Quote of the Week:
“The influence of mankind on climate is trivially true and numerically insignificant.” Richard Lindzen
By Art Horn
The concept of an alternate universe is familiar to many people, especially those who read or view science fiction books or movies. An example of a storyline in an alternate universe would be the re-booting of the Star Trek franchise. In the production of the 2009 movie “Star Trek” JJ Abrams and company wanted to bring the Star Trek series back into the theaters but they wanted to do it in such a way that they could have the artistic freedom to craft stories that were not confined to the history of all the series and movies of the past several decades. The answer was to find a way to alter the “real” world and place the same characters, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the others into a new “alternate reality” that in some ways mirrors the familiar, traditional world but in other ways is radically different. There are parallels to this concept today, not in the movies but in the White House.
If the producers of the next Star Trek movie want some ideas as to how to craft a bizarre story that exists in an alternate universe they need look no farther than our own president. On Tuesday, June 25th, 2013 president Obama unwittingly revealed that while he appears to live in our universe, he actually does not. Some of the statement and declarations made in his “Climate Action Plan” are so strange and so out of touch with the reality that you and I live in, I can only conclude that our president is from and lives in an alternate reality.
In his Climate Action Plan the president states over and over again that we must reduce “carbon pollution.” In fact the phrase “carbon pollution” is mentioned 21 times. The term “carbon pollution” is an excellent example of what universe Obama lives in. In an alternate universe white can mean black, good can be bad, up can be down and so on. In Obama’s “reality” carbon is pollution. Carbon is a chemical element and is the fourth most abundant element in the universe. Who knew the universe is full of pollution! It is also present in all known life forms on earth. In the human body carbon is the second most abundant element by mass other than oxygen. We humans are carbon based life. In Obama’s alternate universe, all humans and all life forms are made of pollution. With the large amount of carbon in our bodies, if it were pollution, we would all be dead.
In the alternate universe that president Obama resides, what appears to be something in our reality is something very different in his. For instance, in his Climate Action Plan he states that carbon pollution from power plants, cars, trucks, trains, planes and everything that uses fossil fuels to make energy must be reduced. His reason for this is that the use of these fuels is changing the weather and ultimately the climate. Being that he is speaking to us from an alternate reality means he does not know that in our universe the term carbon pollution, translated into our reality, is actually carbon dioxide pollution. To many people the word carbon conjures up images of black chunks of coal, dirty and full of soot. The imagery of black carbon smoke filling the sky, fouling our water, covering the earth in a dark fog of unbreathable air and causing the seas to rise alarms and scares many people. This is all intentional.
What Obama is actually talking about, from his alternate universe point of view, is carbon dioxide gas, not black carbon. However, in his universe they are the same. Carbon dioxide is a gas, not a chunk of sooty coal. It has no color, no odor and is used by plants, trees and algae as food. The end result of this usage is to produce oxygen. The early plants that evolved in earth’s distant past produced enough oxygen by ingesting carbon dioxide to make our lives and all other living things possible. Life on earth, without carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, would cease to exist if it were eliminated. In Obama’s universe carbon dioxide means death, not life. Do you see what I’m getting at?
President Obama’s alternate universe is so different from our reality that life giving carbon dioxide is the same thing as mercury, arsenic and lead pollution. The very fact that the president insists that carbon (dioxide) is pollution is evidence that he has little concept of the reality you and I live in. Water vapor in the air causes most of the earth’s greenhouse effect. Will he next proclaim the water in the air is pollution? President Obama also appears to have no clue as to what is happening to the earth’s temperature. The president has stated that “temperature around the globe is increasing faster than was predicted even 10 years ago.” In the universe that you and I live in this is obviously not true and is frankly bizarre. There has been no acceleration of any temperature rise and in fact there has been no measured increase in global average surface temperature in at least 15 years and counting. and has clealy fallen since 2002 Apparently things look very different when you live in an alternate reality.
What is especially dangerous about being governed by someone who lives in an alternate reality is that he has the power to dictate what happens in our reality! The use of the word “dictate” is intentional since he has said “ If congress won’t act on climate change I will.” In our universe the founding fathers of the United States wrote the constitution to limit the power of any one branch of government so that the system has a number of checks and balances so that no branch of government becomes too powerful. In Obama’s alternate universe there is no congress or constitution, he is the sole power. Instead of going through congress he will use “executive orders” to bring his alternate universe view of climate change, and what needs to be done about it, to our reality.
In the land of the free and the home of the brave, capitalism has brought about the greatest economy the world has ever known, fueled by our ability to extract the vast natural resources at our disposal. In president Obama’s view from his alternate universe, this is bad and will destroy the earth. With his recent pronouncements it appears likely he will use executive power to impose a tax on everything that uses fossil fuels to increase the cost of using them and in doing so make them more and more expensive. His ultimate goal is to eliminate fossil fuel use.
In the universe you and I live in there is science. In science we have open discussions about theories. If a theory does not stand up to real world observations and experiments it is discarded and replaced with a new theory that must also go through the same evaluation. In Obama’s universe there is no science and no room for discussion. Speaking from is alternate universe pulpit on June 25th, 2013 Obama said “We don’t have time for a meeting of the flat earth society.” He went on to say “Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it’s not going to protect you from the coming storm.” He may be correct. The storm is coming but it is not the one he is talking about. It is the storm of economic upheaval and the destruction of industries brought about by his dictates that we must be worried about.
In theory, if alternate universes exist, they are apparently operating independently of each other. In theory, if two universes come in contact with each other there could be severe consequences. President Obama seems determined to make that happen by pushing his alternate reality on all of us no matter what the real world data shows. To him the theory is reality, not the evidence. PDF
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Meanwhile some sanity form NOAA.
From: NOAA/NWS/OST S&TI Climate Mission
Subject: Responding to recent notable climate science development
It has been brought to much attention that the observed global mean temperature rise has stagnated over the past 10-15 years. From O2R perspective, NWS/OST S&TI Climate Mission is looking for guidance from research advancement for improving strategic science planning. Here is an update on recent issues raised from notable development.
1. Global warming rate - not as model predicted
In a recent interview by Spiegel Online (6/20), Prof. Hans von Storch (Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg, Germany) pointed out that recent CO2 emissions had actually risen even more steeply than people feared. As a result, according to most climate models, the temperature should rise about 0.25 degree Celsius over the past 10 years. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degree Celsius. This has brought some serious concerns. “If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models”, said Prof. von Storch.
2. Warming of deep ocean - an overlooked new aspect
Dr. Kevin Trenberth (NCAR) recently published a short article on Royal Meteorological Society entitled “Has Global Warming Stalled?” He explained that most (over 90%) of the energy imbalance induced by the greenhouse gas went into the ocean, which warmed not only the upper layers of the ocean but also the deep ocean; the latter was “not there throughout the record”. He emphasized “warming really means heating” that could be manifested in many ways, e.g. rising surface temperatures, melting Arctic sea ice, etc., among which the global sea level would be a better indicator that had kept marching up at a rate of over 30 cm per century since 1992. It came from both ice melting and ocean expansion due to warming, showing global warming continues unabated.
3. Cooling in near future - an alternative outlook
Dr. Habibullo I. Abdussamatov (Pulkovo Observatory, Russian Academy of Sciences), in his 2012 paper onApplied Physics Research, called attention to the change of sun activities. By analyzing the average annual balance of the thermal budget of the Earth-atmosphere system, of which temporal changes in the power of the longwave radiation emitted to space always lag behind changes in the power of absorbed solar radiation due to slow change of its enthalpy, he demonstrated a negative energy balance since 90’s, which will continue in the next a few solar 11-year cycles, and predicted the onset of a new “mini-ice age” commencing in 2014 and becoming most severe around 2055. It shows a potential near-term threat, which should be brought on NWS monitoring radar and taken into account properly in NOAA research as well as operation planning.
