By Marlo Lewis

Last night’s State of the Union Address shows that President Obama learned only one lesson from the failure that was Copenhagen, the farce that was Cancun, the death of cap-and-trade, and the “slaughter” of House Democrats who voted for Waxman-Markey. Namely, dissemble, repackage Kyotoism in new verbiage, and press on with an agenda that voters rejected in November.

Anyone paying attention to Obama EPA’s campaign to ‘legislate’ climate policy through the regulatory backdoor would expect as much. But - true confession - I was surprised when Obama proposed to restructure the U.S. electric power sector along the lines contemplated by H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACESA), the infamous Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill.

In his SOTU speech, President Obama said:

Now, clean energy breakthroughs will only translate into clean energy jobs if businesses know there will be a market for what they’re selling. So tonight, I challenge you to join me in setting a new goal: By 2035, 80 percent of America’s electricity will come from clean energy sources. (Applause.)

Some folks want wind and solar. Others want nuclear, clean coal and natural gas. To meet this goal, we will need them all - and I urge Democrats and Republicans to work together to make it happen. (Applause.)

Upon hearing those words, I wondered: How does Obama’s 80% ‘clean energy’ target compare with the projected electric power sector fuel mix under Waxman-Markey?

......

When Obama was a presidential candidate, he acknowledged that under cap-and-trade, U.S. electric rates would “necessarily skyrocket.” He never said this again, but once the public understood that cap-and-trade would impose a stealth energy tax on the economy in the midst of a deep recession, they turned against it in droves.

Obama, however, never abandoned the big-government agenda of which cap-and-trade was an expression. The day after Election Day, he 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.”

Well, now we know what other means besides EPA ‘lawmaking’ he intends to employ. The good news is this ploy is not going to work. As soon as Tea Party activists recognize the clean energy mandate for the de-facto energy tax/Waxman-Markey knockoff that it is, it’s toast.

Imagine if President Obama had said last night: 

I challenge you to join me in setting a new goal: By 2035, 80 percent of America’s electricity will come from clean energy sources. This will restructure the electric power sector the same way Waxman-Markey would have if Congress had passed it. It will also cause your electric rates to necessarily skyrocket. As I’ve said before, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Such candor would not have won applause.

See more details here.

By Alan Caruba

The announced departure of Carol Browner as President Obama’s climate “czar” is very good news for America, given her long record of contempt for the truth regarding “global warming” and a range of other Environmental Protection Agency initiatives when she served as former President Clinton’s director of the EPA.

The decision to leave could have been motivated to put some distance between herself and the White House to afford the President some political cover.

Whatever reason will be put forth for her leaving, the real reason is her justified concern that she will be summoned before a congressional committee to explain why, for example, she deliberately misled Americans during the BP oil spill, going on national television to say that most of the oil was gone. She cited a White House commission created to investigate the spill, implying that the scientist’s report had confirmed the need for a moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf when, in fact, they had not supported it.

Browner has been a dedicated socialist, serving as a Commissioner of the Socialist International, an umbrella group for 170 “social democratic, socialist, and labor parties” in 55 nations. According to its “organizing document”, the SI cites capitalism as the cause of “devastating crisis”, “mass unemployment”, “imperialist expansion” and “colonial exploitation” worldwide. This is straight out of the Communist Manifesto.

When her role with SI was revealed, its website scrubbed her photo and evidence of her commission membership. No doubt several of Obama’s “czars” have shared similar views of capitalism. One, Van Jones, was forced to resign as the “Green Jobs Czar” when it was revealed he was a communist.

Obama’s election was, in effect, a socialist takeover of the executive branch of the U.S. government.

Browner’s dedication to the Big Lie of “global warming” goes back to her days when she served as then-Senator Al Gore’s legislative director from 1988 to 1988. Browner’s devotion to environmentalism resulted in her being named Florida’s Secretary of Environmental Regulation from 1991 to 1993. After the 1992 presidential election, she served as a transition director for Vice President-elect Gore.

