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!
By Christopher Horner
Barack Obama, on his first foreign trip as President to Canada, will then lecture the United States’ largest trading partner and source of energy imports on the need for a renewed commitment to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Both governments claim to be forging ahead with what’s known as a cap-and-trade system, domestically and internationally, through a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, expected to be signed later this year.
In a cap-and-trade system, the government creates a top emissions level - the cap - and assigns quotas to individual sources of emissions, like utilities and factories, dictating emissions levels for each facility. A facility then must either reduce emissions to meet its quota or buy “hot air credits” from facilities that emit less than their quota. This system rations greenhouse gases (GHGs).The European experience provides a cautionary tale. There, cap-and-trade applied to GHGs was far pricier than its proponents presumed, and didn’t bring the promised emission reductions. It was all pain, no gain. Excuses for all of this are plenty, though it is inarguable that cap-and-trade is not well-suited for ubiquitous GHGs like carbon dioxide, which are not “pollutants” in any traditional sense.
The attraction of adopting such a scheme is difficult to spot. Except for politicians, who like cap-and-trade because it is an indirect and non-transparent tax - they claim businesses pay for GHG reductions instead of taxpayers. Of course, people pay taxes, not businesses. As a result, voters in Europe, and even their usually timid industry, are rebelling. Cap-and-trade, the key component in the Kyoto policy mix, has demonstrably increased not only energy costs and economic uncertainty but has already sent manufacturing jobs, e.g., steel, and related construction jobs, to the United States
Europe’s failure has exposed Kyoto-style cap-and-trade as ill-suited for a problem that evidence suggests does not exist, as some people believe. Mr. Obama, eager to cast himself as the “anti-Bush,” clearly seeks to lead Prime Minister Stephen Harper toward a new, selectively “global” agreement rationing GHG emissions in, and transferring wealth away from, developed nations. Not coincidentally, this is the same thing our economic competitors both rich (Europe) and otherwise (China, India, Mexico, etc.) would like to see, too.
In addition to rejecting such a rationing and wealth-transfer scheme domestically, Obama and Harper should also reject any continuance of the Kyoto process. Kyoto expressly exempts most of the world now, and, as proposed, for the future as well. It also includes certain provisions, such as a 1990 “baseline” year and the collectivizing of emissions, designed to ensure no meaningful obligations rest with any country from the Iberian Peninsula east through Russia. Instead, it transparently targets the United States, Canada and Japan to bear this cross of green.
Further, our leaders might acknowledge that people are cooling to global warming. Polls show that Americans and Canadians place the issue at or very near the bottom of their list of policy priorities. Leadership can mean ignoring polls but ignoring the consequences of such policies is foolhardy and poses threats vastly greater than the theoretical results of man-made global warming. Yet Western politicians, generally, remain in thrall to the claim they are saving Mother Earth while slaking the policy thirst of a noisy, if small, mob of green campaigners. Not to mention the demands for “rents” from businesses hoping to cash in on “global warming.” That mob will increase its pressure this year as a post-Kyoto treaty is tabled. Global warming alarmists fear the process will lose momentum, meaning that, without a false imperative of a deadline, the issue will fade away to its rightful, lower place in the policy hierarchy. This is particularly true should the planet continue cooling, a projection even some warming hawks now admit to.
Of course, it is also possible that Harper and Obama will recognize that this once plausible theory, grounded solely in computer models, has suffered badly under the past decade of observations. As such, in addition to the tremendous uncertainty of the climate science used to justify the enormous taxpayer subsidization of the global warming industry, they might also grasp the tremendous costs of “acting” while lacking evidence of climatic benefit.
A consideration of the evidence is not too much to ask, particularly in these uncertain economic times. If our leaders continue to refuse to face facts we must hold them accountable - people no longer buy into the global warming state of fear. Economic realities and scientific observations have pushed global warming off the agenda, and so should Harper and Obama. See article in the National Post here. See also Chris’s post on Planet Gore here.
Christopher Horner is Senior Fellow with Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and author of Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed.