By Lord Christopher Monckton
The Senate testimony of Sec. Chu is predicated upon false assumptions, points out Christopher Monckton in a succinct letter to Senators posted by the Science and Public Policy Institute, [SPPI], a Washington DC -based NGO.
The letter points out that Chu’s testimony cites the now-outdated 2007 Climate Assessment Report of the IPCC and a subsequent but also now-outdated MIT study, saying global warming by 2100 would be 7-11 F. “These excessive estimates are founded solely on computerized guesswork,” says Christopher Monckton, former adviser to UK Prime Minister Thatcher and current SPPI policy adviser.
Monckton reviews a number of recent papers having appeared in the peer-reviewed literature that put the man-made warming scare to rest, and render regulation of CO2 emissions needless and blindingly fatuous. Particular attention is given to the recent paper of Lindzen and Choi (2009). Using direct measurements of outgoing radiation, the two researchers found that the IPCC models get both the science and their “predictions” wrong. Monckton resents a series of IPPC model graphs and compares them to the one produced from real measurements. “The IPPC model predictions,” reports Monckton, “actually trend in a direction opposite to that of the graph from observed reality.”
All UN models (11 are shown in red) wrongly predict that as the sea surface warms by 1 C (1.8 F), the outgoing radiation escaping from the top of the Earth’s atmosphere to space diminishes by about 3 Watts per square meter. The UN wrongly assumes temperature feedbacks cause water vapor - the most significant greenhouse gas - to accumulate in the upper air. See larger image here.
Concludes Monckton, “By patient, painstaking measurement, the two researchers have trumped the computer models’ unanimously erroneous guesswork, and have definitively ended the debate over the question how much warming CO2 causes. Therefore, Secretary Chu’s declaration that the ‘threat’ from ‘climate change’ is ‘grave’ and that current levels of CO2 emission are ‘unsustainable’ has no scientific justification.”
The letter further informs Senators that “Even if, per impossibile, the UN’s exaggerated estimate of the warming effect of CO2 were right, it is trivial to demonstrate that reducing carbon emissions would be the least cost-effective use of taxpayers’ money ever devised.” This is so because to forestall just 1 F of warming would require the entire world to forego all carbon emissions for more than 200 years. Thus, “Sec. Chu’s implication that reducing CO2 emissions via the Copenhagen Treaty or via the 900-page Climate Bill now before the Senate would make a significant difference to the climate is accordingly wrong. The Bill, even if fully implemented, would make no measurable difference.”
The letter concludes by informing the Senators of Sec. Chu’s “regrettably one-sided view of the current market for so-called “renewable” technologies,” his withholding information of China’s true energy investments and the failure of CO2 trading schemes in every instance tried. Says Monckton, “The Energy Secretary has not yet mastered his portfolio. It is high time he did, or the consequences for taxpayers will be as costly as they are pointless.”
Read here.
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See larger video here.
By Editors, National Review Online
Hear that? It’s the sound of another 1,000-page bill hitting desks all over Washington. Sens. John Kerry and Barbara Boxer have introduced the “Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act,” which is the Senate equivalent of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that passed the House earlier this year. Compared to Waxman-Markey (1,428 pages), the Kerry-Boxer bill (925 pages) is a model of concision. However, it is expected to grow as Senate Democrats try to buy Republican votes with token support for nuclear energy and offshore drilling. Skeptical senators should not take the bait.
See larger video here.
Sen. Jim Inhofe, the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has blown the whistle on the Democrats’ strategy, which involves targeting Republicans such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham. We’ve been down this road before: Last year, when the GOP was winning the debate over offshore drilling, Graham and four other Republicans nearly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by signing onto a watered-down compromise that would have opened only a tiny sliver of the coast for drilling in exchange for a batch of new subsidies for renewable energy, including nuclear power.
Graham is at it again: He recently shared a byline with John Kerry in the New York Times, signaling his willingness to play ball on cap-and-trade as long as the final bill contained the right incentives for nuclear power and a few nods to offshore oil and gas production. (He’s also keenly interested in a provision that would impose green tariffs on Chinese imports competing with South Carolina’s textile industry.) But as Inhofe told NRO’s Robert Costa last week, “we can build nuclear plants and support new energy exploration without tying it to cap-and-trade.”
Indeed, any bill that linked new petroleum production to cap-and-trade would lack coherence. The whole point of cap-and-trade is to make energy generated from fossil fuels more expensive and thereby reduce CO2 emissions. Like Waxman-Markey, Kerry-Boxer would set a cap on CO2 emissions. Major emitters, such as petroleum refineries, would have to purchase offsets in order to stay under the caps, and that would raise the price of fuel. It makes no sense to clear the way for new oil and gas production while at the same time trying to tax oil and gas out of existence.
New incentives for nuclear power or offshore drilling would not compensate taxpayers and energy consumers from the raw deal they would be getting under cap-and-trade. The Heritage Foundation estimates that the Waxman-Markey bill would cost the average family of four almost $3,000 per year in higher energy costs. What do we get in return? Even the bill’s most enthusiastic supporters admit that it would not have a significant impact on global temperatures unless countries like China and India pass their own carbon caps. Neither country has shown any enthusiasm for emulating our proposed folly.
So cap-and-trade is not likely to work in the real world, and it will not be easy to make it work politically, either: A new Pew study has found that the percentage of Americans who see solid evidence for man-made warming has fallen dramatically. Average global temperatures have actually fallen this decade even though CO2 emissions have continued to rise. This by itself does not prove anything - cap-and-trade supporters argue that this is nothing more than a temporary downswing in the middle of an upward trend. But the same models that predicted catastrophic warming in the future failed to predict the current cooling. That should give policymakers pause.
Falling support for climate-change legislation mirrors persistent opposition to the Democrats’ reorganization of the nation’s health-care system - another initiative on which they appear determined to forge ahead. How many massive bills can this Congress pass over mounting concern that it is doing too much, too quickly? Come election season, the GOP must shift from defense to offense and put forward an alternative agenda for the country. But for now, blocking the Democrats’ unpopular million-page legislative juggernaut makes for good policy and good politics.
Read editorial here.
By William R. Hawkins
On October 22, an accord was signed by Xie Zhenhua, China’s vice minister at the National Development and Reform Commission, and Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister, in New Delhi. The memorandum provides an alternative framework to counter pressure from America and Europe to adopt mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions in a new UN treaty. The two Asian powers will collaborate on the development of renewable power projects and improved energy efficiency programs, while rejecting any outside mandates that would slow economic growth.
The United Nations has been holding forums around the world to build support for a new climate treaty to be drafted in Copenhagen in December to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto document did not require the developing countries to do anything about reducing emissions. The United States and European Union have been trying to find some formula that would persuade the developing countries to sign on to the new treaty. China and India, along with Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, have been adamant about staying out of any global requirement. By forming regional alignments that keep policy in the hands of national governments, the developing countries expect to be able to resist Western and UN pressure.
It is easier to stay independent of the climate paranoia if one does not believe the planet is in peril. Xiao Ziniu, director general of the Beijing Climate Centre, told the British Guardian newspaper recently that “There is no agreed conclusion about how much change is dangerous....Whether the climate turns warmer or cooler, there are both positive and negative effects....In Chinese history, there have been many periods warmer than today.” He disputed the disaster warnings of the UNIPCC, saying, “The accuracy of the prediction is very low because the climate is affected by many mechanisms we do not fully understand.”
An article published in China’s Science Times on September 7 cited a study done by Ding Zhongli, vice president of the Science Academy of China. It argued that there is no solid scientific evidence to strictly correlate global temperature rise and CO2 concentrations. Professor Ding noted that some geologists believe that global temperature is related to solar activities and glacial periods, meaning human activity is only one factor that can cause climate change. “Up to now not a single scientist has figured out the weight ratio of each factor on global temperature change,” he wrote.
The author of the Science Times article, Wang Jin, used Ding’s study as part of his larger argument that, “the massive propaganda ‘human activity induced the global temperature increase’ has been accepted by the majority of the society in some countries, and it has become a political and diplomatic issue. Why do the developed countries put an arguable scientific problem on the international negotiation table? The real intention is not for the global temperature increase, but for the restriction of the economic development of the developing countries.” The problem for Beijing is, according to Wang, “How can China fight for its right to emit while continuing to develop its economy?”
The answer is to confront the issue head on. At a UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting in Thailand Oct. 5, China and the Group of 77 developing nations reiterated their opposition to any binding commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from “poor” countries and countries with “economies in transition.” They were prepared to walk out of the climate talks if there was any language in the drafts leading to Copenhagen that would limit their actions. As a result, the two weeks of talks in Bangkok ended “without a consensus” on how to proceed.
The danger is that the West will draft a treaty that will only apply to America and Europe, crippling their economies. This was certainly the hope of the Nobel Committee when it awarded its Peace Prize to President Barack Obama. “Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting,” said the Nobel proclamation.
It was also on President Obama’s mind when he accepted the award, “We cannot accept the growing threat posed by climate change, which could forever damage the world that we pass on to our children—sowing conflict and famine; destroying coastlines and emptying cities. And that’s why all nations must now accept their share of responsibility for transforming the way that we use energy,” said Obama, whose alarmist rhetoric was almost verbatim with what he had said at the UN Climate Summit September 22.
In 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize was shared by former Vice President Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC), “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change.” The 2007 award was also a slap at the Bush Administration which had refused to accept the Kyoto Protocol. Shortly after the award to Obama was announced, Gore said he was optimistic that a new treaty will be approved in Copenhagen.
The work of the UNIPCC is cited in the “cap and trade” American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) passed by a narrow vote in the House last June. On September 30, Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) introduced the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (S. 1733) which will be the vehicle for climate legislation in the Senate. The bill states, “the United States should lead the global community in combating the threat of global climate change and reaching a robust international agreement to address global warming under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.”
The Kerry-Boxer draft aims to reduce CO2 emissions 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 compared to the 17 percent cut set in the House bill. As Bradford Plumer noted in a blog at The New Republic Sept. 30, “thanks to the recession, we’ll be 8.5 percent below 2005 levels by the end of this year, which is why Boxer stumped for a steeper reduction.” In other words, economic ruin is an integral part of the Green agenda.
The Congressional targets are still less than the goal of a 40 percent cut in emissions from 1990 levels by 2020 being pushed by the UNFCCC. The most controversial part of the Nobel Committee’s award statement was the assertion that Obama’s “diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.” Basing American policy on foreign opinion is not the proper duty of a President of the United States whose job is to lead his own nation to greatness. But the Nobel Committee was also being delusional in an ironic way. The majority of the world’s population wants to progress and improve its material standard of living. The governments which represent them outside America and Europe reject the notion that they should give up their aspirations for a better world to appease an unfounded climate paranoia among Western liberals. And they are right. Read post here.