a href="https://www.cato.org/blog/climate-science-deception" title="By PATRICK J. MICHAELS and Ryan Maue">By PATRICK J. MICHAELS and Ryan Maue
Former Energy Department Undersecretary Steven Koonin caused quite a stir yesterday in an interview with Mary Kissel of The Wall Street Journal when he stated Federal scientists purposefully misled the public about climate change. He recounted that the 2014 National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts in the United States emphasized a dramatic increase in Atlantic hurricane power beginning in 1980. However, this conveniently chosen segment of the historical record does not tell the entire story, the narrative that hurricanes are right now getting more frequent and intense due to climate change just does not stand up to scrutiny.
The offending figure is on Page 42 of the document (reproduced here). It is in Chapter 2 of the report, which is called “Our Changing Climate.”
These are graphs of something called the Power Dissipation Index (PDI) for Atlantic and Eastern North Pacific hurricanes. Note that the data begins in 1970 and ends in 2009. The text explains the beginning date by saying “there is considerable uncertainty in the record prior to the satellite era (early 1970s).”
This is true, but phenomenally disingenuous. Another hurricane scientist, conspicuously absent from the author list, is Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center, who developed the Center’s historical hurricane archive, known as HURDAT2. According to Landsea, the problem in the early record (which should be obvious) is that some storms will be missed, not the other way around! In his words, in a 2013 article in Monthly Weather Review, “Some storms were missed, and many intensities are too low in the pre-aircraft reconnaissance era (before 1944 in the western half of the basin) and in the pre-satellite era (before 1972 for the entire basin).”
Therefore, prior to 1972, any history is likely to underestimate the PDI rather than overestimate it.
One of us (Maue) calculated the PDI using the HURDAT2 data back to 1920, shown below:
We have included the trend line from the National Assessment. It’s also noteworthy to see what happened after 2009. The accompanying text says “Adapted from Kossin et al. 2007,” meaning they added two more years. Why didn’t they add through 2013, the year before publication of the Assessment? One potential reason is a close look at the chart (which goes through 2016) would have destroyed the narrative.
When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released the Assessment on May 6, 2014, it said, “The report, a key deliverable of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan, is the most comprehensive and authoritative report ever generated about climate changes that are happening now in the United States...[emphasis added].”
The President’s Action Plan eventually resulted in the Clean Power Plan, arguably the most expensive environmental regulation ever promulgated. The flamboyant, cherry-picked misrepresentation of the hurricane data record was indeed a “deliverable.”
A more “comprehensive” and “authoritative” report would have noted that periodic changes in the north-south gradient of temperature in the Atlantic Ocean (known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation or AMO) are related to hurricane activity. The trendline in the Assessment begins in a “negative” AMO period, which is associated with suppressed hurricane activity, and ends during a very positive phase which is associated with enhanced hurricanes. A more accurate representation should have begun in 1950, which would have represented a complete AMO cycle. Of course, there wouldn’t be any trend, as expected. Instead, the Assessment cherry picked data to tell a story, and the concocted cheap excuse as to why it did it is risible.
Let’s just quote NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory updated overview of current research as of April 13, 2017: “It is premature to conclude that human activities - and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming - have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity.” Now, that is an entirely different story than we have been told.
See also Cliff Mass’s take on the March for Science here.
April 22 is Earth Day, the March for Science and Lenin’s birthday (which many say is appropriate, since environmentalism is now green on the outside and red, anti-free enterprise on the inside). April 29 will feature the People’s Climate March.
The Climate March website says these forces of “The Resistance” intend to show President Trump they will fight his hated energy agenda every step of the way. Science March organizers say they won’t tolerate anyone who tries to “skew, ignore, misuse or interfere with science.”
After eight years of government policies that killed jobs and economic growth - and skewed, ignored, misused, obstructed, vilified and persecuted science and scientists that strayed from alarmist claims, to advance a climate chaos, anti-fossil fuel, anti-growth agenda - that is arrogant hypocrisy at its finest.
But their theater of the absurd gets worse. Some March for Science leaders were outraged that the recent MOAB bomb dropped on ISIS terrorists shows “how science is weaponized against marginal people.”
