UPDATE: The December Central England Temperature which is one of the longest running record extending back to the Little Ice Age (1659), had a -0.61C provisional average (reported by Hadley as -0.7C). This is the SECOND COLDEST DECEMBER trailing only 1890 which came in at -0.8C. It was also the 20th coldest month in the entire record.
The enlarged is here. The data can be downloaded here.
Keep this in mind when you read the garbage pedeled by Samuelsohn and all the agenda-driven, rent-seeking liars below. Much more on this December to Remember early this week.
By: Darren Samuelsohn, Politico
December 31, 2010 05:37 AM EST
Hey America! Are you ready to get wonky on global warming?
After a year that started with fallout from the “Climategate” e-mail release, saw the cap-and-trade bill die in Congress, and ended with a gang of Republican climate skeptics winning House and Senate seats, global warming experts are going back to basics.
Environmentalists, scientists and lawmakers have renewed public relations efforts to put global warming plainly before Americans’ eyes and also rebut opponents who say nothing is happening.
“Folks are enraged about this, rightly so, and are looking for ways to educate,” said Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned (Corrupted) Scientists.
Climate science hit a high-water mark with the media and public in 2007 when Al Gore and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won Nobel prizes for their work spreading the message. But the Democrat-led Congress and the White House were ultimately unable to translate that attention into a first-ever limit on domestic greenhouse gas emissions emissions.
Despite mounting evidence that the greenhouse gas buildup in the Earth’s atmosphere is causing runaway changes to the climate - NASA this month declared 2010 the hottest year on record - several pollsters say the American public isn’t listening.
In a recent survey, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change, found that the number of people in the United States who believe in global warming fell from 71 percent to 56 percent between 2008 and 2010. Just 34 percent of the public thinks there’s scientific agreement on climate change, down from 47 percent two years ago.
Enter the next phase of the climate education campaign.
Advocates recognize their chances for passing cap-and-trade legislation are dead for at least two years, maybe longer. But they want to make sure the public and policymakers don’t forget about the problem, especially with President Barack Obama insisting that he remains committed to lower-hanging fruit within the energy portfolio to try to get the job done.
Several key moments are ahead for inflection on climate science. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is pursuing emission reduction regulations hotly contested by industry and Republicans. A wide-open GOP presidential nomination campaign will test the political sway of conservative activists who say global warming is a scam. U.N.-led negotiations continue on whether to extend the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012. And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will roll out its next assessment in 2013 and 2014, covering all the key bases from the physical science to adaptation and ways to reduce greenhouse gases.
Expecting a surge next year in Republican-led House hearings on global warming science, the Union of Concerned Scientists sent experts out earlier this month to Washington and New York for meetings with reporters from 60 Minutes, Time, USA Today, Reuters, Bloomberg, MSNBC and other news organizations. Frumhoff said the journalists “were keenly interested in understanding how casting doubt about mainstream scientific findings that upset powerful financial interests, from the health risks of tobacco to the reality and risks of global warming, is a tactic that has been used time and again to delay or avoid regulation.”
UCS has also been leading behind-the-scenes efforts to get its scientists on television, radio and in print stories, as well as in front of Rotary clubs and editorial boards.
Heidi Cullen, the CEO and director of communications at Climate Central, a non-profit media group, said she’s trying to explain the scientific fundamentals to the American public while pinpointing solutions reflective of the size of the problem. She’s also trying to avoid frightening language.
“I think we need to approach it as a solvable problem,” Cullen said. “There’s a way to talk about this in sort of a rational, decision-based framework that has people saying, ‘Oh, OK, I see the risks and what I can do about it’ without feeling overwhelmed.”
Cullen has produced stories explaining when it is appropriate to make connections between daily weather like heat waves, storms and cold snaps - things that the public takes much greater notice of - and long-term climate projections linked to global warming. She’s also focused on the costs if government doesn’t act, as well local links like the need for greater emergency management equipment to protect Miami-Dade County’s multi-billion dollar tourism industry from stronger hurricanes and sea-level rise.