Nowadays in science policy discussions (AMS, 6/3-4; AGU, 6/25-26), global warming and climate service is still a hot topic. Most people understand the greenhouse effects of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. The real problem is the projection of future long-term climate, for which the greenhouse gas is only one of the players. The others and interactions among all players are far from well explored and understood, which should bring out concerns about reliability of current long-term climate projection products with good reasons for requesting more research. Prof. von Storch said it well: “Certainly the greatest mistake of climate researchers has been giving the impression that they are declaring the definitive truth. It’s not a bad thing to make mistakes and have to correct them. The only thing that was bad was acting beforehand as if we were infallible. By doing so, we have gambled away the most important asset we have as scientists: the public’s trust.”
References
Interview with Hans von Storch, SPIEGEL ONLINE, 20 June 2013.
Trenberth, K.: Has Global Warming Stalled? Royal Meteorological Society, 22 May 2013.
Abdussamatov, H.I., 2012: Bicentennial Decrease of the Total Solar Irradiance Leads to Unbalanced Thermal Budget of the Earth and the Little Ice Age. Applied Physics Research, 4, 178-184. .
Icecap Note: A fair and balanced assessment. I don’t buy ego driven Trenberths ‘Where’s Waldo’ game - the heat hiding in the deep oceans but encouraging to hear Von Storch showing some humility, and Abdussamatov we believe is on target.
But in Bonn, the Un delegates did not have a clue...you see they don’t study what is happening only use models to predict future. And it doesn’t matter as this quote shows:
“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.” Instead, climate change policy is about how “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.” UN IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer 2010
Marc Morano wrote a good summary: “President Obama is still parading his ignorance on climate science, linking bad weather to ‘global warming’, claiming a mythical 97% consensus, and implying that his executive actions can alter the globe’s temperature and lessen extreme weather events. The President has descended into the realm of medieval witchcraft by claiming he can combat global temperature rises and weather patterns through administrative action.”
Recently he underwelmed the media by shooting 2 out of 22 baskets on camera. He actually missed the mark even more with his’ low point in the history of science’ address,
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WASHINGTON, D.C., June 25, 2013 - President Obama’s climate agenda released today is being done without public or congressional support and is being pursued in this way because he knows the peoples’ elected representatives would never approve these plans, say experts at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
“Obama’s all-pain, no-gain agenda will cost jobs, drive up prices and have little effect on global emissions,” said Myron Ebell, director of CEI’s Center for Energy and Environment. “It is undemocratic, bordering on authoritarian.”
“It confirms the Obama administration’s all out war on coal, calls for more negotiations on a treaty the Senate will never ratify and displays an alarming lack of knowledge about the state of climate science. Congress should move immediately to defund as much of this as possible.”
The president also said his decision on whether to approve the Keystone pipeline project would depend largely on whether it increases total carbon emissions.
“President Obama should’ve announced his approval today of the Keystone pipeline,” Ebell said. “The fact he didn’t demonstrates that he’s still playing political games with this project, which has overwhelming public and congressional support.”
The president pledges to impose carbon dioxide emissions limits for existing as well as new power plants, strengthen efficiency standards for homes and appliances and encourage more development of renewable energy sources on public lands. Obama admits his plan calls mostly for actions he can take without congressional approval.
“He doesn’t want to go through elected officials because he knows if he put this plan in a bill and submitted it to Congress, it would be dead on arrival,” said Marlo Lewis, senior fellow in CEI’s Center for Energy and the Environment.
Lewis said all three elements of the president’s plan should be opposed. Renewable energy is costly, intermittent and unreliable,” Lewis said. “If it weren’t a bad buy for consumers, Congress would not need to subsidize it in perpetuity, and 30 states and the District of Columbia would not need to mandate its use.”
Sam Kazman, general counsel for CEI, said the appliance efficiency standards limit consumer choice and mean “consumers will be victims, not beneficiaries.”
“The current standards already have ruined such previously reliable appliances as top-loading washing machines and dishwashers. If these new higher-efficiency technologies promised by the White House are really so great, then why must they be mandated?”
But the administration’s proposed CO2 emission limits for existing power plants pose “the biggest risk to consumer welfare and the economy,” Lewis said.
Christopher C. Horner, senior fellow at CEI and author of the 2012 “The Liberal War on Transparency,” research for which turned up the secret “Richard Windsor” email address of former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, said the proposal which would drive a stake through coal-fired power plants nationwide should come as no surprise.
“It’s more of the same,” Horner said. “It’s what he has done since this agenda was rejected by the democratic process. But the Constitution still says you have to go through that process to rewrite laws.
He warned us in the now-famous YouTube video he would shutter all existing coal-fired power plants and “bankrupt” anyone who tried to build a new one even though they provide 40 percent of our electricity and much of our competitive advantage.”
President Obama touts these measures as necessary to address a growing threat from a warming planet. But even pro-warming scientists have begun to admit a substantial gap exists between observations and climate model projections that suggests the “consensus” may have been wrong about the key issue of climate sensitivity,” Lewis said.
“A slew of recent studies discredit the ‘planetary emergency’ narrative,” Lewis said. “For instance, sea-change over the next century probably will be measured in inches, rather than feet.”
By Dr. Larry Bell, Forbes
Representatives of Russia and other Eastern bloc countries at the recent climate talks in Bonn made it clear that they aren’t one bit happy about efforts within the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Conference of Parties (COP) to cap their free Soviet-era carbon credit trading green stamps previously gifted to them under the Kyoto Protocol. The original deal was that signatory nations that reduced carbon emissions by targeted amounts under their 1990 levels would be able to sell credits based upon tonnage improvements to countries that produced more than their allocations, thereby meeting quotas. In other words, a market was created to sell lots of hot air...something that the U.N. excels at.
The idea, at least as presented by the FCCC, was to save our planet from dreaded CO2-induced global warming. Incidentally, we might have credited that plan for great success were it not for the fact that while global temperatures have been flat now for about 17 years, those atmospheric CO2 levels have continued to rise.
Originally, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on December 2, 2003, that his country would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol because the rationale supporting it was “scientifically flawed”. He argued that even one hundred percent compliance with the agreement wouldn’t reverse climate change.
The Russian Academy of Sciences presented scientific arguments against signing in a statement issued on July 1, 2005, noting that the world’s temperatures do not follow CO2 levels. Instead, they observed a much closer correlation between world temperatures and solar activity. The Academy also determined that sea levels were not rising faster with warming; rather, they had been increasing steadily about 6 inches per century since the Little Ice Age ended in about 1850.
In addition, the Academy discounted one of the most significant danger claims about global warming - that tropical diseases would spread - noting that malaria is a disease that is encouraged by sunlit pools of water where mosquitoes can breed, not by climate warmth. They also pointed out the lack of correlation between global warming and extreme weather, which a British government scientific delegation had admitted it could find no evidence to support.
What ultimately caused Putin and the Russian duma to change their position and ratify the Protocol? It is widely speculated that Europeans were instrumental in getting Russia admitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO), and thus categorized it as a developing country rather than a developed one in applying the Protocol regulations. This meant that Russia received an opportunity to sell to European countries billions of dollars’ worth of Soviet-era emission credits associated with former dirty industries that had been casualties of economic melt-down. This would also help Europe meet Kyoto’s first-phase requirements without actually cutting emissions or energy use.
Europe’s 1990 CO2 emissions of 4,245 million tons fell to 4,123 tons in 2002 due to reductions in burning coal in both Britain and East Germany. Yet Kyoto Protocol requirements stipulated further European Union cutbacks to 3,906 million before 2012. A December 2003 U.N. report predicted that the E.U. would miss that reduction target by even more than that amount, namely, by dropping an additional 311 million tons. Since Russia’s 1990 emissions were 2,405 million tons, and had fallen by 2001 to 1,614 million tons, they could sell up to 800 million tons of credits to the Europeans at an “auction” price. This would be cheaper for Europe than shutting down fossil-fired power plants or removing trucks from its vital transportation infrastructure by means of escalating already high diesel fuel taxes.
