By Dow Jones

President Barack Obama’s climate czar said Sunday the Environmental Protection Agency will soon issue a rule on the regulation of carbon dioxide, finding that it represents a danger to the public.

The White House is pressing Congress to draft and pass legislation that would cut greenhouse gases by 80% of 1990 levels by 2050, threatening to use authority under the Clean Air Act if legislators don’t move fast enough or create strong enough provisions.

Carol Browner, Obama’s special advisor on climate change and energy, also said the administration is seeking to establish a national standard for auto emissions that could mean tougher efficiency mandates for auto makers. The new standard could be fashioned after strict proposals developed in California that would limit greenhouse gas emissions - initiatives that car makers have vigorously fought.

The comments - the first by the administration on the topic - could lead to another blow for beleaguered car companies such as General Motors (GM) and Ford (F) that are already tottering.

“EPA’s going to look at Mass. Vs. EPA and will make an endangerment finding,” Browner told Dow Jones Newswires in an interview. The Supreme Court ordered the EPA in the Mass. Vs. EPA case to determine if carbon dioxide endangered public health or welfare.

“The next step is a notice of proposed rulemaking” for new regulations on CO2 emissions, Browner said on the sidelines of the National Governors Association meeting, one of her first public appearances since the inauguration.

Browner declined to say exactly when the EPA would issue the finding or rulemaking, but EPA chief Lisa Jackson has indicated it could be on April 2, the anniversary of Mass Vs. EPA. Obama EPA chief Lisa Jackson said earlier in the month that her office would soon begin drafting rules for regulating CO2. The agency has been intensely reviewing and updating an existing endangerment finding made last year by agency officials - but blocked by the previous administration - that found carbon dioxide threatened human welfare.

Officially recognizing that carbon dioxide is a danger to the public would trigger regulation of the greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants, refineries, chemical plants, cement firms, vehicles and any other emitting sectors across the economy.

Industry fears it could shut down the economy, not only preventing plants from operating and spurring a dramatic retooling of the energy sector but also pushing up costs and hurting the international competitiveness for a raft of sectors. Environmentalists, meanwhile, say action by the administration is required by law and need to pressure lawmakers to act.

But Browner said the administration prefers that Congress draft legislation rather than CO2 to be regulated under the Clean Air Act because lawmakers could develop a bill that could more deftly regulate the greenhouse gas through a cap- and-trade system. Read more here. See this Canada Free Press story here discounting the CO2 role in climate change and importance to agriculture.

By Arno Arrak

A full analysis of satellite-measured lower tropospheric temperatures indicates that none of the global temperature variations from 1978 to 2008 can be attributed to the effect of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. The record shows global climate oscillations with a period of three to five years and a peak-to-peak amplitude of 0.4 to 0.5 degrees Celsius about a common, fixed mean temperature that lasted from 1978 to 1997. Since this mean temperature did not change for twenty years the late twentieth century warming touted by IPCC and others simply did not happen. The cause of these newly discovered climate oscillations is large-scale periodic movement of ocean waters from shore to shore, part of the El Nino - Southern Oscillation (ENSO) system. It is accompanied by a massive, periodic transfer of heat from the oceans to the atmosphere and back again which was previously unsuspected and which is detectable even in land-based records. This major atmospheric phenomenon is missing from all IPCC Global Circulation Models (GCMs) and thereby invalidates conclusions drawn from their climate models. Satellite records show that this oscillatory period ended with a giant warming peak known as the “super El Nino of 1998.”

This unusual peak does not belong to the oscillatory ENSO system but interrupts it and could well be of cosmogenic origin. After it subsided the interrupted ENSO oscillation continued. But it had been energized from that warm peak and in three years the global temperature rose to a plateau 0.2 degrees above previous peaks. The expected climate downturn that should have followed failed to occur and temperature stayed up there for six years. It lasted from 2001 to 2007. This “twenty first century high,” together with the warming peak that preceded it, accounts for recent accelerated loss of arctic ice. Contrary to carbon dioxide theory the world temperature did not increase but stayed the same during this period. The period ended with a climate downturn in 2007.