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), co-author of several unsuccessful climate bills over the last decade, said he agrees with the need to make more local connections for the public. Hitting home for him are studies showing lobster and winter flounder moving north out of Long Island Sound.
“It’s not the end of the world, and yet it suggests the world is changing,” Lieberman said. “It’s one small example. The world is full of them.”
Lieberman said he thinks there’s a need for more TV and radio commercials that capture the most eye-catching images. “Just show people what’s happening,” he said. “Show them satellite pictures of the ice caps.”
Princeton University climate researcher Michael Oppenheimer said advocates will be effective in raising public awareness with a campaign that focuses on specific opinion leaders.
“This is just one among many” hefty issues competing for Americans’ attention, alongside nuclear arms proliferation, health care and the federal deficit, he said. “And when the public is besieged by a plethora of complicated issues, they make their decisions not by looking granularly at the details, but mostly they look to people they trust.”
Cullen said Obama should eventually play an important role as the nation’s educator-in-chief. “I think it’s really critical,” she said. “It’s absolutely required. I don’t know when or if that can happen in the next two years. A lot of folks are feeling like it’s not the time.”
Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes said in an interview that the Obama administration is engaged on several levels in climate education by bringing the latest science to land, water and wildlife managers. He cited an 11-year old water shortage in the Colorado River Basin. “It’s one of the worst droughts in history,” Hayes said. “And we’re bringing the data to the table.”
The Senate’s leading global warming skeptic, Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe, said he’s not concerned about another blitz of information, whether from Obama or anyone else.
“No matter what they do, whether it means being more articulate or anything else, they’re fighting a losing battle because the science is cooked,” Inhofe told POLITICO. “The trouble is they’re not trying to educate the public. They’re trying to influence the public.”
Lawmakers say their efforts have been undermined by skeptics like Inhofe who create the appearance of scientific conflict. Several cited Bill Sammons, the FOX News managing editor in Washington who sent a memo to staff last December after the “Climategate” story broke urging them to “refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.”
“The problem is that we now have people create their own set of realities and then debate that,” said Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.). “If I said the world is round, and there’s substantial evidence to believe that, and someone else said the world is flat, the report is there’s a dispute on the shape of the world. Well, there’s not a dispute at all.”
“It’s easier to discredit something than it is to build the case for it too often,” added Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). “That’s why these guys are so good about lying about stuff.”
Jim Connaughton, President George W. Bush’s top White House environmental adviser and now an executive vice president at Baltimore-based Constellation Energy, said the next education campaign should focus on getting Americans up to speed on the shortcomings in delivering them their power.
“I think the public knows more about climate change science than they do about the major impediments to a really efficient well functioning electricity and natural gas system,” said Connaughton, who added that climate science should be considered settled.
Climate policy advocates also are looking for help in getting their message out from business leaders who can show the public why this hurts their corporate bottom line.
“The scientific community is not skeptical, you know,” Virgin Atlantic CEO Richard Branson told Newsweek this month. “But let’s assume the odds were only 50/50. If you have a 50 percent chance of getting knocked over by a car crossing the road, you’re going to take out insurance, or you’re not going to cross the road.” See Politico here.
by Marlo Lewis
In a recent issue of the Daily Caller, reporter Jonathan Strong asserts that EPA’s global warming regulations are “no end-run around Congress,” because “This time Congress is being held hostage by its own laws.” That’s exactly what EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and just about every environmental advocacy group in America says. They are mistaken.
Interestingly, much of Strong’s argument leads to conclusion that EPA is engaged in an end-run. His column leaves little doubt that the Clean Air Act (CAA) is a stunningly inappropriate framework for regulating greenhouse gases. That should make him wary of environmentalist claims that EPA is just carrying out the will of Congress.
Strong notes that President Obama and others depicted CAA regulation of greenhouse gases as “heinously bad” when they wanted to spook Republicans into supporting cap-and-trade legislation as a lesser evil. But why would Congress authorize something heinously bad? Granted, Congress does many foolish things, but it has never, ever voted to put EPA in charge of making climate policy.
