Originally published in The Washington Times.
By Steve Goreham
Exports from the Pacific Northwest are an ongoing battleground in the environmental war on coal. Last week, the Sierra Club and three other groups announced that they would file suit against Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway and six coal companies over shipments of coal in open-topped train cars. The announcement is an escalation in the three-year battle to stop new export terminals proposed for ports in Washington and Oregon. Underlying all the rhetoric is a concern that mankind is causing dangerous global warming.
In 2010, Peabody Energy, Cloud Peak Energy, and Australia-based Ambre Energy announced competing plans to build export terminals in the Pacific Northwest to ship coal to Asia, with Arch Coal joining the fray in 2011. Five new export terminals have been proposed. Coal would be shipped by rail from the Powder River Basin coal mines in Montana and Wyoming, loaded on ships at the proposed terminals, and transported across the Pacific Ocean to meet the growing demand for coal in China and Asia. Potential coal exports to Asia are estimated at between 50 and 100 million tons annually. Environmental groups and students have mounted a growing campaign to oppose construction of the terminals and the planned coal exports
The Sierra Club and other opponents claim that rail transport of coal is responsible for “emitting coal into waterways in many locations across Washington” in the form of coal dust and that this violates the Clean Water Act. They fear that, if the export terminals are built, additional coal trains will add to the problem. “Coal is a toxic pollutant and this action today seeks to stop illegal pollution and keep our river free of dirty coal,” said Brett VandenHeuvel, Executive Director of Columbia Riverkeeper.
Shipping coal by rail and exporting coal is nothing new. In 2011, the US exported 89 million metric tons of coal, up 143 percent from 2002. Most of those exports went through the East Coast ports of Norfolk, New Orleans, and Baltimore to Europe, which is using more coal not less. Most of this coal was delivered to ports by rail and water pollution has not been a major issue.
Neither is coal dust new. In 1900, coal provided 70 percent of US energy consumption. Factories, railroads, electrical utilities, and home furnaces were powered by coal. During the 1940s and 1950s, fallen snow in Chicago was blackened with coal dust after only a few days. Homeowners washed their walls once a year to remove accumulated coal dust. But thanks to cleaner-burning coal-fired plants and our nation’s shift to natural gas and petroleum, US emissions of coal dust today are at a 50-year low.
While environmentalists complain about coal dust, the real reason they hate coal is their acceptance of the ideology Climatism, the belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate. In 2009 Dr. James Hansen stated, “The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.” Environmental groups believe burning coal will cause catastrophic climate change, so “coal dust” is used as an excuse to try to halt coal exports.
But there is no empirical evidence that human greenhouse gas emissions are causing dangerous global warming. Carbon dioxide is a trace gas. Only four of every 10,000 air molecules are carbon dioxide. Ninety-nine percent of Earth’s greenhouse effect is natural, caused by water vapor and natural greenhouse gas emissions from oceans and the biosphere. Global temperatures have not increased for more than ten years, despite a continued rise in atmospheric CO2, confounding the climate models. And despite the furor over Hurricane Sandy, history shows that storms, floods, and droughts today are neither more frequent nor more severe than in past centuries.
Yet, protests against coal in the Pacific Northwest continue to escalate. It seems that “yes we can” works except in the case of export terminals and pipelines
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the new book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
UPDATE (4/4/13)
Average Peak Bloom Date: April 4
2013 Peak Blooming Date Prediction: April 6 – April 8
Exactly when the buds will open is not easy to predict and it is extremely difficult to give an accurate forecast much more than 10 days before peak bloom. National Park Service horticulturists monitor five distinct stages of bud development and provide timely forecasts and updates.
The Peak Bloom Date is defined as the day on which 70 percent of the blossoms of the Yoshino cherry trees that surround the Tidal Basin are open. This date varies from year to year, depending on weather conditions. The Blooming Period is defined as that period when 20 percent of the blossoms are open until the petals fall and leaves appear. The blooming period starts several days before the peak bloom date and can last as long as 14 days, however, frost or high temperatures combined with wind or rain can shorten this period.
