By Darren Samuelsohn, E&E senior reporter

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has given the chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee the go-ahead to advance global warming legislation by Tuesday if Republicans have not ended their boycott by then, according to three sources close to the process.

Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) originally wanted to push forward tomorrow with debate and votes on amendments to the 959-page climate bill.

But the sources say Reid urged Boxer to wait until Tuesday, Nov. 10. The markup was originally scheduled to begin yesterday, but the committee’s GOP members are boycotting in an effort to force U.S. EPA to further study the climate proposal.

“Makes them look like the ‘party of no,’” one source said. “Makes them look frivolous.” As of press time, Boxer was huddling with EPW Committee Democrats to discuss their strategy on the climate bill over the coming days. As she entered the closed-door meeting, Boxer said she would remain in the Capitol into the evening for Republicans to return to the negotiation table.

Aides to Boxer and Reid declined comment on the schedule that Reid and Boxer discussed earlier this week. But Boxer earlier today signaled she was losing her patience with Republicans after they twice ignored her deadline for submitting amendments and also rebuffed two offers to publicly question a top EPA official about the models that the agency has already run on the House-passed bill and its Senate counterpart.

“Stay tuned,” she said. “You’ll know very soon.” Senate aides say Boxer plans to proceed under a rarely used interpretation of the EPW Committee’s rules that allows her to start and finish the markup so long as a majority of the panel’s members are present, rather than long-standing precedent requiring two minority members to be in attendance. About 80 Democratic amendments have been submitted for the markup, but it is unclear how many will be brought up for consideration.

“Let me just say, we’ll follow the rules,” Boxer said today. “The rules are written in the Senate committees for reasons. And the reasons are to make sure we can do our work. Can you imagine if, and regardless of who’s in charge, there’s never an ability to move a bill out? That would paralyze the nation.”

EPW Committee ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) warned Boxer earlier not to move the climate bill in violation of the long-standing committee precedent, calling it “the nuclear option” that could disrupt progress on other legislative items. Inhofe and the other GOP committee members stayed away from this afternoon’s staff-led briefing on the details of the climate bill.

But Inhofe’s spokesman did stop by the hearing room to circulate a letter sent today on their behalf to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson from four critical Republican moderates seen as potential swing votes on the floor: Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and Maine’s Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.

“As senators interested in a bipartisan approach to addressing climate change and energy independence this Congress, we have a keen interest in ensuring that cost estimates, models and other data critical to the legislative process be made available to members of Congress and the public in a timely manner,” the four senators wrote. “We cannot support legislation without this information.”

The Republican senators’ letter urged EPA to deliver the economic models on the Senate bill “prior to any action in EPW.”

Graham’s signature came within hours of his appearance at a press conference where he reaffirmed his role in working toward a bipartisan compromise on the climate proposal with Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.).

Graham told reporters he was “sympathetic” to the GOP boycott on the EPW panel, which builds off a 3-month-old request for information at EPA sought by Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio).

“I’d probably be where Senator Voinovich is at,” Graham said. “I think he’s a pretty constructive guy, and I think he’s got some legitimate concerns.”

But Graham also said he was trying to work with the Democrats and Obama administration on legislation that squeezes together both climate change and more supply-side energy production, including nuclear power and offshore oil and gas production.

“I hope my Republican colleagues will at least listen, come to the table as the chamber has, see where we’re going, give us input, and if at the end of the day they can’t support it, that’s OK,” Graham said.

Kerry, Graham and Lieberman touted a letter sent yesterday to Boxer and Inhofe from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that spelled out in greater detail where it stands on the climate bill. Kerry called the chamber’s letter “essential.” And Graham said the group mirrors many Senate Republicans who are not quite sure where they stand on the issue.

“The chamber letter sort of reflects where a lot of people are,” Graham said. “This sounds intriguing.”

Senators, White House talk

The three senators also held a series of meetings today in the Capitol with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and White House energy adviser Carol Browner—all aimed at gleaning where the Obama administration stands on the critical issues at the center of the climate and energy bill.

“Our effort is to try to reach out, to broaden the base of support, beyond the committees of jurisdiction,” Kerry said. “We’re going to do that working very closely with the chairs of those committees, as well as members across the Senate. The key here is really to negotiate once, not negotiate with ourselves, and not negotiate just in the Senate and not have the White House also at the table.”