Strong observes that it “hardly makes sense to hold individual states accountable for their greenhouse gas levels when every pollution source across the planet is contributing to that level.” Yet once EPA issued its December 2009 Endangerment Rule, it set a fateful precedent that could compel the agency to do just that.
The Endangerment Rule is EPA’s official finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. Logically, given that premise, EPA must now develop national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for greenhouse gases, and then compel states to reduce atmospheric levels within five or at most 10 years. The Center for Biological Diversity and other groups are petitioning EPA to establish a NAAQS for carbon dioxide (CO2) set at 350 parts per million (ppm) - about 40 ppm below the current concentration (390 ppm). Yet not even a severe depression cutting global GDP and emissions to, say, 1970 levels, would stop CO2 concentrations from rising.
In short, applying the CAA to greenhouse gases threatens to turn the Act into a de-industrialization mandate, a national economic suicide pact. Yet one of the statute’s core purposes, declared in the first section, is “to promote . . . the productive capacity of the population.” When did Congress vote to rescind that provision?
Strong notes that another “major lever” of the law is the requirement, once greenhouse gases become regulated air pollutants, for newly built or modified industrial facilities to install “best available control technology.” However, Strong concedes, because no cost-effective technology exists to “scrub” greenhouse gases out of emissions, “requiring best technology is inherently limited, even irrational.”
Indeed, he continues, regulated entities have a “unique financial incentive” to cheat on any type of greenhouse gas control system. Unlike other gases EPA regulates, the quantity of CO2 emissions “is basically a factor of how much output there is by a facility.” Ergo, regulating greenhouse gases has a unique potential to curb output and economic growth.
That’s a major reason why climate policy is intensely controversial; why the Senate, via the July 1997 Byrd-Hagel resolution, preemptively rejected the Kyoto Protocol; and why the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill became politically radioactive not long after it passed in the House. It’s also why Congress has never even come close to voting for EPA to establish best available control technology standards for greenhouse gases.
Strong acknowledges that applying CAA permitting requirements to greenhouse gases would produce an administrative “meltdown,” a “bureaucratic Armageddon.” EPA and its state counterparts would have to process an estimated 41,000 preconstruction permit applications per year (instead of 280) and 6.1 million operating permits per year (instead of 15,000). The permitting programs would crash under their own weight, crippling both environmental enforcement and construction activity while exposing millions of non-permitted firms to new litigation risks. A more potent Anti-Stimulus Program would be hard to imagine. This is not what Congress authorized when it enacted the CAA in 1970, nor when it amended the statute in 1977 and 1990.
To avoid such “absurd results,” EPA issued its so-called Tailoring Rule. It revises the statutory definitions of “major emitting facility” so that CAA permitting programs apply only to very large CO2 emitters such as coal-fired power plants, refineries, and cement production facilities. Strong says the Tailoring Rule “significantly bend[s] the letter of the law,” commenting: “Whether that rather sizeable legal leap withstands judicial scrutiny is an open question.” That’s too charitable. “Tailoring” is bureaucrat-speak for “amending.” To avoid absurd results and a political backlash, EPA now presumes to play lawmaker and amend the statute. When did Congress give EPA the okay to flout the separation of powers?
Strong notes that the CAA was enacted in 1970, “before global warming was even on the radar map.” Exactly! And after 20-plus years of global warming advocacy by the U.N., the environmental movement, regulatory bureaucrats, mainstream media, and rent-seeking corporations; and despite pressure from the White House, Democratic control of both the House and Senate, and a $100 million lobbying surge campaign, Congress in 2010 again rejected cap-and-trade. Are we then to suppose that back in 1970, when global warming was not even a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, Congress authorized EPA to implement a more “heinous” version of the same, but just forgot to tell anybody?
Read much more here.
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GOP Set to Resist EPA Rules on Global Warming, Op-Ed Declares
Wednesday, 29 Dec 2010 04:26 PM
House Republicans are ready to battle the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reverse or delay new climate-change regulations, according to an Op-Ed piece in The Wall Street Journal. The EPA’s new climate-change rules will impede economic recovery, and the only solution is for Congress to overturn the proposed greenhouse gas regulations outright, according to Tuesday’s article, which incoming Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., co-wrote with Americans for Prosperity’s Tim Phillips.