Visit the National Park Service’s website with links to the Blossom Cam, cherry blossom photos, and information on how to donate to the Cherry Tree Replacement Fund.
The following is a comparative record of past bud development. The date listed is when 70 percent of the buds have reached each stage:
Green Color in Buds: Mid to late February to Early March
Florets Visible: Early to Mid March, Av. 16 to 21 days to Peak Bloom
Extension of Florets: Av. 12 to 17 days to Peak Bloom
Peduncle Elongation: Av. 5 to 10 days to Peak Bloom (Frost Critical)
Puffy White: Av. 4 to 6 days to Peak Bloom
2008 Blooming Period: March 26 to April 11, 2008 17 days
2009 Blooming Period: March 28 to April 9, 2009 13 days
2010 Blooming Period: March 27 to April 5, 2010 10 days
2011 Blooming Period: March 26 to April 8, 2011 14 days
2012 Blooming Period: March 18 to March 26, 2012 9 days
Attacks on my work that are aimed at undermining true climate change science have turned me into a public figure. I am not vain enough to embrace that role.
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley (with no apologies to Michael E. Mann)
As a climate researcher, I have seen my integrity perniciously attacked. Politicians have demanded I be tried for “"high crimes against humanity”, for which the penalty is death, because of my work demonstrating the reality and threat of exaggerations about human-caused climate change.
I’ve been subjected to congressional investigations by congressman in the pay of the environmental lobby and was the target of a scientifically-illiterate eight-month “witch hunt” by a Minnesota Trotskyite. I have even received a number of anonymous death threats. My plight is dramatic, but unfortunately, it is not unique; climate skeptics are regularly the subject of such attacks.
The cynicism of my attackers is part of a destructive public-relations campaign being waged by banks, “renewable” energy companies, insurance giants, front groups, and individuals aligned with them in an effort vastly to profit by vastly exaggerating the science in making suggestions that the burning of fossil fuels may cause potentially dangerous climate change.
My work first appeared on the world stage in the mid-2000s with the publication of a series of articles in the London Sunday Telegraph indicating inter alia that estimating past temperature trends using information gathered from tree rings to piece together variations in the Earth’s temperature over the past 1,000 years had been proven unreliable. What I found was that the recent small warming, which coincides with the fastest growth in solar activity in 11,400 years, is a much-precedented event in this period of reconstructed temperature changes.
Though recent work published in the journal Science suggests that the recent warming trend has no counterpart for at least the past 11,000 years, and perhaps longer, the central England temperature record, which has proven a less inaccurate proxy for pre-thermometer temperatures than dubious tree-rings dubiously processed on dubious computers by dubious zitty teenagers paid by dubious rent-seekers like Michael E. Mann, confirms historical evidence that at the end of the Maunder Minimum temperatures rose at a rate of 4 Celsius/century for 40 years. Nothing like that has been seen since: the 20th century saw just 0.7C of warming, and the 21st century shows none at all. In a graph showing the linear trend for the last 23 years, the trend line looks like a billiard cue.
Since the Doha climate conference of 2012, at which I inadvertently represented Burma, the graph now known as the billiard cue graph has become an icon in the climate-change debate, providing potent, graphic evidence of the recent total absence of human-caused climate change. As a result, governments, banks, renewable-energy hucksters, academics, journalists and those who do their bidding saw the need to discredit it in any way they could, and I have found myself at the receiving end of attacks and threats of investigations, as I describe in my forthcoming book Climate of Freedom. In 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) praised my work publicly; and, jointly with Congressman John Linder, I have been awarded the Meese-Noble Award for Freedom for my work on climate change.
On three occasions, Representative Joe Barton (R-TX) invited me to testify before the Energy & Commerce Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. On the third such occasion, the Democrats – for the first time in the history of Congress refused the Republicans their free choice of witness because they wanted to protect their own witness, Al Gore, from the public humiliation to which my testimony would inevitably and deservedly have subjected him. I have also testified before the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Climate Change Committee. Inhofe and Barton are just two of the growing number of members of Congress who have seen through the climate scam.
