By Suzanne Goldenberg, UK Guardian

The Obama administration is poised for its most forceful confrontation with the American public on the sweeping and life-altering consequences of a failure to act on global warming with the release today of a long-awaited scientific report on climate change.

The report, produced by more than 30 scientists at 13 government agencies dealing with climate change, provides the most detailed picture to date of the worst case scenarios of rising sea levels and extreme weather events: floods in lower Manhattan; a quadrupling of heat waves deaths in Chicago; withering on the vineyards of California; the disappearance of wildflowers from the slopes of the Rockies; and the extinction of Alaska’s wild polar bears in the next 75 years.

Today’s release is part of a carefully crafted strategy by the White House to help build public support for Obama’s agenda and boost the prospects of a climate change bill now making its way through Congress.

For many Americans, the report released today, entitled Global climate change impacts in the United States provides the most tangible evidence of the economic costs of climate change - from the need to relocate airports in Alaska built on permafrost, to the increased need for pesticides in agriculture, to an electrical grid straining to meet the increased demand for air conditioning in summer and ageing sewer systems brought to bursting point by heavy run-off in 770 American cities and towns.

Scientists and environmentalists who had seen today’s report praised the breadth of its science as well as its accessible language.

“It’s a clarion call for immediate action,” said Amanda Staudt, a climate scientist at the National Wildlife Federation who has seen advanced drafts of the report but not the version released today. “This report basically describes a state of emergency. It says we need to act quickly and decisively. Every state is going to be affected, and every sector of the economy.”

The final draft of today’s report uses climate models to map out starkly different futures if the current generation of Americans fails to act to reduce the carbon emissions that cause global warming.

If today’s generation acts on climate change, the average US temperature will rise 0.4C-1.83C (4-6.5F) by the end of this century, said the draft, which was finalised in April.

If it does not, average temperatures could rise by about 2.1C-4.3C (7-11F) with catastrophic consequences for human health and the economy.

Americans have already been living with evidence of changing climate, the report said. Over the last 30 years winters have grown shorter and milder, with a 2.1C (7F) rise in winter temperatures in the midwest and northern Great Plains. Hurricanes have become deadlier.

If climate change is left unchecked, the future promises to bring even more ferocious hurricanes to coastal regions - in the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, punishing droughts to the south-west, and increasingly severe winter storms in the north-east and around the Great Lakes.

The human consequences, as envisaged by the draft, are similarily catastrophic: potential food shortages because of declining wheat and corn yields in the breadbasket of the mid-west, increased outbreaks of food poisoning and epidemic diseases.

US cities will be choking because of deteriorating air quality; leisure pursuits will disappear. The report predicts that the ski season in the north-east will be 20% shorter. As for summer holidays, 14 of 17 North Carolina beaches will be permanently underwater by 2080, the draft forecasts.

Today’s release of the report was part of a methodically planned media roll-out by the Obama administration.

Scientists who have seen the report said the administration spent several weeks honing the language and graphics to make it accessible to non-scientists and to sharpen its core message: America must act now on climate change.

As part of the PR surrounding the release of the report, the administration approached the San Francisco consulting firm, Resource Media, which specialises in environmental campaigning, to oversee the release, and produce a shorter and more digestible brochure of today’s report for wider public distribution.

Read rest of the sad story here. See Dr. Ed Blick’s reply here.

The report issued was the Hollywood supported NOAA CCSP report which after two rounds of comments by many scientists citing peer review reasons to change, largely ignored the comments and delivered a document even more alarmist than the IPCC. It starts out DAY ONE being wrong on many of its claims but goes much further to rely on climate models for 2050 and 2100 to make even more dire prognoses. This is not a work of science but an embarrassing episode for the authors and NOAA. They gave the administration the cover to push the unwise cap-and-tax agenda.

By Martin Feldstein

The cap and trade legislation supported by the Obama administration is a stealth strategy for a massive long-term tax increase. It is a large tax on all American households, and the tax burden rises in future years without any need for further legislation. It will evolve into an enormous new source of tax revenue for the government.

A cap and trade system is supposed to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by raising the price of CO2-intensive goods and services like gasoline, electricity, and a wide range of industrial products. This, in theory, will induce consumers to shift their spending to services and products that involve lower levels of CO2 emissions. It achieves these price increases by requiring firms that create CO2 in their production process, or sell goods like gasoline that create CO2 when used, to have a permit per ton of CO2 emission.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that reducing the level of CO2 to 15 percent less than the total level of U.S. emissions in 2005 would require permit prices that would increase the cost of living of a typical household by $1,600 a year. To put that $1,600 carbon tax in perspective, a typical family of four with earnings of $50,000 now pays an income tax of about $3,000. The tax imposed by the cap and trade system is therefore equivalent to raising the family’s income tax by about 50 percent. (Some advocates of a cap and trade program argue that the cost to households could be much less than $1,600 if the government uses the tax revenue to finance transfers to low income households and tax cuts to others, but since there is no way to know how the future revenue would actually be used, the only number we have to consider is the $1,600 direct increase in the burden on households.)