“If Democrats refuse to join Republicans in doing so, then they should at least join a sensible bipartisan compromise to mandate that the EPA delay its regulations until the courts complete their examination of the agency’s endangerment finding and proposed rules,” Upton and Phillips wrote, addingm “There is no way to know whether two years will be sufficient time for the courts to complete their work.”
A federal appeals court denied a motion this to delay the rules, which are set to roll out on Jan. 2.
Calling the controversial EPA rules “an unconstitutional power grab that will kill millions of jobs - unless Congress steps in,” Upton and Phillips questioned whether carbon even needs regulating. House Republicans are promising a fight if the Obama administration moves forward with any carbon crackdown, they said.
“The EPA has its foot firmly on the throat of our economic recovery,” Upton said of the EPA’s “long regulatory assault” against domestic energy producers. “We will not allow the administration to regulate what they have been unable to legislate”.
By Chris Horner
I was taken aback by this paragraph in a Politico story by someone a colleague of mine styles as the best reporter in DC on these issues. It reveals the media are not only telling us what to watch for this year, but getting an early jump:
Despite mounting evidence that the greenhouse gas buildup in the Earth’s atmosphere is causing runaway changes to the climate - NASA this month declared 2010 the hottest year on record - several pollsters say the American public isn’t listening. (emphases added)
Now, the reason no evidence—mounting, or otherwise—of runaway climate change was cited there is because there is no evidence of runaway climate change. Let alone man-made. There is as there always has been a continuing stream of evidence of changes in climate, because change is the sole constant in climate. But it takes an environmentalist or axe-grinding politician to say that whatever happens is evidence supporting his faith and/or agenda. The ‘runaway’ business is just absurdly hyperbolic. Which, again, is why no such evidence was actually cited.
Get this straight because once they agree on a talking point they beat it to death: their new one, of 2010 being the hottest year ‘on record’, would not rise to the level of evidence of man-made warming despite being touted as a self-evident example of cause-effect. This would remain true even if the cited source, NASA—meaning James Hansen’s runaway office, known as GISS—had not also done two things: adjust the historical record to make older years cooler (rewriting history) and ‘extrapolate’ data over vast stretches in the Arctic where they have none...but which happens to be where they find the warming (making history up).
None of which is secret, all of which then makes the above-cited paragraph an embarrassment.
Then the reporter discussed what the global warming industry plans to do about this, and includes the following predictable punch telegraphed.
...Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), co-author of several unsuccessful climate bills over the last decade, said he agrees with the need to make more local connections for the public. Hitting home for him are studies showing lobster and winter flounder moving north out of Long Island Sound.
“It’s not the end of the world, and yet it suggests the world is changing,” Lieberman said. “It’s one small example. The world is full of them.”
Lieberman said he thinks there’s a need for more TV and radio commercials that capture the most eye-catching images. “Just show people what’s happening,” he said. “Show them satellite pictures of the ice caps.”
Yes, the world changes and, of course, if something happens then you did it and their agenda would change it. Even if after billions of dollars and several decades they cannot make their case and are reduced to doing what they started with. Primitively pointing to the world around them and shrieking that the witch—now, the SUV—did it.
Expect the media to run with this. And in response I will show you pictures of, say, the World Trade Center collapsing. Why? Because that is their logic: show you something and say it is evidence that you did it. Example, invoked by a mindless fellow panelist on a tv show last week:
Man-made global warming is causing Mt. Kilimanjaro’s glacier to recede.
How do you know?
Mt. Kilimanjaro’s glacier is receding.
Oh. OK.
The CIA brought the World Trade Center down.
How do you know?
The World Trade Center came down.
Your ‘conclusion’ is actually an assumption. And that’s too stupid even for Washington to re-engineer the economy around. Here’s to an invigorating 2011.
See post here.