More recently, Vaclav Klaus, as President of the Czech Republic, cited me twice in a speech on climate change in Washington DC, and subsequently accepted my invitation to deliver the annual Magistral Lecture at the World Federation of Scientists’ annual seminar on planetary emergencies.
The Chinese Ambassador to Italy forwarded my seminal, published paper on Clouds and Climate Sensitivity to Peking after his Scientific Counsellor, on hearing me present it, had commented: “This changes everything. It is clear there is no significant manmade influence on the climate.”
I, too, can name-drop sanctimoniously, just like Michael E. Mann.
Meanwhile, I’ve also been subject to a constant onslaught of character attacks and smears on websites, in op eds, by a politicized and now-discredited clerk in the House of Lords acting without the authority of the House, in Michael E. Mann’s Climategate emails, and on left-leaning news outlets, usually by front groups or individuals tied to global warming profiteers of the traffic-light tendency (the Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds): groups like Greenpeace, Deutsche Bank, the Environmental Defense Fund, Munich Re, and the World Wide Fund for Nature.
As the website WattsUpWithThat has frequently pointed out, climate researchers are in a street fight with those who seek to discredit the data that now comprehensively disprove the once-accepted scientific “evidence” simply because it is inconvenient for many who are profiting from attacking fossil fuel use.
Being the focus of such attacks has a lead lining: I’ve become an accidental public figure in the debate over human-caused climate change. Reluctant at first, I remain reluctant embrace this role, but nevertheless I choose to use my position in the public eye to inform the discourse surrounding the issue of climate change.
Despite continued albeit diminishing skepticism in official quarters, in reality the evidence against dangerous human-caused climate change is now very strong. By digging up and burning fossil fuels, humans are releasing carbon that had been buried in the Earth into the atmosphere, helping to stave off the mass extinctions that would follow from the next – and long overdue – Ice Age. And storms like extra-tropical system Sandy and hurricane Irene, and the oft-precedented heat, drought, and wild-fires of last summer cannot in logic, reason, or science be attributed to “global warming” that has become conspicuous chiefly by its near-total absence over the past two decades and perhaps more. In a deterministic climate object operating on a rational world, that which has not happened cannot have caused that which has.
If we continue down this path of lavishly funded nonsense, we will be leaving our children and grandchildren a different planet - one with more extreme Socialism, more pronounced and widespread scientific illiteracy, worse episodes of cant even than those of Michael E. Mann (if that were possible), and greater competition for diminishing taxpayer subsidies. It will be worse than we ever thought.
Greater competition for diminishing taxpayer subsidies, even at a time when global population growth is declining, in turn, is a recipe for a national security nightmare. The worst thing we can do is bury our heads in the Cypriot sand and pretend that national bankruptcy doesn’t exist.
It is imperative that we take no action now to squander trillions enriching charlatans like Michael E. Mann. It would be one or two orders of magnitude less cost-effective to spend a single red cent today than to let global warming happen, enjoy the sunshine, go surfing, and pay the minuscule cost of adapting to its consequences the day after tomorrow.
Global warming? As we shivering Scots lairds say as we carry glasses well filled with single malt whisky to our aged retainers as they gallantly shovel feet of unseasonal snow off our three-mile driveways, “Bring it on!”.
Christopher W. Monckton of Brenchley is a Distinguished Expert Reviewer for the IPCC’s forthcoming Undistinguished Fifth Assessment Report. Last year he was the Distinguished Nerenberg Lecturer in Mathematics at the Distinguished University of Western Ontario, where he discussed the mathematics of Doric architercture, probabilistic combinatorics, logic, climate sensitivity, feedback amplification, and climate economics in a Distinguished fashion. He directs Distinguished Monckton Enterprises Limited. He is the Distinguished author of numerous Distinguished reviewed papers in the Distinguished learned literature, and of the Distinguished forthcoming book “Climate of Freedom”. He is Distinguished for his notorious self-effacement, modesty, and humility – which is more than can be said for the Undistinguished Michael E. Mann.