By the Science and Public Policy Institute

Around the country, localities, states and multi-state regions are convening Climate Change Task Forces aimed at developing plans toreduce greenhouse gas emissions. As the name suggests, these groups have been created to develop Climate Action Plans that are intended to lessen the projected impacts of anthropogenic climate change around the world in general, but more particularly, in each state. In every case, the Action Plans include a lengthy list of cookie-cut, prescribed actions spread across all segments of society, and that are aimed towards reducing future emissions of greenhouse gases to a
level below some arbitrarily set target. In no case do any of the Plans lay out what quantified effects their recommended emissions cuts will have on local, regional or global climate. The reason why not? None of the Climate Action Plans will have any meaningful effect on the climate - or any change in future temperatures or sea levels.

Given the magnitude of global emissions and the rate of global emission growth, even regulations prescribing a complete cessation, rather than a partial reduction, of local, state, or even national CO2 emissions will have absolutely no meaningful effect on global climate. In other words, state mitigation plans are “all pain and no gain” - a folly bordering on official malfeasance.

President-elect Obama has promised to “bankrupt” the coal industry with the most draconian cap and trade scheme in the world. Under his announced greenhouse gas emissions reduction plan, he proposes to reduce the U.S.’s annual greenhouse house gas emissions total such that the U.S. total emissions in the year 2020 are the same as what the U.S. total emissions were in the year 1990. Even further, he vows to reduce total greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. to 80% below what they were in 1990 by the year 2050.

Even assuming the UN’s mid-range sensitivity for a doubling of CO2, the modeled result of an 80% below 1990 level reduction of U.S. emissions by the year 2050, the global average temperature in the year 2050 under Obama’s plan would be less than two-tenths of a degree F lower than it
otherwise would have been in the year 2050. The global sea level would be about one-half an inch lower than where it otherwise would have been. Read much more here.

In the report, they look at the state-by-state and country-by-country effects on climate of emissions control. Since they are assuming the midrange impact of CO2 warming and gtlobal temperatures are tracking below the lowest range impact, it is likely even these numbers are even more minscule. Indeed a lot of pain for industry and the public with virtually no gain (except financially to those standing to benefit from carbon trading like Al Gore and his friends).

Boston.com

“Few challenges facing America—and the world - are more urgent than combating climate change,” Obama says in this video. “The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season. Climate change and our dependence on foreign oil, if left unaddressed, will continue to weaken our economy and threaten our national security.

Obama continues that “too often, Washington has failed to show the same kind of leadership. That will change when I take office. My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process. “That will start with a federal cap and trade system,” he says. “We will establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 percent by 2050. Further, we will invest $15 billion each year to catalyze private sector efforts to build a clean energy future. We will invest in solar power, wind power, and next generation biofuels. We will tap nuclear power, while making sure it’s safe. And we will develop clean coal technologies.

“This investment will not only help us reduce our dependence on foreign oil, making the United States more secure. And it will not only help us bring about a clean energy future, saving our planet. It will also help us transform our industries and steer our country out of this economic crisis by generating five million new green jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced.” Read more here

See larger image here

See larger image here

See larger image here

Temperatures have declined for 7 years and sea levels have paused in their rise. 5 of the last 7 decades since WWII and post war boom have shown cooling, not exactly an endorsement for the greenhouse gas warming theory. Climate models are failing even the ones from the IPCC from 2007 above.

Obama is not taking heed of the devastating economic impact of cap and trade on EU, UK, Canada and New Zealand, where countries are abandoning their emission goals and or kicking out the ruling parties. Obama is on the right track partially with the energy plans. We need to exploit our energy resources including nucleer, clean coal, but wind and solar will only be single digit answers anytime soon. We need all of us to conserve energy. We need the ability to drill offshore and tap our in ground resources of fossil fuel - clean burning natural gas and oil. Let’s hope market forces and public pressure drive an “all of the above solution” although I think it may take brownouts and blackouts before the politicos tell the enviros to back off their untenable positions.

By Christopher Booker, UK Telegraph

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious “hockey stick” graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new “hotspot” in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen’s institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.) Yet last week’s latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen’s methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising “very much faster” than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world’s governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought. Read full post here.