By Paul Chesser
The BP rig explosion has caused the greatest oil mess in U.S. history, and eco-activists are puzzled as to why they can’t exploit it to advance initiatives such as climate-change legislation. “It’s hard to imagine a more useful disaster,” wrote two Washington Post environmentalist reporters, noting a squandered opportunity.
Could it be because we’ve heard similar alarms before? We were told in past decades about the pulled pin on the overpopulation grenade, an impending ice age and a nuclear-caused scorched earth. Photos of starvation and Hollywood “Day After” productions accompanied the ominous predictions.
More recently, we’ve been lectured about so-called hazards such as fossil-fuel-caused global warming, mountaintop coal mining and hydraulic fracturing to reach natural-gas deposits. Smokestacks and drills interchanged with unaltered woods and wildlife conveyed approaching doom, thanks to human corruption of the planet.
But now the Homo sapiens are tired of the blame, not to mention the photoshopped images that falsified many of the accusations. Coca Cola’s polar bears seemed more real.
The Post reported that while the BP leak concerns everyone, public reaction reflects a desire to address our oil-exploration problems so we can continue to access and use fossil fuel resources, as opposed to the environmentalists’ “end it all” plan.
“People’s outrage is focused on BP,” said Yale University public-opinion researcher Anthony Leiserowitz. The spill “hasn’t been automatically connected to some sense that there’s something more fundamental wrong with our relationship with the natural world.”
Missing those signals, environmental extremists want to use the disaster as an excuse (once again) to modify human behavior via forced curbs on greenhouse gases.
Their approach was to corrupt science with the climate-change cause. Degreed leftists like the Union of Concerned Scientists have pushed the global-warming agenda for years, and not just in objective disguises like the National Academy of Sciences. One of their top alarmists, Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, is author of the November release “Science as a Contact Sport.” The researchers at the University of East Anglia in England and Penn State University’s Michael Mann took this principle to heart when they conspired to exclude the works of skeptical climate scientists from research journals. And Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Benjamin D. Santer was famously revealed in the Climategate e-mails to want to “beat the crap out of” skeptical climatologist Patrick J. Michaels, formerly of the University of Virginia.
Not quite Mel Gibson, but the revelation of this secretly menacing attitude wasn’t the beginning of the climate activists’ woes anyway. The global-warming movement had lost standing (according to several polls, including quarterly ones from Rasmussen Reports, as well as Gallup) before the Climategate scandal broke in November. Now their credibility is at an all-time low, as illustrated by their current failed messaging.
The environmentalists’ public displays have become hackneyed and cliched. A Hands Across the Sand demonstration against offshore oil drilling, co-sponsored by nearly all the recognizable groups (including Greenpeace, Sierra Club and Audubon, plus MoveOn.org and others) drew scant media attention and participation only from the activists’ marginal ranks.
If the environoiacs want to capture the minds and the energy of average Americans, blaming them for their “addiction to oil” is the wrong way to go about it. Whoever came up with the public relations idea to equate our everyday low-cost, lifesaving energy use to back-alley junkie dependencies needs to go back to marketing school.
Put all the ingredients together - the Climategate deception, fraudulent scare tactics, guilt trips and stupid messaging - and the recipe flops. Americans have figured out they don’t like the taste, and they don’t believe the environmentalists when they say it’s good for their health.
Read more here.
By Susan Ferrechio, Washington Examiner
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s climate and energy proposal is more ambitious than many Senate Democrats would like, particularly in an election year. (Alex Brandon/AP)
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., plans to bring a comprehensive energy and climate bill to the Senate floor by the end of the month that will include a cap on carbon emissions produced by the nation’s utilities.
Reid announced his plans after huddling with President Obama about the Senate’s July agenda and said he wants to introduce the bill, which has not yet been written, the week of July 26.
Reid was vague on details, but signaled he wants the bill to require the nation’s electricity providers to pay a price for emitting carbon, which the EPA says will lead to global warming.
“We’re looking at a way of making sure that when we talk about pollution, that we’re focused just on the utility section,” Reid said, adding that the bill would also include language aimed at reducing energy consumption, producing more clean energy and creating “green jobs.” The legislation would also address the Gulf oil spill, he said.
Reid’s proposal is more ambitious than many Senate Democrats would like, particularly in an election year and amid polls showing voters care far more about the economy and less about global warming.
Democratic lawmakers said It will be difficult, if not impossible, to find the 60 votes needed to block a Republicans filibuster if the measure includes a cap on carbon, which would raise energy prices.
Following a lunchtime meeting with Reid, Senate Democrats were shaking their heads at the prospect of a carbon cap, even one limited to utilities.
A handful of senators stood up in the meeting and told Reid they oppose moving forward on a bill that will never garner 60 votes but will force them into a politically damaging debate.