Global warming is the assertion that the Earth is rapidly warming as the result of the buildup of “greenhouse gases”, most particularly carbon dioxide.

The “theory” is now totally discredited, but continues as justification for a variety of policies such as the administration’s emphasis on wind and solar energy, attacks on the coal and oil industries, and efforts that would drive up the cost of electricity to business, industry, and all consumers.

Browner is on record saying that global warming is “the greatest challenge ever faced” despite revelations in 2009 that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had rigged the computer model’s global temperature records to advance the fraud.

Global warming is the basis for the Cap-and-Trade legislation that was stalled in the Senate during the first half of Obama’s term. Since then, the EPA under Lisa Jackson, a Browner acolyte, has asserted that it intends to regulate CO2 and other greenhouse gases. The EPA has no such authority under the Clean Air Act. Such regulations would have a devastating affect on the nation’s economy.

In December 1992, President-elect Bill Clinton named Browner as his choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency and she was confirmed by the Senate on January 21, 1993. She would become the longest-serving EPA director.

Despite a J.D. degree from the University of Florida College of Law in 1979, Browner has frequently shown a contempt for the law. In 1995, she used her position at the EPA to lobby more than a hundred grassroots environmental groups to oppose the Republican-led Congress’s regulatory initiatives to curb the EPA. In doing so, she violated the Anti-Lobbying Act. The Browner-led EPA was strongly rebuked by a bipartisan subcommittee of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee.

On her last day as EPA Director, Browner ordered a computer technician to delete all her computer files despite a federal judge’s order requiring the agency to preserve those files. It was later learned that three other high-ranking EPA officials had also violated the judge’s order. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth held the EPA in contempt of Congress in 2001.

During secret negotiations with auto industry executives on behalf of the Obama administration, Browner directed them “to put nothing in writing” as she orchestrated an agreement to increase federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. Federal law requires officials to preserve documents concerning significant policy decisions.

In these and countless other unknown ways, Carol Browner has used the reins of power as EPA Director and later as President Obama’s climate advisor to assert EPA and government control over every aspect of the lives of Americans, limiting their choices, and in the process harming the nation’s economy.

Until the nation is released from the grip of such environmental/socialist zealots, its future remains in jeopardy.

See more here.

By Judith Curry

This week, I will be in Lisbon attending a Workshop on Reconciliation in the Climate Change Debate.  The Workshop was conceptualized by Jerome Ravetz,Silvio Funtowicz, James Risbey, and Jeroen van der Sluijs. While I (relatively) rarely travel overseas for meetings, I jumped at this invitation.  The topic is certainly intriguing and an issue that I have spent a great deal of time pondering over the last year.  Further, I really want to meet Ravetz, Funtowicz, Risbey, and van der Sluijs, whose papers I have been avidly reading over the past year, including citing them on a number of Climate Etc threads.

What has impressed me about their writings is that they recognize that climate change is not only a scientific subject, but also a political, economical, and ethical subject.

Postnormal science

The names Funtowicz and Ravetz are associated with the concept of postnormal science.  The issue of postnormal science is widely misunderstood in the climate blogosphere.  As per the Wikipedia:

“James J. Kay described Post-normal science as a process that recognizes the potential for gaps in knowledge and understanding that cannot be resolved other than through revolutionary science, thereby arguing that (in between revolutions) one should not necessarily attempt to resolve or dismiss contradictory perspectives of the world (whether they are based on science or not), but instead incorporate multiple viewpoints into the same problem-solving process.”

Detractors of post-normal science, conversely, see it as a method of trying to argue for a given set of actions despite a lack of evidence for them, and as a method of trying to stifle opposing voices calling for caution by accusing them of hidden biases. Many consider post-normal science an attempt to ignore proper scientific methods in an attempt to substitute inferior methodology in service of political goals. Practitioners advocating post normal science methods defend their methods, suggesting that their methodologies are not to be considered replacements for dealing with those situations in which normal science works sufficiently well.

Ravetz has clarified his ideas on this topic in the context of climate change in this essay at WUWT and response to WUWT criticism.

