By Bob Ferguson, SPPI

Around the country, localities, states and multi-state regions are convening Climate Change Task Forces aimed at developing plans to reduce 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. Here’s why.

In 2007, global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) - the primary greenhouse gas emitted by human industrial activities - totaled 27,600 million metric tons (mmtCO2). The United States, as a whole, contributed 5,900 mmtCO2 to that total, or about 21.4%. Individual localities, states, etc., contributed much less (see columns 2 and 3 in the Table below for a state by state breakdown of total and percentage of global emissions).

Even more importantly, the percentage of global, manmade CO2 emissions from the U. S. (and each individual state) will decrease over the 21st century as the growing demand for power in developing countries such as China and India - and beginning in 2012, the Middle East - rapidly outpaces the growth of our CO2 emissions (EIA, 2007).

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.

During the past 5 years, global emissions of CO2 from human activity have increased at an average rate of 3.5%/yr, with China alone contributing nearly 2/3rds of the new emissions (Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, 2008). This means that the annual increase of global CO2 emissions is several times greater than the total emissions from most of the individual 50 states. Therefore, even a cessation of all CO2 emissions from any particular state will be completely subsumed by global emissions growth in only a matter of months! In fact, emissions increases produced by China alone rapidly overwhelm any emissions reductions made in the U.S. See rest of the story and the state-by-state table here.

By Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun

British journalism lecturer and warming alarmist Alex Lockwood says my blog is a menace to the planet. Sceptical bloggers like me need bringing into line, and Lockwood tells a journalism seminar of some options: “There is clearly a need for research into the ways in which climate scepticism online is free to contest scientific fact. But there is enough here already to put forward some of the ideas in circulation.”

One of the founders of the Internet Vint Cerf, and lead for Google’s Internet for Everyone project, made a recent suggestion that the Internet should be nationalised as a public utility. As tech policy blogger Jim Harper argues, “giving power over the Internet to well-heeled interests and self-interested politicians” is, and I quote, “a bad idea.” Or in the UK every new online publication could be required to register with the recently announced Internet watchdog.

Strangely, Lockwood sees no irony in canvassing controls on dissent in order to defend “media freedoms” - apparently believing that media freedom is at best the freedom to agree with him: “I would argue that climate disinformation online is a form of cultural and political malware every bit as threatening to our new media freedoms, used not to foster a forum for open politics but to create, in Nancy Fraser’s term, a “multiplicity of fragmented publics” that harms not only our democracy, but our planet.”

But a flash of insight does briefly flare in his brain: “Suppressing debate where it legitimately exists risks leaving the mainstream agenda open to dismissal. ‘Green bully’ and ‘religious environmentalist’ personas are invoked as evidence of hysteria at the heart of environmental commitment.” Sadly, this green panicking and bullying is seen as merely a perception to overcome, not a reality to address.

PS: In case you think this journalism lecturer must just have expressed himself badly, in an earlier missive he makes clear his desire to restrict the rights of sceptics to speak publicly: “The question for journalism (rather than journalists) is: what limits do we have to debate? What can or should we ask of the regulators, ISPs, or even governments, to help fact-check, at a structural level, the information entering the public sphere?  The question is: how much time to do we have to encourage media freedoms that freely amplify uncertainties that may be helping hold back political action on such an unprecedented issue?”

Nor is this one isolated extremist teaching tomorrow’s journalists to preach the warming faith, rather than cover the debate. Here is Cristine Russell, president of the US Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, opining in the Colombia Journalism Review: “The era of “equal time” for skeptics who argue that global warming is just a result of natural variation and not human intervention seems to be largely over. The he-said, she-said reporting just won’t do. The public needs a guide to the policy, not just the politics.”

And why stop there? Why not make scepticism a crime? The U.N.’s top climate official warned policymakers and scientists trying to hammer out a landmark report on climate change that ignoring the urgency of global warming would be “criminally irresponsible.” Indeed, putting sceptics on trial already appeals to Julian Burnside, Margo Kingston and Tim Flannery. The new faith has its Inquisition.  See this very scary story here.

For ten years or more, professor David Deming has taught a course in environmental geology at the University of Oklahoma.  In October 2008, he was informed that the “general education” certification for his course was being revoked.  Under the University of Oklahoma system, this means that student enrollment in the course is likely to drop by two-thirds.

This is a course which receives outstanding student evaluations. Professor Deming is well-known to be a global-warming skeptic.  In 2006, he testified before the US Senate that media coverage of global warming had descended into ”irrational hysteria.” Excerpt:

“Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, and distinguished guests, thank you for inviting me to testify today. I am a geologist and geophysicist. I have a bachelor’s degree in geology from Indiana University, and a Ph.D in geophysics from the University of Utah. My field of specialization in geophysics is temperature and heat flow. In recent years, I have turned my studies to the history and philosophy of science. In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal Science. In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me. I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” (University of Arizona’s Jonathan Overpeck was not named in testimony but is said to be that individual).

“There is an overwhelming bias today in the media regarding the issue of global warming. In the past two years, this bias has bloomed into an irrational hysteria. Every natural disaster that occurs is now linked with global warming, no matter how tenuous or impossible the connection. As a result, the public has become vastly misinformed on this and other environmental issues.” See full testimony here.

Professor Deming is unaware of any other case in the history of the University of Oklahoma where the “gen ed” certification for a course has been revoked. It would appear possible that Professor Deming’s position on global warming was a motivating factor.  But in this case, the tragedy is that the people being punished are the students, not the professor. Those who wish to express their concern can do so by writing or calling University of Oklahoma President David Boren.

David Boren, President
University of Oklahoma
110 Evans Hall
Norman, OK 73019
telephone:  405-325-3916
email:  dboren@ou.edu