By Marc Morano

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has turned his back on the latest science, economics, the Republican Party, and American national security, by announcing his new partnership with Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) to find “the winning formula” to pass global warming cap-and-trade legislation.

Graham is now touting his view that man-made global warming fears are real and can be “solved” by passing Congressional cap-and-trade legislation. Graham teamed up with Sen. Kerry to write an October 11 New York Times op-ed explaining that the GOP and Democrats should “work together to address an urgent crisis facing the world.”

Graham has latched on to perhaps the silliest of all arguments and the most insulting to voters’ intelligence: that somehow passing a congressional climate bill will lead to fewer wars in the future. Graham and Kerry wrote, “[W]e agree that climate change is real and threatens our economy and national security.”

“Even climate change skeptics should recognize that reducing our dependence on foreign oil and increasing our energy efficiency strengthens our national security,” Graham and Kerry asserted. On this point, Graham and Kerry are correct. But their claim that a top heavy cap-and-trade bill would accomplish those goals is contrary to all available evidence. First off, even if we faced the man-made global warming catastrophe that Graham and Kerry seem so confident about, we would all be doomed if we relied on Congressional cap-and-trade to save us. The climate bill was declared “scientifically meaningless” by an analysis earlier this year. Most importantly, President Obama’s own EPA is now on record admitting that U.S. cap-and-trade bill “would not impact world CO2 levels.”

A Bloomberg News article on the Waxman-Markey bill’s impact on June 26, 2009 revealed U.S. oil companies may cope with the climate legislation by “closing fuel plants, cutting capital spending and increasing imports.” Bloomberg also reported that “one in six U.S. refineries probably would close by 2020” and this could “add 77 cents a gallon to the price of gasoline.” Far from providing “energy security,” cap-and-trade would make us more dependent on foreign sources of energy, according to the Bloomberg report. Obama advisor Warren Buffet told CNBC that cap-and-trade would also be a “huge” and “regressive” tax on Americans .

Global warming cap-and-trade would have a huge impact on congressional coffers. To understand all you need to know about the “science” of man-made global warming and the motivations of politicians to pass it, you need to look no further than Democrat Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland. In 2009, Cardin called cap-and-trade “the most significant revenue-generating proposal of our time.”

In simple terms, what Graham is hailing as some sort of “solution” to the alleged climate “crisis” is nothing more than pure Washington fluff with a huge price tag and expansion of government controls on our lifestyles.  In short, it is all economic pain for no climate gain.

All of this while the science behind man-made climate fears continues in a freefall. In the past few months, we have witnessed U.N. scientists warning at U.N. meetings that global cooling is a now possible. Even the mainstream media—led by the BBC and the New York Times—is finally having their moment of clarity on man-made global warming. But Graham continues to binge on old scientific claims and empty economic promises. Global warming cap-and-trade has lost so much support that even Democrat Sen. Al Franken is bailing on the bill! In an August 6 letter with 9 other Democrats, Franken wrote a letter to Obama declaring that the U.S. “must not engage in a self-defeating effort.”

Enter Lindsey Graham to offer political cover for Democrats on cap-and-trade. Graham hopes to be able to add provision for expanded nuclear energy and drilling into the cap-and-trade bill and thus bring all sides together. Sadly, Graham knows that any promises about expanding drilling or nuclear energy can be rescinded in future years or road blocked in any number of ways. But once a cap-and-trade system is in place, it will be the nearest thing to eternal life here on Earth.

Graham tries to convince unenlightened Republicans that “killing a Senate [climate] bill is not success given the threat of [EPA] regulation” of CO2 under the Clean Air Act. But Graham knows this is a straw man argument. The last thing the Obama administration or Congressional Democrats want to do is have EPA in charge of CO2 emissions. Former President Clinton’s Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, admitted this was a false threat on October 12, when he wrote: The EPA regulatory threat is “no real threat” because lawsuits would “keep the EPA tied up in litigation for years.”

Graham is also touting a new U.N. climate treaty, urging the U.S. to be “in the lead again” and “produce a new international agreement on global warming.”
Graham is hopelessly naive about climate science realities, cap-and-trade economics and environmental politics.  Sadly, he has morphed into a media sycophant who pines for every opportunity to get noticed by the mainstream media—to hell with his home state voters’ wishes.

Graham’s Senate website claims he “is known as a leader who never abandons his independence or strays from the conservative reform agenda.” Though Graham does have a conservative voting record overall, he has broken ranks with his home state voters and the GOP on key policy decisions (votes on immigration, the bank bailout and Justice Sotomayor’s confirmation) that differ from his political base. 

Graham’s embrace of the man-made global warming fear movement could literally snatch defeat from the jaws of victory when it comes to congressional cap-and-trade bills. Never underestimate the ability of rudderless Republicans like Graham to be the key difference in passing costly non-solutions to problems that do not even exist. There exists in Washington pretenders who go along with the majority of beliefs of a political ideology or party platform just so they can bide their time—waiting to really have the most impact (or do the most damage) on the key issues that matter most to their internal ideology. Ladies and gentleman, meet Sen. Lindsey Graham: The most crystal clear example of everything that is wrong with politics (and the Republican Party) in Washington today.

