected to be uncontaminated by political policy agendas, however passionate those participants may be regarding personal ideological beliefs. That same reasoning should also apply to those who are empowered to sponsor and direct that science. All too often this has not been the case, as revealed in candid public admissions by influential government officials, international climate summit organizers and leading IPCC authors.
Dating back two decades ago to the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Climate Summit, which codified the U.N.’s central theme for the famous (or infamous) Kyoto Protocol, chairman Maurice Strong proposed a remedy to solve what was regarded to be a man-caused climate crisis. Addressing the audience, he suggested, “We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrialized civilization to collapse. Isn’t it our job to bring that about?”
Former Senator Timothy Wirth, then representing the Clinton-Gore administration as Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, strongly endorsed using global warming to advance that cause: “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
Wirth, a former senator, had been instrumental in helping to set up Al Gore’s 1988 Senate Science, Technology and Space hearings. In an interview with PBS Frontline he recounted: “We called the Weather Bureau and found out what was historically the hottest day of the summer...so we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it...we went in the night before and opened all the windows so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room.”
Wirth now heads the U.N. Foundation which lobbies for hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to help underdeveloped countries fight climate change.
Also speaking at the Rio conference, Deputy Assistant of State Richard Benedick, who then headed the policy divisions of the U.S. State Department, agreed that the Kyoto Protocol should be approved whether it had anything to do with climate change or not: “ A global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect.”
Christine Stewart, then Canadian Minister of the Environment, speaking before editors and reporters of the Calgary Herald in 1998, said, “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
And as IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer admitted in November 2010, “...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...”
While climate is generally defined in at least three decade-long periods, consider that James Hansen’s 1988 testimony before then-Senator Al Gore’s carefully staged steamy spectacle that stirred up a frenzy about an alleged CO2-driven climate emergency occurred only slightly more than one decade after many scientists had predicted an opposite crisis. One of them was the late Stanford University Professor Stephen Schneider who authored The Genesis Strategy, a 1976 book warning that global cooling risks posed a threat to humanity. Schneider later changed that view 180 degrees, serving as a lead author for important parts of three sequential IPCC reports.
Schneider candidly summed up what appears to be a prevalent IPCC view of scientific responsibility: “On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, on the other hand, we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of the doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
In other words, trust not what we tell you, but believe that we have your best interests in mind, because our intentions, if not our methods, are ethical. Accept what we tell you for that reason alone. If we have to exaggerate and alarm to get your attention, recognize that this is for a righteous cause.
Nobel Physics laureate Ivar Giaever has called global warming (aka. climate change) a “new religion”. When scientists emulate spiritual prophets, they overstep all ethical bounds. In doing so, they forfeit our confidence.