By Paul Driessen
The climate “crisis” is a “moral issue that requires serious debate,” Al Gore proclaimed in an April 27 AlGore.com blog post. His conversion to the Anglo-American tradition of robust debate came a mere three days after the ex-VP refused to participate in a congressional hearing with Lord Christopher Monckton, former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Republicans had invited Monckton to counter Gore’s testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. But Gore froze like a terrified deer in headlights, and Chairman Henry Waxman told the UK climate expert he was uninvited. Their hypocritical cowardice simply reflects a recognition that their entire energy rationing crusade would collapse if they ever allowed real debate.
Monckton would have focused on the science. But it is morality that truly requires serious debate. Climate Armageddon claims are being used to justify malignant policies that have no rational basis. Global average temperatures peaked in 1998 and since have cooled slightly, despite steadily rising CO2 levels. Except in its Western Peninsula, Antarctica is gaining ice, and Antarctic sea ice reached an all-time high in 2007. Arctic ice is seasonably normal, and in 2008 the Northern Hemisphere was covered by more snow than ever before recorded.
Scientists are hard-pressed to point to long-term state or country climate trends that differ from historic experience and can reasonably be linked to anthropogenic warming crises. Merely asserting that obesity causes warming or increased malaria and house cat populations are due to warming does not make it so. Even more devastating to alarmist claims, long-held assumptions about the deep Atlantic counter-current or “conveyor belt” below the Gulf Stream have been undermined by recent studies. Those assumptions underlie many climate models and their scary worst-case scenarios about alleged planetary crises. The models and GIGO scenarios are now even more questionable.
Yet, model results are constantly portrayed as “evidence” - “proof” that immediate, drastic action is required to avert disaster. Nonsense. Climate changes and their causes are complex, our knowledge is still limited, and the inputs and assumptions are deficient. Climate models are no more reliable than computer predictions of future Super Bowl winners and scores. Their Frankenstein scenarios are no more valid as a basis for law and policy than the special effects in The Day After Tomorrow or Jurassic Park.
Worse, even the 942-page Waxman-Markey climate bill’s absurd target - a 17% reduction in US carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 and 83% by 2050 - would have no detectable benefits, even if CO2 does cause climate change. Research climatologist Paul “Chip” Knappenberger calculates that even these draconian measures would result in global temperatures rising a mere 0.1 degrees F less by 2050 than doing nothing, mostly because Chinese and Indian emissions would quickly dwarf America’s job-killing reductions.
Meanwhile, China and South Africa want developed nations to slash carbon emissions 40% by 2020 - and give poor countries $200 billion annually, to help them cope with global warming’s imagined disasters. Bolivia wants $700 billion a year. Our children will get the bill for that, too. None of this apparently matters to congressional leaders, Climate Action Partnership members or other professional alarmists and rent seekers. If anything, it has spurred them into even hastier action, to transform America’s energy and economic system, regardless of the consequences. Waxman-Markey was approved by the E&C Committee May 21 on a mostly party-line vote.
Above all, they want to replace vile hydrocarbons with wind power. That would require $$$ billions in taxpayer subsidies; hundreds of thousands of turbines, across millions of acres of scenic land, habitats and sea lanes; thousands of miles of new transmission lines and towers; and billions of tons of concrete, steel, copper and fiberglass - plus raw materials and natural gas for backup generators. Spain’s experience should be cautionary, but probably won’t be. According to a study by Dr. Gabriel Calzada, Spanish taxpayers spent $754,000 for each new job in the wind turbine industry (mostly installing towering turbines) - and destroyed 2.2 regular jobs for each “green” job, primarily because pricey “renewable” electricity forced companies to lay off workers, to stay in business.
A recent Lauer Johnson Research poll found 78% of respondents saying even a $600 per year increase in utility bills would be a “hardship.” They should be so lucky. Compared to no cap-and-tax regime, Waxman-Markey would cost the United States a cumulative $9.6 trillion in real GDP losses by 2035, according to an updated study by the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis. The bill would also cost an additional 1.1 million jobs each year, raise electricity rates 90% after adjusting for inflation, cause a 74% hike in inflation-adjusted gasoline prices, and add $1,500 to the average family’s annual energy bill, says Heritage.