Von Storch has also discussed postnormal science in the context of the climate change debate:

This paper addresses the views regarding the certainty and uncertainty of climate science knowledge held by con- temporary climate scientists. More precisely, it addresses the extension of this knowledge into the social and political realms as per the definition of postnormal science. The data for the analysis is drawn from a response rate of approxi- mately 40% from a survey questionnaire mailed to 1000 scientists in Germany, the United States, and Canada, and from a series of in-depth interviews with leading scientists in each country. The international nature of the sample allows for cross-cultural comparisons.

With respect to the relative scientific discourse, similar assessments of the current state of knowledge are held by the respondents of each country. Almost all scientists agreed that the skill of contemporary models is limited. Minor differences were notable. Scientists from the United States were less convinced of the skills of the models than their German counterparts and, as would be expected under such circumstances, North American scientists perceived the need for societal and political responses to be less urgent than their German counterparts. The international consensus was, however, apparent regarding the utility of the knowledge to date: climate science has provided enough knowledge so that the initiation of abatement measures is warranted. However, consensus also existed regarding the current inability to explicitly specify detrimental effects that might result from climate change. This incompatibility between the state of knowledge and the calls for action suggests that, to some degree at least, scientific advice is a product of both scientific knowledge and normative judgment, suggesting a socioscientific construction of the climate change issue.

Where do I stand on the postnormal science issue?  I prefer to use the term “postnormal environment for science” to avoid the perception that proper scientific methods are being ignored.  The environment that brought about the behavior of Mann, Jones et al., the blogospheric obsession with their emails, and publication of statements such as those by Hasselman and Trenberth does not reflect a normal scientific environment, but rather a highly politicized one.  Scientists and others being labeled as “deniers” or “alarmist” is a clue that this is not a normal environment for science.

Climate science is fraught with uncertainty, as acknowledged Funtowicz, Ravetz, and von Storch.  The key point is the incompatibility between the state of knowledge and the calls for action.  The “call for action” aspect introduces the extended peer community, of which the climate blogosphere is a poster child.  So I think there is merit in this concept, provided that that postnormal science is not used either as an excuse to short cut the scientific method or to dismiss the science.  At the science-policy interface where the science is highly uncertain, understanding of the postnormal environment for science can help avoid situations of overconfidence in the science and keep the focus on understanding and characterizing the uncertainty.

Ravetz makes the point that the situation with climate science is a long way from the classic problems of the philosophy of science as laid out by Popper and Kuhn. Ravetz argues that there is a new class of epistemic problems that are dominated by uncertainty in the context of social and ethical concerns.

Towards reconciliation

I am hoping that there is some sort of path for reconciliation in this debate for the benefit of both scientific progress and social consideration of the issues surrounding climate variability and change.  I don’t know what this should look like, other than:

(1) Transparency and traceability in the science
(2) Loyalty to truth and the scientific method
(3) Understanding and acknowledgement of uncertainty and the possibility of error
(4) Win-win situations such as no regrets policy.

I know what it DOESN’T look like, and that is reflected by Kevin Trenberth’s essay, where the blame is put on the deniers, the media, etc. (everybody but the IPCC scientists and their supporters).  The domination approach only “works” if you can actually pull it off; climate scientists are babes in the woods when it comes to this kind of politics.  A partnership approach makes much more sense and might actually produce a good outcome.

I will be posting more on this topic after the Workshop (and possibly during); I look forward to your thoughts on this topic.

Participants

I just received a list of the participants last week, an interesting group to say the least.  A total of 28 people are participating.  In addition to the organizers, a number of names will be familiar to denizens of the climate blogosphere:

Judith Curry
Steve Goddard
Steve McIntyre
Ross McKitrick
Steve Mosher
Fred Pearce
Nick Stokes
Hans von Storch
Peter Webster

See this excellent post here. We hope Judith and the participants can make progress. Climate realists are all for an open dialogue and reconciliation. But the behavior of the alarmists/elitists make us doubtful. Please prove us wrong.