The rhetoric also recalls the annual Earth Hour, when people in rich countries are supposed to turn off their lights for 60 minutes, to repent for the sin of using fossil fuel, nuclear and hydroelectric power to electrify our homes, businesses, schools and hospitals. I personally promote Human Achievement Hour, by turning on extra lights, to celebrate humanity’s incredible innovations and advancements these past 130 years, our modern living standards, and the right of all people to improve their lives and life spans.
I was a campus organizer for the very first Earth Day, in 1970, when we had serious pollution problems. But since then we’ve cleaned up our act, air and water. Environmentalist groups, modelers and Obama regulators ignore these advances and the Real World climate outside their windows.
Far worse, while claiming to care deeply about the poorest among us, they ignore the harm their policies inflict: soaring electricity prices, fewer jobs, lower living standards in the West - and perpetual poverty, disease, malnutrition and premature death in developing countries. We pay more and more each year for de minimis further improvements in environmental quality, combined with ever-expanding government and activist control of our lives, and steadfast opposition to reliable, affordable energy in the Third World.
That’s why some folks who actually care about poor, minority, elderly, working class and developing country families again designated April 17-23 as Green Energy Poverty Week.
For industrialized nations, “green energy poverty” refers to households in which 10% or more of family incomes is spent on household energy costs - due to policies that compel utilities to provide ever increasing amounts of expensive, less affordable, politically preferred “green” energy. It’s a regressive tax that disproportionately affects low and fixed income families which have little money to spend beyond energy, food, clothing, rent and other basic needs. Every energy price increase hammers them harder.
Beyond our borders, the concept underscores the lot of families that enjoy none of the living standards we take for granted. They have no electricity or get it a few hours a week at random times, burn wood and dung for cooking and heating, and spend hours every day collecting fuel and hauling filthy water from miles away. Corrupt, incompetent governments and constant pressure from callous environmentalist pressure groups in rich countries perpetuate the misery, joblessness, disease, starvation and early death.
In the United States, green energy policies affect the poorest households three times more than the richest households. In fact, rising electricity prices affect all goods and services, for all electricity users: homes, offices, hospitals, schools, malls, farms and factories. With 37 million American families earning less than $24,000 per year after taxes, and 22 million households taking home less than $16,000 post-tax, it’s pretty obvious why wind and solar mandates are unfair, unsustainable and inhumane.
Unbelievably, one million mild-weather California households now live in green energy poverty, the Manhattan Institute reports. In fact, the once-Golden State now has the USA’s highest poverty rate, thanks largely to government requirements that one-third of the state’s electricity must come from “renewable” sources by 2020, and one-half by 2030. No wonder California’s rising rates are already nearly double those in Kentucky and other states that use coal and natural gas to generate electricity.
Tesla electric cars also reward wealthy buyers: with free charging stations, access to HOV lanes, and up to $10,000 in combined tax rebates. They require batteries made from lithium dug out under horrendous or nonexistent environmental, health, safety and child labor rules in Africa. The batteries cost $325 per kilowatt-hour - equal to $350 per barrel for oil (seven times the April 2017 $50.40 a barrel price).
Spreading California policies across the United States would send the cost of heat, lights, AC, internet, and all goods and services soaring. Jobs would disappear, living standards decline, depression rates increase, drug and alcohol abuse climb, and more people die needlessly and prematurely.
Over in Europe, electricity prices are double California’s current rates: 30 - 45 cents per kWh! Green energy policies are hammering jobs, industries, healthcare, family budgets and future prospects.
British families pay “a whopping 54% more” for electricity than average Americans. Nearly 40% of UK households are cutting back on food and other essentials, to pay for electricity. One in three UK families struggles to pay their energy bills. Up to 24,000 elderly Brits die from illness and hypothermia each winter, because they cannot afford proper heat; many are forced to choose between heating and eating.
In Germany, 330,000 families had their electricity cut off in 2015, because they could not pay soaring bills. In Bulgaria, 50% of average household income is spent on energy. Greeks are cutting down trees in protected forests because they cannot afford heating oil; hundreds of thousands of acres are being destroyed across Europe for the same reason. A tenth of all EU families are now in green energy poverty.