But Not Such a Great Deal for the U.S.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it wasn’t in the cards for the U.N. to offer the U.S. any breaks comparable to those accorded to the Europeans and Russians. First, unlike Europe and former Soviet countries that were treated as separate emission-credit-trading entities, the U.S. was treated as a single nation (allowing no credit exchanging between states to meet quotas). Second, the U.S. emissions in 1990 were not inflated to high target allowance levels as was the case in Germany, Britain, and Russia, making compliance much more difficult to achieve.
In response to these inequities and other issues, our Senate passed (95-0) a rare unanimous bipartisan Byrd-Hagel U.S. Senate Resolution (S Res 98) that made it clear that the United States would not be signatory to any agreement that “would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States”. Then-President Clinton, no stranger to political pragmatism, got the message and never submitted a necessary U.S. Kyoto Protocol approval request for congressional ratification.
Heated Climate Negotiations Put On Ice
Reuters reported on June 6 that U.N. talks aimed at progress towards a new 2015 climate pact agreement have now been stalled by objections from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine regarding procedural violations purposefully intended to eliminate their free carbon food stamp lunch. The UNFCCC now wants to renege on a deal they made with Russia to get them into Kyoto in the first place.
Now that European carbon markets have recently collapsed with the price of carbon (hot air) hitting record lows, they are concerned that allowing Russia, Ukraine, Poland and other former Soviet bloc nations to retain the huge stockpile of carbon credits they picked up under Kyoto would further flood and depress the market.
Ironically, those credits were originally granted as a reward to former Eastern bloc nations for the Communism which depressed their economic development prior to 1990, essentially compensating them for the economic destruction wreaked by their own Communist regimes. Poland, which will host COP 19 in November, has approximately 500 metric tons of carbon credits it plans to continue to sell to other nations including Japan, Ireland and Spain to offset its emissions from heavy coal use.
Russia has since announced that it will not be part of a second Kyoto commitment period under these conditions, saying that they are committed to keep the credits and sell them to other countries regardless of a claimed COP “consensus” that would terminate them. They are still smarting over a snub during two-week-long U.N. Climate talks in Doha, Qatari last year when, during the final minutes, Vice Prime Minister Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiya ended the eighteenth Conference of the Parties (COP18) before their delegation which wished to be recognized could speak. While Christiana Figueres, the U.N.’s climate chief, claimed that a consensus had been reached, Oleg Shamanov, the chief negotiator for Russia’s delegation called that an “absolutely obvious violation of this procedure.” Shamanov added, “This is a systemic issue. Unless we put our house back in order, we may not be able to guarantee that in 2015 we end up with something productive.”
Carbon credit cap-and-trade marketing is but one U.N. climate alarm-based profiteering scheme aimed at global wealth redistribution. Another important agenda item for the UNFCCC’s 2015 Paris treaty to address is a planned “loss and damage” mechanism to seek compensation from “Tier 1” developed nations by a lawyered-up group of small island governments, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), premised upon global warming hazards caused by industrialization. AOSIS leaders, including Tuvalu, Kirabati, St. Lucia, and the Maldives, claim that man-made global warming is causing super-hurricanes and rising sea levels.
And who is most to blame? Coincidentally, of course, those legions of lawyers have identified culprits with the deepest pockets...the U.S., Western Europe and Japan. Although China is now the world’s largest CO2 emitter, they got a pass. Still to be determined, is the problem of how such penalties should be assessed. For example, if a Category 4 hurricane hits an island, how can anyone know which portion of that hurricane was caused by each nation? Also, how much of it was caused by those coal plants and SUVs, versus at Mother Nature’s sole discretion?
The idea of penalizing the West for trumped-up past and future climate crimes is certainly not new. Prior to COP-15 (2009-Copenhagen), several Latin American nations, the Philippines and the African Union claimed that Western countries owed developing countries trillions of dollars.