“The Chamber of Commerce is going to spend $75 million trying to defeat Democratic candidates, which is more than both the Republican and Senate campaign committees put together,” Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said after the meeting. “In other words, doing something for the sake of doing it didn’t seem to be carrying a lot of favor in there.”
Reid is moving ahead nonetheless. He told reporters he would meet Tuesday with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Carol Browner, Obama’s director of energy and climate change policy.
“I now have a rough draft of what we’re going to do,” Reid said.
He refused to describe his proposal as a cap on carbon emissions, a term that has become politically toxic in recent months.
“Those words are not in my vocabulary,” Reid told a reporter. “We’re going to work on pollution.”
There are at least two proposals in the Senate to put a carbon cap on utilities, one authored by Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and another in the works by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., who earlier this year introduced a bill calling for an economywide cap on carbon.
The Bingaman draft calls for capping carbon emitted by utilities at 25,000 metric tons per year beginning in 2012. The draft also calls for reducing overall carbon emissions 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 and 42 percent by 2030.
Read more here.
Times of India, Reprinted from the Financial Times
Two British committees, one Dutch committee and a US Senate committee have investigated Climategate - the disclosure from emails that scientists at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University sought to withhold data from and sabotage research publications of other scientists questioning the conventional wisdom on global warming.
The first three committees gave CRU scientists and collaborators - including Phil Jones, Michael Mann, Keith Briffa and Kevin Trenberth - a slap on the wrist without calling them outright frauds. The Minority Staff Report of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, however, has accused the scientists of (a) obstructing release of damaging data and information, (b) manipulating data to reach preconceived conclusions, (c) colluding to pressure journal editors who published work questioning the climate science ‘consensus’, and (d) assuming activist roles to influence the political process.
Critics have lambasted the supposedly-independent inquiry by Sir Muir Russell because he himself is a climate change crusader. He interviewed the CRU scientists but not the climate sceptics whom the scientists were targeting. This has been called “a trial with judge, jury, reporters, spectators and defendant , but no plaintiff. The plaintiff is locked outside the courtroom sitting in the hall hollering and hoping the jury hears some of what he has to say.” At the end of it all, two things are clear. First, it is fantasy for crusaders to claim that catastrophic global warming is established science: the emails reveal doubts and caveats even among true believers in CRU. Second, the International Panel on Climate Change must disavow its claim made first in 2001 - based on the ‘hockey stick’ graph of Michael Mann using historical tree-ring data - that the world is warmer today than ever before.
Tree-ring data after 1961 indicate cooling, but actual temperatures show warming. So, Jones resorted to the ‘trick’ of splicing tree-ring data up to 1961 with actual temperatures after 1961, thus manufacturing a steadily-rising temperature trend in the 20th century. The splicing was dishonest and an insult to science. Yet, the independent inquiry did not condemn it, showing how easily crusader-inquirers forgive transgressions that promote their private agenda.
The IPCC needs to revert to the earlier scientific consensus - maintained from its first report in 1990 to 2001 - that the medieval warm period of 800-1 ,300 AD - well before fossil fuels were extracted - was warmer than it is today.
This is inconvenient for climate crusaders who blame fossil fuels for all warming. But it will provide citizens with basic information they need before deciding whether to spend trillions on combating a problem that may or may not be real.
To throw light on these two issues, it is worth citing some of the emails.
Phil Jones (regarding queries from climate sceptic S McIntyre). “I had some emails with him a few years ago when he wanted to get all the station temperature data we use here in CRU. I hid behind the fact that some of the data had been received from individuals and not directly from Met Services through the Global Telecommunications Service (GTS) or through GCOS.”
Phil Jones to Michael Mann. “And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp [file transfer protocol] sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send it to anyone”
KEITH Briffa. “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data, but in reality, the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies) show some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming...”
Phil Jones. “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK, it has, but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”
On February 13 this year, Phil Jones told BBC that “there has been no statistically significant warming over the last 15 years.”
Kevin Trenberth, UCAR, October 12, 2009, “We can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t .”
Professor Mojib Latif, an IPCC member , recently said, “For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.” Breaking with climate-change orthodoxy, he said North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) cycles were probably responsible for some of the strong global warming seen in the past three decades. The NAO was now moving into a colder phase (New Scientist, September 2009).
The National Research Council appointed by US Congress concluded that “the substantial uncertainties in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about AD 1600 lower our confidence in this (hockey stick) conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming. Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al(1999) that the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium.”
Climategate fortifies my own convictions as a critical agnostic on global warming. We know so little about the weather that we cannot predict it five days ahead, let alone one century ahead. This also means we know too little to rule out guesstimates - like the six IPCC scenarios - about a possible catastrophe.
The case for combating global warming rests not on established proof of warming but on insuring against a catastrophe that may not happen. If the public decides to spend a trillion dollars on such speculative insurance, so be it. I doubt if this will happen once people learn that catastrophic global warming is a guesstimate, not proven science. (PDF)