It’s infinitely worse for billions of parents and children in Earth’s poorest regions. In Africa, India and other impoverished regions, more than two billion people still burn firewood, charcoal and dung for cooking. Millions die from lung infections caused by pollution from these open fires, millions more from intestinal diseases caused by bacteria-infested food and water, millions more because medicines are spoiled and healthcare is primitive in clinics that don’t have electricity, refrigeration or window screens.
In Uganda, “entrepreneurs” burned a village down, killing a sick child in his home, to turn the area into new forest so that the country could claim carbon credits to prevent climate change. Chad’s government banned charcoal, the mainstay for cooking in that nation, out of absurd concern about climate change.
Africa’s desperate families hunt and cook anything that walks, crawls, flies or swims, endangered or not. They have cut down forest habitats for miles around cities and villages - turning cheetah and chimpanzee habitats into firewood and charcoal. Poverty is undeniably the worst environmental pollutant.
For the wealthy and increasingly powerful radical environmentalist movement, it is no longer about addressing real pollution problems, protecting the environment or improving human health. As UN climate officials have proudly proclaimed, it’s really about ending fossil fuel use and capitalism, redistributing the world’s wealth, and controlling people’s livelihoods and living standards.
Ponder all of this during Green Energy Poverty Week. Contrast Green rhetoric with hard reality.
Many liberals and greens profess to care deeply about America’s and the world’s poor and middle classes. Sadly, their policies and actions speak far more loudly than their words. With friends and protectors like that, do the world’s poor really need enemies?
See this excellent discussion of the issue with Alex Epstein and Stefan Molyneux :
See also this earlier Icecap Post.
Climate: The Real Worrisome Trend
Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow
Update: James Delingpole has also posted on the EF invalidity and the need for the EPA to revoke it based on peer reviewed scientific findings. The Endangerment Finding is the basis for all the EPA’s overreaching regulations.
The story below was picked up by Michael Bastasch at the Daily Caller.
Immediately below you will find a summary of the rationale for our Petition to EPA to begin a formal Reconsideration of its January 15, 2009 CO2 Endangerment Finding:
The Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council Calls on President Trump and EPA to Revisit and Revoke the Scientifically Invalid CO2 Endangerment Finding
Key Points:
1. If the Endangerment Finding is not vacated, whether the current administration likes it or not, it is certain that electric utilities and many other industries will face ongoing EPA CO2 regulation.
2. This regulation will raise energy prices thereby reducing economic growth and jobs.
3. New research findings make it all but certain that CO2 is not a pollutant but rather a beneficial gas that should not be regulated.
As you may recall, recent research findings have now made it very clear to many climate scientists, not blurry-eyed by funding issues or their own past published alarmists claims, that there is no mathematically proper validated proof that CO2 has had, or ever will have, a statistically significant impact on global average surface temperatures. This means that until proven otherwise, CO2 MUST BE considered a beneficial gas. Distinguished climate scientists, such as Will Happer of Princeton and Dick Lindzen of MIT, have recently publicly endorsed CO2’s overall beneficial properties as have many other scientists.
The failure of the Trump Administration to move immediately forward with a formal reconsideration of the Endangerment Finding has left a very dangerous opening for bad ideas to now be given very serous consideration by members of the Trump Administration, ideas such as Carbon Taxes and the U.S. remaining committed to the Paris Agreement. Because of the extremely negative consequences of the U.S. staying on the Green Train to Energy Poverty (amply demonstrated by skyrocketing electricity prices and blackouts or near blackouts in today’s Germany, UK and Southern Australia,) we think this topic is of critical importance to the American People - right now. We hope you agree.
Note that CA and many Northeastern States have already gotten on this Green Train and the impact in their well above average electricity prices is evident in the table below.
Enlarged
Source: EIA
The Trump administration has put out a guidance letter telling States they are not obligated to abide by the Clean Power Plan while the Supreme Court’s Stay remains in effect. Ironically, CA, 10 of the Northeast States and 6 others are now suing before the DC Circuit Court to preserve their rights to continue on a path to even higher energy prices and to force all other States to do the same. States continuing to follow CPP CO2 emission reduction goals, using Germany as an example, would find their average electricity prices 2 to 3 times higher than States that choose not to enforce the regulations and instead treat CO2 as the beneficial gas that it is. Another taxpayer cost relates to the higher taxes required to pay for the subsidy payments for renewables, a double whammy.
