By Chip Knappenberger

“The current debate has proven one thing very clearly. The U.S. climate debate is not about saving the climate. It is about regulation for its own sake in the name of “saving the climate.” This fact should give pause to everyone who really cares about human welfare. Cap-and-trade is at odds with the economic wealth needed to adapt to a future that cannot be centrally planned by politicos.” ”Cap-and-Trade and the Temple of Enron,” MasterResource.

A New York Times headline (print edition) read: “House Backs Bill, 219-212, to Curb Global Warming.” But if the 219 House members who voted for the American Clean Energy and Security Act (HR 2454, aka the Waxman-Markey climate bill) thought they were casting a vote to “curb global warming,” they were sadly mistaken. As I have shown, the climate impact of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions prescribed under Waxman-Markey is very small - best case it reduces projected global warming by less than one-tenth of a degree Fahrenheit by 2050 and only about one-third of a a degree F by century’s end - a reduction that is scientifically meaningless. Many Representatives, in their pre-vote statements on the House floor, pointed this out, and perhaps many of the dissenting vote casters took this fact to heart.

However, while many of the opposition speakers mentioned the paucity of climate impacts from the emissions reduction measures, the great majority of the supporting speeches focused on energy security and domestic job creation (a contention vehemently challenged by the dissenters) and left the influence on the climate out of it! Undoubtedly, they knew full well that it would be inconsequential.

The only thing that the bill’s supporters could muster up about climate is that U.S. actions were necessary in order to convince the governments of China and India to curtail their emissions (the countries that hold the biggest keys to the rate of future greenhouse emissions growth and thus climate change).

But this is a peculiar argument for passing legislation that will impact the daily lives of each and every resident of the U.S. in ways which we probably will not like (higher energy costs) and which will produce no direct climate effect. Why offer it up as a reason for the governments of India and China (and other developing countries around the world) to impose the same (likely unpopular) restrictions on their citizenry? Opposition speakers rightly referred to this as the see-we’re-jumping-off-a-cliff-won’t-you-all-follow approach.

But if the developing countries do not follow us (after all they are developing countries and limiting energy consumption is not particularly good for development), the best we have to hope for is that while the U.S. limits its energy consumption as it tries to develop new non-greenhouse gas emitting technologies to prepare us for the future, the rest of the world, using a proven and for the near future (if not longer) plentiful fuel sources, doesn’t pass us by - economically and technologically (i.e. they develop new energy technologies in the course of their growth and development).

By passing the bill, the U.S. House of Representatives indicates its support for the establishment of an artificial scarcity of fossil fuels - legislating that fossil fuels are “running out” (i.e., the ever-tightening “cap") and forcing us to try to use something else (all the while hoping that this doesn’t negatively impact our economy). The idea is to spark innovation in response to a dwindling supply. While it is certainly true that hard times lead to innovation, it is certainly not true that all innovation grows from hard times. The House has decided to impose hard energy times on us now (as if things aren’t hard enough already), rather than wait to see if they develop on their own (at some time in the not-too-near future).

Now, the debate moves to the Senate. Hopefully these 100 individuals will not be motivated by the “curbing global warming” canard - because, as I have shown, whatever they decide, America’s future energy choices will not alter the course of global climate. Any sacrificial song must have different verse.
Read story here.

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The Morality of Climate Change: (Uploaded 18 July 2009)
One has to know all the facts to determine the morality of an issue. John Christy on CO2Science.org, below and enlarged here.

See this town hall attack on Mike Castle, one of the Republicans who voted FOR Cap-and-Trade below.

By Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth

A new paper in Science reports that a careful study of satellite data show the assumed cooling effect of aerosols in the atmosphere to be significantly less than previously estimated. Unfortunately, the assume greater cooling has been used in climate models for years. In such models, the global-mean warming is determined by the balance of the radiative forcings—warming by greenhouse gases balanced against cooling by aerosols. Since a greater cooling effect has been used in climate models, the result has been to credit CO2 with a larger warming effect than it really has. A new paper in Science reports that a careful study of satellite data show the assumed cooling effect of aerosols in the atmosphere to be significantly less than previously estimated. Unfortunately, the assume greater cooling has been used in climate models for years. In such models, the global-mean warming is determined by the balance of the radiative forcings - warming by greenhouse gases balanced against cooling by aerosols. Since a greater cooling effect has been used in climate models, the result has been to credit CO2 with a larger warming effect than it really has.

Aerosol cooling and climate sensitivity in the models must balance each other in order to match historical conditions. Since the climate warmed slightly last century the amount of warming must have exceeded the amount of cooling. As Dr. Roy Spencer, meteorologist and former NASA scientist, puts it: They program climate models so that they are sensitive enough to produce the warming in the last 50 years with increasing carbon dioxide concentrations. They then point to this as ‘proof’ that the CO2 caused the warming, but this is simply reasoning in a circle.

A large aerosol cooling, therefore, implies a correspondingly large climate sensitivity. Conversely, reduced aerosol cooling implies lower GHG warming, which in turn implies lower model sensitivity. The upshot of this is that sensitivity values used in models for the past quarter of a century have been set too high. Using elevated sensitivity settings has significant implications for model predictions of future global temperature increases. The low-end value of model sensitivity used by the IPCC is 2C. Using this value results, naturally, in the lowest predictions for future temperature increases. According to the paper Consistency Between Satellite-Derived and Modeled Estimates of the Direct Aerosol Effect published in Science on july 10, 2009, Gunnar Myhre states that previous values for aerosol cooling are too high - by as much as 40 percent - implying the IPCC’s model sensitivity settings are too high also.

Myhre argues that since preindustrial times, soot particle concentrations have increased much more than other aerosols. Unlike many other aerosols, which scatter sunlight, soot strongly absorbs solar radiation. At the top of the atmosphere, where the Earth’s energy balance is determined, scattering has a cooling effect, whereas absorption has a warming effect. If soot increases more than scattering aerosols, the overall aerosol cooling effect is smaller than it would be otherwise. According to Dr. Myhre’s work, the correct cooling value is some 40% less than that previously accepted by the IPCC.

Not that climate modelers are unaware of the problems with their creations. Numerous papers have been published that detail problems predicting ice cover, precipitation and temperature correctly. This is due to inadequate modeling of the ENSO, aerosols and the bane of climate modelers, cloud cover. Apologists for climate modeling will claim that the models are still correct, just not as accurate or as detailed as they might be. Can a model that is only partially correct be trusted? Quoting again from Roy Spencer’s recent blog post:

It is also important to understand that even if a climate model handled 95% of the processes in the climate system perfectly, this does not mean the model will be 95% accurate in its predictions. All it takes is one important process to be wrong for the models to be seriously in error.

Can such a seemingly simple mistake in a single model parameter really lead to invalid results? Consider the graph below, a representation of the predictions made by James Hansen to the US Congress in 1988, plotted against how the climate actually behaved. Pretty much what one would expect if the sensitivity of the model was set too high, yet we are still supposed to believe in the model’s results. No wonder even the IPCC doesn’t call their model results predictions, preferring the more nebulous term “scenarios.”

See larger image here.

Now that we know the models used by climate scientists were all tuned incorrectly what does this imply for the warnings of impending ecological disaster? What impact does this discovery have on the predictions of melting icecaps, rising ocean levels, increased storm activity and soaring global temperatures? Quite simply they got it wrong, at least in as much as those predictions were based on model results. To again quote from David Evans’ paper:

None of the climate models in 2001 predicted that temperatures would not rise from 2001 to 2009 - they were all wrong. All of the models wrongly predict a huge dominating tropical hotspot in the atmospheric warming pattern - no such hotspot has been observed, and if it was there we would easily have detected it. See much more.