Kerry insisted that the three senators would keep their focus on closed-door negotiations in an efforts to win over more than 60 votes on the proposal. “We’re just at the beginning stage,” he said. “One thing I’ll say, we’re not going to negotiate this publicly, day by day, drip by drip. We’re going to do this in a way that maximizes the privacy of putting something like this together.”

Ultimately, Kerry said he hopes to deliver a legislative package to Reid that includes input from leaders of the six Senate committees with jurisdiction over the issue, as well as members off the committees. Reid is scheduled to meet in the “next week or so” with the six chairmen, Reid spokesman Jim Manley said yesterday.

Lieberman, one of the original co-sponsors of climate legislation, said he expects the final climate bill to include significant backing for building new nuclear power plants. Nuclear industry officials are seeking several times the $18.5 billion for new plant loan guarantees that Congress has already provided and the Energy Department plans to divide among a handful of companies soon.

Lieberman declined to put a dollar figure on the new support he envisions.

Elsewhere, Lieberman cited increased streamlining of the new reactor licensing process, nuclear work force development and support for waste recycling technologies.

Compromise efforts on nuclear power will not be the subject of amendments in the EPW Committee but rather during the floor debate, he said. “I don’t expect that the work we’ve been doing will lead anyone involved to offer amendments,” Lieberman said. “It will be more part of this process, or on the floor.” Read more here.

Anxious for any quick ‘victory’ and ignoring the promises that no bills would be voted on before they were posted for full public and congressional review on the web, Pelosi and Reid have agreed to fast track what will be the biggest tax increase in US history in what may be a 2000 page bill which will mean billions of dollars in profit for Goldman Sachs, GE and Al Gore and his friends to push forward plans that Spain, Denmark, Germany and the UK have conclused were expensive mistakes.

Instead of avoiding prior mistakes, our clueless leaders are pushing foward at light speed to appease their base and their special interests. It may well be the biggest blunder in the history of this great country pushing a hugely expensive ‘solution’ to a non-existent problem.

By Marc Sheppard, American Thinker

Last Tuesday, Arab Internet services company Maktoob.com posted the article Gore beats climate change drum in Dubai, which covered the speech our favorite greenhouse gasbag gave that day to the Leaders in Dubai Business Forum. Here’s a portion of Gore’s rhetoric as reported in the original article on Tuesday: [my emphasis]

“Each one metre of sea level rise [SLR] is associated with 100 million climate refugees in the world,” the Nobel laureate told a business forum in Dubai, which could see its famous man-made islands disappear under the waves if his predictions prove true. “The North Pole ice cap is 40 percent gone already and could be completely and totally gone in the winter months in the next 5 to 10 years,” he warned. If the North Pole were to melt it could increase sea levels by 67 metres, Gore said, speaking in the heart of an oil-rich region not known for its regard for the environment.

Needless to say, there was just so much wrong in those 105 words I felt compelled to respond with this now recalled Friday blog entry, pointing out that, based on those figures, by 2020 the oceans could rise 220 feet and the entire population of the planet might be forced to wander the globe as “climate refugees.” I challenged the statement that the North Pole ice cap is 40% gone, assuming he retrieved the figure from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) 2007 announcement that arctic sea ice extent was 40% below its 20-year mean.  I pointed out that NOAA also reports that the ice began recovering in 2008 and is now at about 32% below that same average.  (BTW - Joe D’Aleo at Icecap points outs that “actually the sea ice has increased in two years during the peak melt ”by 26% since 2007” ).

I wondered whether, had he been aware of these recent recoveries, Gore would have nonetheless forecasted that winter ice will be gone in 5-10 years? For starters, the controversy over arctic ice has been of whether or not it may vanish in summer months. Ice extent variance is a seasonally cyclical phenomenon, retreating in summer and recovering in winter. Yes, there have been alarmist projections of ice-free summers occurring as early as 2020, but even those predictions were recently walked back in a report from UK’s Met office, which confirmed the ice to currently be in recovery and predicted that “the first ice-free summer [is] expected to occur between 2060 and 2080.”