A very recent Rasmussen poll reported that “The emphasis on stopping global warming is the highest it’s ever been since regular surveying on the question began in 2014.” and that “45% of Likely U.S. Voters now think taking steps to stop global warming is more important than creating jobs.” But do they have the facts?
This research report as all the comments, analyses and petitions were done pro bono and peer reviewed by 11 distinguished scientists.
The entire Press Release and its URL may be found here:
The Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council Calls on President Trump and EPA to Revisit and Revoke the Scientifically Invalid CO2 Endangerment Finding
Key Points:
1. If the Endangerment Finding is not vacated, whether the current administration likes it or not, it is certain that electric utilities and many other industries will face ongoing EPA CO2 regulation.
2. This regulation will raise energy prices thereby reducing economic growth and jobs.
3. New research findings make it all but certain that CO2 is not a pollutant but rather a beneficial gas that should not be regulated.
April 9, 2017
The Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council today praised President Trump for his recent Executive Order on climate and energy policy. However, the Council further called on the President and EPA, as part of the process initiated by the Executive Order, to revisit and revoke the scientifically invalid Endangerment Finding on which Obama-era greenhouse gas regulations are based.
On Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017, the Council submitted a Petition to EPA, (here) demanding that it revisit and revoke the Endangerment Finding because that Finding has been scientifically invalidated. The Petition demonstrates that the Endangerment Finding is nothing more than a scientific hypothesis that has been disproved by the best empirical evidence from the real world.
The Endangerment Finding is the fundamental foundation on which all greenhouse gas policy and regulation of the Obama era rest - including the Clean Power Plan and U.S. involvement in the Paris Climate Accord. The Endangerment Finding purported to “find” that human-generated greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, constitute a “danger” to human health and welfare because of their effect in warming the atmosphere. However, the Endangerment Finding has been invalidated, and with it the foundation for regulation. As a result, there exists no scientific basis for any of ex-President Obama’s greenhouse gas-restricting policies or regulations.
The Council Petition to EPA is based in part on the September 21, 2016 Research Report by James Wallace, John Christy and Joseph D’Aleo. That Report demonstrated by clear scientific proof the invalidation of each of the three lines of evidence on which EPA relied in the Endangerment Finding to attribute global warming to human emissions of greenhouse gases. The Research Report can be found here.
The Research Report was peer-reviewed by eleven eminent and highly qualified scientists, engineers and economists, all of whom agreed with its conclusion. Those conclusions are definitive and unequivocal. As stated in the Research Report itself, “[T]his analysis failed to find that the steadily rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 13 critically important temperature time series data analyzed.”
In testimony before Congress on March 29, 2017, Dr. Christy reiterated the key findings of the Research Report. Dr. Christy stated:
”
The IPCC climate models performed best versus observations when they did not include extra GHGs [anthropogenic greenhouse gases]. . . . The basic result of this report is that the temperature trend of several datasets since {1959/} 1979 can be explained by variations in the components that naturally affect the climate [that is, excluding anthropogenic greenhouse gases] . . . .”
The scientific invalidity of the Endangerment Finding is now obvious, undeniable and easily demonstrated. It is time for an honest and rigorous scientific re-evaluation of this Obama-era political document. We have been taken down a tragically foolish path of pointless regulations and wasteful mal-investments to “solve” a problem which does not actually exist. Our leaders must summon the courage to acknowledge the truth and act accordingly.
The Council brought its Petition because the Obama-era greenhouse gas regulations threaten, as President Obama himself conceded, to make the price of electricity “skyrocket.” All Americans will benefit from a new era of regulation where the cheapest sources of energy can also compete and prevail in the marketplace.
For more information, contact:
Francis Menton
Law Office of Francis Menton
85 Broad Street, 18th floor
New York, New York 10004
(212) 627-1796
fmenton@manhattancontrarian.com