U.S. and European delegation representatives attending the Copenhagen Climate Conference initially agreed to provide their “fair share”, pledging $10 billion in compensation per year from 2010 to 2012, The offer was rejected as an insult, discussions were temporarily interrupted as representatives of several undeveloped countries walked out of the meetings, and angry riots broke out in the streets over the injustice of such paltry penance.
Then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told the audience where to lay the blame for the world’s social, economic and climate problems:
“If the climate was a bank, [the West] would already have saved it”.
“The destructive model of capitalism is eradicating life”.
“Our revolution seeks to help all people...Socialism, is the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet; capitalism is the road to hell...Let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us”.
Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton then came to the rescue, offering to up the ante with a $100 billion annual contribution from the United States and our more prosperous friends to the “poorest and most vulnerable [nations] among us” by 2020. She said that the money would come from “a variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance”. Where it would actually come from no one knew, including Hillary and her boss. (Any guesses?)
Time to End the Climate of Insanity
It’s way past time to recognize that UNFCCC’s cap-and-trade, loss and damage compensation and other global wealth redistribution agendas have little or nothing to do with actually preventing a climate crisis, much less offering any benefits. Despite rising atmospheric CO2 levels, global temperatures have not only been flat for going on two decades, but are predicted by leading scientists to cool over many future years or decades to come.
Russia entered into the Kyoto Protocol realizing prior to that time that there was no convincing scientific climate-related basis for doing so. More recent determinations by researchers at their prestigious Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg project that the global average yearly temperature will soon begin to decline into a very cold and protracted climate phase.
Pulkovo Observatory head Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov, one of the world’s leading solar scientists, member of the Russian Academy of Science, and director of the Russian segment of the International Space Station, believes that the deep freeze will last until the end of this century. He predicts that: “after the maximum of solar Cycle-24, from approximately 2014, we can expect the start of the next bicentennial cycle of deep cooling with a Little Ice Age in 2055 plus or minus 11 years” (the 19th to occur in the past 7,500 years).
Dr. Abdussamatov points out that over the last 1,000 years deep cold periods have occurred five times. Each is correlated with declines in solar irradiance much like we are experiencing now with no human influence. “A global freeze will come about regardless of whether or not industrialized countries put a cap on their greenhouse gas emissions. The common view of Man’s industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect.”
Pulkovo Observatory: “Measure temporary variations of shape and diameter of the Sun, as well as fine structure and dynamics of the granulation on the Service module of the Russian segment of the International Space Station”.
Russian scientists Vladimir Bashkin and Raulf Galiullin from the Institute of Fundamental Problems of Biology of the Russian Academy of Science agree that climatic changes are characterized by natural cycles which have nothing to do with activities of man. As Bashkin observes: “A global warming that so many are talking about is not so much a scientific problem, rather it is much more a marketing trick...We do not have global warming ahead of us. Rather, we have global cooling.”
Yes, and that marketing trick is one that the UNFCCC, including the Russian’s, has learned to play very well.
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THEIR OWN WORDS SHOW IT’S NOT ABOUT SCIENCE
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, would fit the bill.” Club of Rome First Global Revolution
“Urgent and unprecedented environmental and social changes challenge scientists to define a new social contract...a commitment on the part of all scientists to devote their energies and talents to the most pressing problems of the day, in proportion to their importance, in exchange for public funding”. NOAA exiting Administrator for NOAA Dr. Lubchenko when she was president of AAAS in 1999 (explains NOAA’s obsession with ‘finding’ warming, extremes)
“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony ... climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” Christine Stewart, Canadian Environment Minister
“We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.” Timothy Wirth, U.S. Senator, president of the United Nation’s Foundation
“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.” Instead, climate change policy is about how “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.” UN IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer 2010
In Eisenhower’s Farewell Address remembered for concerns about the military industrial complex, he was also concerned about science becoming corrupted for political and economic gain. “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”