The Congressional Budget Office says the poorest one-fifth of families could see annual energy costs rise $700 - while high income families could see their costs rise $2,200 a year. Harvard economist Martin Feldstein estimates that the average person could pay an extra $1,500 per year for energy. MIT says household energy costs could climb $3,000 per year. Where will families find that extra cash? “What do I tell a single mom, making $8 an hour?” asked North Carolina congressman (and Congressional Black Caucus member) G. K. Butterfield.
That was a few days before he and his Democrat colleagues voted against amendments to Waxman-Markey that would have suspended the punitive law if electricity prices go up more than 10% after inflation, unemployment reaches 15% or gasoline prices hit $5. What will he tell that single mom? Eco-activists gleefully predict that oil, gas and coal companies, utilities, vehicles and investors are destined for extinction. No wonder lobbyists have descended on Washington - over 2,300 of them just on climate change: 4.4 per member of Congress.
Some are getting $400-$850 an hour for their skill in promoting mandates, subsidies, legal measures to hobble competitors, and cap-tax-and-trade versions of the mortgage derivatives market. Al Gore alone boasts of having received $300 million (from unnamed sources) to trumpet alarmism and draconian legislation. Colleges, scientists, activists, unions and companies receive billions in taxpayer money, to hype climate chaos claims, intimidate skeptics and lobby Congress. African bureaucrats get millions from the UN (and thus US taxpayers) to hype climate disaster claims that keep millions of Africans impoverished and deprived of the life-enhancing benefits of reliable, affordable electricity.
President Obama says the Bush Administration “made decisions based upon fear, rather than foresight, and all too often trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions.” He and his Democrat allies in Congress should take that critique to heart on global warming. As it stands, this Congress is rapidly shaping up to be the most unethical, immoral and dictatorial in history. When the people finally rebel, it won’ be a pretty sight. Download pdf here.
By Dr. Anthony Lupo
For those who are proponents of the idea that humankind is harmfully warming the climate by adding greenhouse gasses to the earth’s atmosphere, it is also an article of faith that we can engineer our own solutions through policy prescriptions or burdensome regulations. So it is with Energy Secretary Dr. Steven Chu who claimed that we can offset a large part of the expected human-induced warming by changing roofs to white and urban surfaces to a lighter, more reflective color.
In tropical and subtropical island climes, they often use white roofs to help keep houses cooler where there are no trees to shade. The roofs are often terraced in a way to capture fresh water, often in short supply on islands. In middle to high latitudes, roofs are often white part of the year. It is called snow.
There are many real climate scientists out there who question such silly statements and are not afraid to point out that trying to modify urban areas on such a grand scale would be a very expensive endeavor while delivering a small payoff. Dr. Roy Spencer[1] convincingly demonstrates that such a prescription would offset only a very small portion of the expected CO2 emissions, and thus probably not make much of a difference in global temperatures. Dr. Lubos Motl[2] also performs some back-of-the-envelope calculations to demonstrate that the impact of Steven Chu’s prescription might result in a global temperature change on the order of 0.01C or less.
My own critique of Dr. Chu’s statement has come a bit slower as I am generally a step or two behind many of the skeptics like those cited above. One also might ask the question; what would be the real impact of brightening urban surfaces on the current climate and even the weather. After reading Chu’s statement, I was reminded of an experiment that I’d done with a simple climate model some 15 - 20 years ago in a graduate class back at my alma mater. After doing some digging, I found this report and the data, and then reviewed what was done.
In this experiment, a statistical-dynamic climate model (SDM) was used (Oglesby et al. (1990)). A statistical-dynamic model is much simpler than the general circulation models (GCMs) used today (see [4] for a discussion of GCMs on this website). The SDM uses the same mathematical core that a GCM uses, but only yields two-dimensional solutions of climate that are steady-state (can be used to diagnostically). The GCM by contrast can yield fully three-dimensional solutions that can vary with time (or be used as a forecast model). Additionally, the SDM has simpler versions of all the critical physics of a GCM, so the advantage is that the computer program is only about 1% as long as a GCM. It can give nearly instantaneous results compared to the GCM. These advantages were big at the time when computer space was at a premium.