More importantly, even should the highly alarmist Met’s highly unlikely 50 to 70 year predictions come true, melting sea ice has little or no effect on SLR as it displaces an approximately equal weight of sea water in either physical state. I suggested that perchance Gore had conflated the floating polar ice cap with the land-based Greenland ice sheet.  The Met does predict it holds enough water to effect 7 meters of SLR should it disappear.  Of course that’s only a fraction of the figure Maktoob claimed Gore predicted, but I was willing to cut the man some slack for rounding.  But there was still a problem—according to Met, even “if man-made emissions are not controlled,” Greenland melting “would take a few thousand years.”

I pointed out that Gore’s co-Nobel awardees at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) maintain a midrange prediction of 1.26 inches per decade.  And that even his fellow uber-alarmist James Hansen is only predicting 1.5 meters SLR by 2100!  And Joe D’Aleo helped out again:  ”Holgate ” showed sea levels slowing the later part of the century and ”Topex showed sea levels stopped rising in 2006 in sharp contrast to Al’s dire predictions.”

So if Gore really made these statements, he was truly ratcheting up the terror way beyond even what had been his previously longstanding level of lunacy. Which is why I also disclosed that my information came from one source and one source only, as media coverage of Tuesday’s event appeared to have been somewhat sparse.  And added that Maktoob Business is a major player in the region, and that the author, Shakir Husain, boasts rather impressive credentials.  And that due to Gore’s world-renowned large on shock-value, short on facts style, I was inclined to believe his words to be as reported.  But I also revealed that I had contacted Mr. Husain for further confirmation and that I’d update this entry should I receive relevant advice.

Yesterday, I received such advice from Mr. Husain, who wrote to me in an email:  “In the second quote, it should be 6-7 metres not 67. It has been rectified on the website.” It certainly had.  But that’s not all that had been “rectified.” In fact, they appear to have revisited a number of issues I brought to their attention. The paragraph that originally stated “If the North Pole were to melt it could increase sea levels by 67 metres” was replaced with:

“Gore said if Greenland and West Antarctica, made up of massive ice sheets, were to melt it could increase sea levels by 6-7 metres, speaking in the heart of an oil-rich region not known for its regard for the environment.” “Greenland and West Antarctica are such massive amounts of ice each one of would lead to a six to seven metre increase in sea level if it were to melt. And both West Antarctica and Greenland are beginning to melt,” he said. So not only did they flub the measurement, they also got the location of the ice all wrong.  A crucial point, indeed.

Interestingly, Maktoob, which blames the blunders on tape transcription errors, stands behind its reporting that Gore referred to north polar ice disappearing in winter rather than summer months in 5-10 years, which still makes no sense even were the ice indeed in retreat. But by changing the originally reported SLR predictions from 67 meters to 6-7 meters and its cause from melting sea to melting land-based ice, Gore’s North Pole Ice Cap predictions, while still nutty, become appropriately irrelevant to the SLR discussion.

Granted, the 6-7 meter figure isn’t nearly as massive a whopper as the 67 Maktoob originally reported - but it’s a howler nonetheless.  Remember, he bases that rise on the thawing of ice his fellow-alarmists at Met state “would take a few thousand years” even if we do nothing. Let’s face it - had these words been attributed to any other person on Earth, they would have been dismissed as a reporting error right out of the gate.  But they were instead ascribed to the man who truly does warn of catastrophic 20 foot SLR this century.  Who did claim that warming could stop the Gulf Stream and throw Europe into an ice age. Who does attempt to blame everything from fictional polar bear extinctions and seasonal wild-fires to the misery of Hurricane Katrina and the thousands killed in a last year’s Myanmar Cyclone on global warming. 

And who did, incidentally, state on Tuesday that each meter of SLR creates 100 million climate refugees and the North Pole will be ice-free in the winter within 10 years. So then, it still appears that even faced with the reality that the public’s disbelief in his hilariously impossible doomsday scenarios has likely played a major role in cooling the fear of the threat of global warming, Al Gore nevertheless continues to ratchet up the terror.

And that’s still not likely to please more moderate anthropogenic global warming believers.  Just last Friday, Britain’s Timesonline reported that “senior scientists” are quite concerned that such exaggerations from clueless politicians and activists undermine the efforts of serious researchers to get the word out: “Excessive statements about the decline of Arctic sea ice, severe weather events and the probability of extreme warming in the next century detract from the credibility of robust findings about climate change.”