The Waxman-Markey bill that recently passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee would cause an even greater initial rise in the cost of living by its requirement to cut CO2 emissions to 17 percent less than the 2005 level of emissions rather than the 15 percent reduction assumed in the CBO estimates. (European officials are, moreover, calling for the United States to agree to a much bigger initial cut--20 percent less than the U.S. emission level in 1990.)

As the legislated CO2 reduction increases automatically after 2020, the price of the permits would rise to further limit consumers’ demand for CO2-intensive goods and services. The Waxman-Markey legislation requires the CO2 level in 2050 to be an amazing 83 percent less than it was in 2005, and a study by the EPA estimates that the price of the permit would rise from about $20 a ton in 2020 to more than $75 a ton in 2050. The higher permit costs would be reflected in the prices that households would pay for CO2-intensive goods and services.

Rises in the cost of living would be greater for households that use more energy and CO2-intensive goods and services. The implied rate of the cap and trade carbon tax would therefore rise with income. In that way it would act like an income tax--reducing the reward for additional effort by putting a tax wedge between the individuals’ additional work effort and the resulting increase in their standard of living. But while it would collect more tax from higher income households, the cap and trade tax would be a relatively heavier burden on lower-income and middle-income households. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that spending on “carbon based energy” is 21.4 percent of income among households in the lowest income quintile but only 4.1 percent of income in the highest income quintile.

The rise in the prices of U.S. goods would make them less competitive. American firms would suffer in export markets and domestically in competition with goods imported from countries that do not impose such a high implicit tax on CO2 emissions. There would no doubt be pressure to impose tariffs on imports from other countries that have lower carbon costs. This might be welcomed by the unions that now seek to use foreign labor practices as an excuse for tariffs on imports, but countervailing tariffs based on carbon content would hurt American consumers and threaten our global trading system.

And, despite the high cost to American households and the economy, the proposed cap and trade plan would do little to deal with concerns about global warming. The proponents of enacting a U.S. cap and trade program at the present time “to show U.S. leadership” so that other countries will follow are naive to think that China and India will agree to major CO2 reductions without financial inducements. Read full story here.

By Ross McKitrick

Polls show that global warming has fallen to the bottom of the list of Americans’ worries. Meanwhile 170 Michigan professors signed a letter calling for tough climate legislation. I read the professors’ letter, and I have to say I’m with the people on this one.

Their letter would be more convincing if they weren’t so dismissive of the costs involved. They cite unnamed “recent studies” that claim emission cuts could create 150,000 jobs in Michigan. I put more stock in the analysis by the Energy Information Administration of last year’s Lieberman-Warner bill (which is similar to the Waxman-Markey bill now before Congress). The EIA pointed out that cutting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions requires driving up energy prices, and this will shrink the economy. U.S. manufacturing would decline by 3% to 7%, depending on how lucky the United States is at developing alternative energy sources, and manufacturing employment will fall between 3% and 10% (p. 39). Of course the professors won’t lose their jobs, but they should still be concerned about these things.

It is true that if you could convince taxpayers in the other 49 states to subsidize new, money-losing green energy projects in Michigan, then you might gain some jobs. But when every other state is hoping to pull the same trick on you, it’s a zero-sum game. Actually it’s worse: Subsidies for green jobs end up reducing national employment, not increasing it.

I also found the letter’s scientific content unconvincing. Regional climate forecasting is very conjectural, and models often contradict each other. I suppose it is possible that all four trout species could disappear as a result of a few degrees of warming over 100 years, but if trout were that delicate, the annual arrival of summer would have wiped them out long ago.

As for the litany of potential damages from recent warming trends, I browsed some of the longest weather station histories for Michigan, such as Grand Rapids, Cheboygan and others. There are some trends, but after 1920 they are pretty small, especially considering the known warming bias in long-term climate data from regions undergoing urbanization.

The professors claim that these small trends could, among other things, destroy Michigan agriculture. Let’s give farmers a bit more credit. If farmers could not adapt to weather variability, agriculture in Michigan would have disappeared by the 1930s.

Even if the long list of problems could be blamed on CO2 emissions, the professors failed to mention that the small cuts envisioned under the proposed regulations would not change anything. The differences would be minuscule at the global scale, which is where they matter.

Next: Looking at the data on carbon dioxide and temperatures.

Ross McKitrick is a professor of economics at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, where he focuses on environmental economics. Read post here.

See follow-up post in the Detroit Free Press on Check This Data here. See his response to Senator Dingell after testimony in congress here. See that testimony here.