In one experiment, the SDM model was used in which the earth’s surface albedo, or the amount of reflected radiation, was decreased for all the land on earth by about 2.5%. Keep in mind about 30% of the earth’s surface is land-covered. The global temperature was increased by about 0.04 C. These numbers are consistent with the numbers quoted on the two blogs cited above. In fact, using the numbers presented in [1], [2] is the equivalent of reducing the albedo over the entire land surface of the planet by less than 1%. This is less than half the amount of reduction done in the SDM experiment described above. See the full pdf here.
By Megan Rowling, London, May 29 (Reuters)
Climate change kills about 315,000 people a year through hunger, sickness and weather disasters, and the annual death toll is expected to rise to half a million by 2030, a report said on Friday. The study, commissioned by the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum (GHF), estimates that climate change seriously affects 325 million people every year, a number that will more than double in 20 years to 10 percent of the world’s population (now about 6.7 billion).
Economic losses due to global warming amount to over $125 billion annually—more than the flow of aid from rich to poor nations—and are expected to rise to $340 billion each year by 2030, according to the report. “Climate change is the greatest emerging humanitarian challenge of our time, causing suffering to hundreds of millions of people worldwide,” Kofi Annan, former U.N. secretary-general and GHF president, said in a statement.
“The first hit and worst affected are the world’s poorest groups, and yet they have done least to cause the problem.” The report says developing countries bear more than nine-tenths of the human and economic burden of climate change, while the 50 poorest countries contribute less than 1 percent of the carbon emissions that are heating up the planet.
Annan urged governments due to meet at U.N. talks in Copenhagen in December to agree on an effective, fair and binding global pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s main mechanism for tackling global warming. “Copenhagen needs to be the most ambitious international agreement ever negotiated,” he wrote in an introduction to the report. “The alternative is mass starvation, mass migration and mass sickness.”
The study warns that the true human impact of global warming is likely to be far more severe than it predicts, because it uses conservative U.N. scenarios. New scientific evidence points to greater and more rapid climate change. The report calls for a particular focus on the 500 million people it identifies as extremely vulnerable because they live in poor countries most prone to droughts, floods, storms, sea-level rise and creeping deserts. Africa is the region most at risk from climate change, home to 15 of the 20 most vulnerable countries, the report says. Other areas also facing the highest level of threat include South Asia and small island developing states.
To avoid the worst outcomes, the report says efforts to adapt to the effects of climate change must be scaled up 100 times in developing countries. International funds pledged for this purpose amount to only $400 million, compared with an average estimated cost of $32 billion annually, it notes. “Funding from rich countries to help the poor and vulnerable adapt to climate change is not even 1 percent of what is needed,” said Barbara Stocking, chief executive of Oxfam in Britain and a GHF board member. “This glaring injustice must be addressed at Copenhagen in December.”
Read this UN warning to the developed world here.
A similar load of nonsense was offered by the UK TimesOnLine as environmentalist groups and a sympathetic media lobby for major global changes ahead of Copenhagen here.
Icecap Note: If the UN and envionmentalists really cared about the poorer nations, they would encourage the building of power plants to bring electricity, clean energy for cooking, clean water and sanitation and proper medical care instead of keeping them living a primitive existence while at the same time, crippling the world’s producing countries by limiting the enegy they utilize and restricting harmless carbon dioxide emissions that only serve to increase crop yields. They neglect the fact that global temperatures are cooling, ocean heat content is dropping, polar ice recovering, and sea level rises slowing, all falsifying the climate models they use to create the big scare. The following graphic (enlarged here) from Ian Plimer’s landmark book Heaven and Earth: Global Warming - The Missing Science, flying off the shelves that this is blatantly wrong.