I closed with this on Friday and I’ll close with it again today, despite Maktoob’s corrections: So the incessant, insidious bloviating of the Gorebotic greenhouse gasbags might help impede drastic and disastrous action where no action at all is what’s desperately needed?  Both in Washington and in Copenhagen?  Speak out, Al Gore.  And Barbara Boxer.  And John Kerry.  And Henry Waxman.  And Ban Ki-moon.  The lot of you!
Speak out loudly.  And speak out often. One thing we can agree on - the future of the world as we know it may just depend on it. See post here.

If you have the stomach for it, watch Katie clueless Couric interview hoaxster Gore on CBS here . When the low solar effect kicks in and the cold PDO/La Nina dominated cold era really kicks in, maybe Madoff will have another former millionaire as company to discuss the good lives they enjoyed at the expense of the many good people they hurt. In a surprise, ABC’a Diane Sawyer Hits Gore on Profits From Global Warming, Plays Glenn Beck Attack. 

We are beginning to see it in the US. One example is in Maine, where the state is promising 300 new jobs for one wind project heavily subsidized by stimulus dollars. Looking in detail at the plans, most of those jobs are temporary during the construction phase with only 6 permanent, including some night watchmen/security probably at minimum wage. Given the proven unreliability of wind in windy Europe when energy is needed the most, you might as well burn those dollars for all the good they will do. Maine’s Governor Balducci’s pet project will gain him a 7 figure job in an energy project just as Obama advisor Cass Sustein did after Harvard let him go (he became a consultant for the same wind company in Maine for $2.5M/year for one day of his time per week and before Obama snatched him up.)

David Hathaway, NASA Solar Scientist on the Solar Science Audit Blogs

What Happened to 2006 Predictions of Huge Solar Cycle 24?
Isn’t it especially strange for you because three years ago, all the physics of the sun that you and NASA and everybody else (Icecap Note: Not really true there were many of us who anticipated a weak cycle 24) was using was anticipating that this could be the biggest solar maximum on record?

There were indications back then. I am writing a paper - it’s on my computer as we speak (laughs) - basically saying that I made a big mistake - myself and Bob Wilson - when we wrote a paper in 2006, suggesting Solar Cycle 24 was going to be a huge cycle based on conditions at that time. The problem we had with our prediction was that it was based on a method that assumes that we’re near sunspot cycle minimum.

We had just previously gone through three or four sunspot cycles that had been only ten years long each, so for the one in 1996 to 2006, it seemed like a reasonable assumption. But as we now know, we were off by at least two years. And if we take conditions on the sun now, it’s a completely different story. The conditions now - using even that same technique from 2006 - says that the next sunspot cycle is going to be half what we thought it was back in 2006.

Another big prediction in 2006 was based on a dynamo model - a model for how the sun produces magnetic fields - and it suggested a huge cycle.

But there also were people back at that time saying otherwise. A group of colleagues led by Leif Svalgaard, Ph.D., were looking at the sun’s polar fields and saying even at that point, the sun’s polar fields were significantly weaker than they had been before and those scientists back then predicted it was going to be a small cycle.

How Small Will Solar Cycle 24 Be?
I’ve come around to that view now. I think there is little doubt in my mind now that we’re in for a small cycle. The big question now is how small? I think most of us are predicting small cycles. I think even the techniques I’m using now are suggesting HALF the size of the last three or four solar cycles, but my fear is that even that might be too big just from the fact that it’s taken so long for this Solar Cycle 24 to really get off the ground and start producing sunspots.

I have no doubt at this point that it’s going to be a little cycle. My current prediction is that it’s going to be about half of what we’ve seen in the last four solar cycles or so. But in my gut, I feel it’s going to be smaller than that! (laughs) It’s just so slow in taking off and the indicators that we see - both the polar fields and the geomagnetic indicators are lower than anything we’ve seen before.

So kudos to David Hathaway for writing a paper talking about how wrong his previous papers have been. Absolutely no sarcasm intended or implied.

See post here.


See larger here. Notice how this cycle is currently 13 years after the last minimum. in Cycle 21, we had by 13 years already reached the following maximum of cycle 22. We are still trolling along the bottom at the start of cycle 24.