Carbon dioxide cannot explain the lack of warming in the eighties and nineties, nor any of the abrupt warmings that followed, nor the stasis of the twenty first century high, nor the temperature downturn that followed it in 2007 and bottomed out in 2008. A direct comparison of these satellite data with ground-based measurements is also possible. Comparing satellite (UAH MSU LT) and land-based (HadCRUT3) data for the eighties and nineties gives HadCRUT3 a warming trend of 0.1 degrees Celsius per decade (one degree per century) while lower tropospheric satellite data show no warming at all. This is compounded by the fact that satellite measurements of midtropospheric temperature show a long-term cooling effect for this period. Looking for sources
of error in ground-based data one is led to the usual suspect, the urban heat island effect.

Fatal computer errors in IPCC climate models derive from the fact that none of the abrupt warmings and coolings on the record, especially since 1998, can be attributed to the greenhouse effect. Hence, all IPCC models purporting to predict (project??) climate a hundred years into the future are invalid and their predictions/projections must be discarded. To summarize: existing theory used by the IPCC can neither explain the observed climate nor predict the future. Carbon dioxide warming has been shown to be non-existent in the eighties and nineties, and the warming since 1998 is not carbonaceous in origin. It follows that Quixotic carbon dioxide policies like the Kyoto Protocol and the cap-and-trade laws should be abandoned. See Part 1 post here.
See Part II here.

By Alan Caruba

While President Obama was eagerly signing new legislation to keep unqualified borrowers in their homes by doling out billions of our dollars, over at the Environmental Protection Agency they were leaking plans to use the Clean Air Act as a subterfuge to regulate the second most essential gas, other than oxygen, for all life on planet Earth, carbon dioxide (C02).

Cheering from the sidelines is every demented environmental group in America including the Sierra Club which, if it had its way, would ban the building of a single new coal-fired plant anywhere and shut down the existing ones. This is madness on a scale we have not seen since the mid-point of the last century.

Over at Friends of the Earth, they are breaking out the prayer beads, worried to death that upgrading and improving the nation’s infrastructure means building new roads, bridges and tunnels where they are needed. All the while, the most deceitful President to have ever occupied the Oval Office keeps telling everyone that global warming is real when, in fact, the Earth has been cooling for the past decade. Obama is trying to transform the United States of America into a nation where science means nothing and lies mean everything.

We now have the spectacle of a government employee, Dr. James Hansen, shilling for Capitol Climate Action, saying on a YouTube video that everyone should come to Washington, D.C. on March 2 for what is described as “the largest mass civil disobedience for the climate in U.S. history.” The event is a protest of the Capitol Power Plant that uses - gasp - coal to produce electricity. By the way, that white stuff coming out of the stacks of power plants, including nuclear, is excess steam used to turn the huge turbines that generate electricity. In other words, water vapor.

Dr. Hansen is the Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies who lately has been writing to the leaders of the United Kingdom and Europe saying that coal-fired plants are the moral equivalent of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz during WWII. He’s the fellow who, in 1988, told a congressional committee that global warming was going to destroy the Earth. Al Gore uses him as a footstool.

The immediate question is why someone drawing a government check should also be advocating civil disobedience on behalf of a non-governmental organization or group? The larger question is whether the government is going to make it impossible to provide the growing needs for electricity that all Americans will require by 2030 or sooner? The U.S. has vast deposits of coal with which to generate electricity. To claim that coal is responsible for a global warming that is not occurring and that we must abandon the source of 50% of all the electricity we use every day is insane.

First let’s fire Dr. Hansen. He is making a mockery of NASA and engaging in behavior that is irrational and quite possibly illegal. Then let’s bury the White House in emails, letters and faxes to say “Lay off coal!”

In an astonishing few weeks, the Obama administration has initiated legislation that will further bankrupt the nation, saddle future generations with debt, interfered with the normal action of the housing market, and now wants to leave us without enough electricity to turn on the lights!