Lord Christopher Monckton

The Minnesota Free Market Institute hosted an event at Bethel University in St. Paul on Wednesday evening. Keynote speaker Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, gave a scathing and lengthy presentation, complete with detailed charts, graphs, facts, and figures which culminated in the utter decimation of both the pop culture concept of global warming and the credible threat of any significant anthropomorphic climate change.

A detailed summary of Monckton’s presentation is now available here. However, a segment of his remarks justify immediate publication. If credible, the concern Monckton speaks to may well prove the single most important issue facing the American nation, bigger than health care, bigger than cap and trade, and worth every citizen’s focused attention.

Here were Monckton’s closing remarks, as dictated from my audio recording:

At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regime from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.

I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfication of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” - because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it - Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it.

[laughter]

And the trouble is this; if that treaty is signed, if your Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution (sic), and you can’t resign from that treaty unless you get agreement from all the other state parties [ And because you’ll be the biggest paying country, they’re not going to let you out of it.

So, thank you, America. You were the beacon of freedom to the world. It is a privilege merely to stand on this soil of freedom while it is still free. But, in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your humanity away forever. And neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back. That is how serious it is. I’ve read the treaty. I’ve seen this stuff about [world] government and climate debt and enforcement. They are going to do this to you whether you like it or not.

But I think it is here, here in your great nation, which I so love and I so admire - it is here that perhaps, at this eleventh hour, at the fifty-ninth minute and fifty-ninth second, you will rise up and you will stop your president from signing that dreadful treaty, that purposeless treaty. For there is no problem with climate and, even if there were, an economic treaty does nothing to [help] it.

So I end by saying to you the words that Winston Churchill addressed to your president in the darkest hour before the dawn of freedom in the Second World War. He quoted from your great poet Longfellow:

Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

See post ands Q&A here.

By Madhav Khandekar, Energy and Environment

ABSTRACT
Sea Level Rise (SLR) in response to the present and future warming of the earth’s surface is probably the most contentious issue being debated at present. This brief commentary surveys the most recent literature on ongoing SLR and on the major factors contributing to future rise. It is concluded that the best guess value of SLR for the next 100 years is a relatively modest 23 cm +/- 5 cm which poses little threat to coastal areas of the world either at present or in future.

INTRODUCTION
The topic of Sea Level Rise (SLR) on regional and global scale and its possible linkage to the present and future warming of the earth’s surface is perhaps the most intensely debated issue on climate change at present. A recent Google search shows an astounding 1.8 M listings on global warming & sea level rise issue. Many articles in national & international news papers, popular scientific magazines as well as in scientific journals discuss the possibility of SLR as high as 3 to 7 m as a result of melting of Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets due to warming of the earth’s surface by 3C or more in the next 100 years. In
a recent comprehensive paper (Wunsch et al 2007), the lead author Prof (emeritus) Carl Wunsch states: ‘modern sea level rise is a matter of urgent concern from a variety of points of view, but especially because of the possibility of its acceleration and consequent threats to many low-lying parts of the inhabited world’. Recent satellite altimetric data by the TOPEX/Poseidon satellite (Leuliette 2004) suggest that since about 1993, global SLR has been rising at a rate of 2.8 +/- 0.4 mm per year and this has raised the possibility of “accelerated SLR due to significant melting of high-latitude Ice Sheets”.

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in its 1995 climate change documents estimated SLR of about 50 cm by 2100. In the 2001 climate
change documents the IPCC revised this estimate to about 37 cm. In the most recent IPCC assessment, Meehl (2007) projects SLR to be between 14 and 43 cm (with a mean value of 29 cm) by 2100 under the A1B (greenhouse gas) emission scenario in which the earth’s mean temperature is projected to rise between 2.3C and 4.1C by 2100. In view of the large disparities between these estimates and between the estimates of the ongoing rate of rise and the projections for the future, it is the purpose of this article to take a closer look at some of the recent studies to determine the best possible value of SLR for the next 50 to 100 years.

CONCLUDING REMARKS
The best guess value for SLR for the next 100 years appears to be about 230 mm (23 cm) with a 95% confidence interval of +/-50 mm. In view of cooling of the upper oceans observed in recent years and a possible continued cooling of the earth’s mean temperature over the next decade (e.g., Keenlyside et al 2008), the best guess value of SLR from now until 2025 is estimated to be just about 30 mm with a 95% confidence interval of +/-10 mm. This estimate is significantly lower than the range projected by the IPCC fourth assessment report in 2007. In terms of climate policy, such a value of future sea level rise poses no major threat to the coastal regions or low-lying countries (e.g., Bangladesh, The Maldives, Tuwalu) of the world at present or in the foreseeable future. Read full study here.