By David Lungren
Peterson Institute’s Prediction of 203,000 Net Jobs Gained is Just More Spin
“The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. ‘I am no such thing,’ it would say; ‘I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.’” -William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
We always eagerly await the next iteration of cap-and-trade legislation, for with it comes the inevitable refrain that “this time, it’s different.” Claims that cap-and-trade means fewer jobs, higher energy prices for consumers, a weaker economy-well, maybe for those other bills, advocates say, but not this one. The American Power Act, aka the Kerry-Lieberman bill, is deemed a special case, because, according to one prominent Senate supporter, this time “we got the balance right.”
That same supporter claims that, unlike those other unbalanced cap-and-trade bills, the Kerry-Lieberman bill will actually create jobs-203,000 jobs, in fact, according to a recent analysis by the Peterson Institute. Yet sadly for the bill’s authors, the bill is not sui generis; it’s fairly typical: close scrutiny of the Peterson Institute study shows Kerry-Lieberman is no different than Waxman-Markey and every other failed version of cap-and-trade-jobs will be lost and consumers will suffer.
According to the study, between 2011 and 2020, Kerry-Lieberman would actually kill 479,000 jobs. After tallying the jobs created from, among other things, “clean energy investment,” “adaptation,” and “energy efficiency,” the Institute subtracts those lost in key sectors of the economy because of Kerry-Lieberman. Consider the fossil fuel industry, which would lose 72,000 jobs because of “lower demand for fossil fuels and foregone construction of new fossil fuel power generating capacity. This includes direct, indirect, and induced jobs as well.” The study goes on: “We further subtract the jobs lost when households have less money to spend on other goods because energy has become more expensive.” The number subtracted? 305,000.
Then there’s Kerry-Lieberman’s “macroeconomic effects” caused by “changes in consumer demand.” “This includes,” the authors found, “changes in consumer demand for non-energy goods that are more expensive because of higher energy costs, reduction in investment in non-energy sectors because additional investment in power generation has pushed up interest rates, and changes in the US current account position resulting from a net increase in US investment demand.” Jobs lost: 102,000.
As for those 203,000 net jobs created, the Peterson Institute has some interesting things to say. After the bill’s free allocation of emissions allowances phases out, “resulting in higher energy prices,” the “net effect” is that “after 2025, some of the employment gains in the first decade are clawed back, bringing the 2011-30 average back in line with business as usual.” The authors go on to note that, “While outside the window of this analysis, energy prices will likely continue to increase beyond 2030 as GHG abatement costs get higher.”
As supporters seek to advance yet another version of cap-and-trade-this time one confined to the utility sector-the Peterson Institute study seems to confirm the proverb, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Read more here.
By Andrew Orlowski, The Register
Parliament was misled and needs to re-examine the Climategate affair thoroughly after the failure of the Russell report, a leading backbench MP told us today.
“It’s not a whitewash, but it is inadequate,” is Labour MP Graham Stringer’s summary of the Russell inquiry report. Stringer is the only member of the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology with scientific qualifications - he holds a PhD in Chemistry.
Not only did Russell fail to deal with the issues of malpractice raised in the emails, Stringer told us, but he confirmed the feeling that MPs had been misled by the University of East Anglia when conducting their own inquiry. Parliament only had time for a brief examination of the CRU files before the election, but made recommendations. This is a serious charge.
After the Select Committee heard oral evidence on March 1, MPs believed that Anglia had entrusted an examination of the science to a separate inquiry. Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia Edward Acton had told the committee that “I am hoping, later this week, to announce the chair of a panel to reassess the science and make sure there is nothing wrong."[Hansard - Q129]]
Ron Oxburgh’s inquiry eventually produced a short report clearing the participants. He did not reassess the science, and now says it was never in his remit. “The science was not the subject of our study,” he confirmed in an email to Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit.
Earlier this week the former chair of the Science and Technology Committee, Phil Willis, now Lord Willis, said MPs had been amazed at the “sleight of hand”.
“Oxburgh didn’t go as far as I expected. The Oxburgh Report looks much more like a whitewash,” Graham Stringer told us.
Stringer says Anglia appointee Muir Russell (a civil servant and former Vice Chancellor of Glasgow University), failed in three significant areas.
“Why did they delete emails? The key question was what reason they had for doing this, but this was never addressed; not getting to the central motivation was a major failing both of our report and Muir Russell.”
Graham Stringer
Stringer also says that it was unacceptable for Russell (who is not a scientist) to conclude that CRU’s work was reproducible, when the data needed was not available. He goes further:
“The fact that you can make up your own experiments and get similar results doesn’t mean that you’re doing what’s scientifically expected of you. You need to follow the same methodology of the process.”
“I was surprised at Phil Jones’ answers to the questions I asked him [in Parliament]. The work was never replicable,” says Stringer.
In 2004 Jones had declined to give out data that would have permitted independent scrutiny of their work, explaining that “We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”
This policy is confirmed several times in the emails, with Jones also advising colleagues to destroy evidence helpful to people wishing to reproduce the team’s results.
“I think that’s quite shocking,” says Stringer.
Thirdly, the University of East Anglia failed to follow the Commons Select Committee’s recommendations in handling the inquiry and producing the report.
Stringer said, “We asked them to be independent, and not allow the University to have first sight of the report. The way it’s come out is as an UEA inquiry, not an independent inquiry.”
Stringer also says they reminded the inquiry to be open - Russell had promised as much - but witness testimony took place behind closed doors, and not all the depositions have been published.
How independent was the panel?
Muir Russell’s team heard only one side of the story, failing to call witnesses who were the subjects of the emails - Stephen McIntyre of Climate Audit is mentioned over one hundred times in the archive - who may have given a different perspective. Nor was any active climate scientist supportive of climate change policy but critical of the CRU team’s behaviour - Hans Storch or Judith Curry, let alone the prominent sceptics, for example - summoned. Stringer feels their presence would have provided vital context.
The panel included Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet and a vocal advocate of mitigation against climate change (in 2007 he described global warming “the biggest threat to our future health") and Geoffrey Boulton a climate change advisor to the UK government and the EU, who spent 16-years at the University of East Anglia - the institution under apparently ‘independent’ scrutiny.
In several areas the CRU academics were given the benefit of the doubt because a precedent had been set - often by the academics themselves.
The British establishment has a poor record of examining its own conduct. The 1983 Franks Report into events leading up to the Falklands Invasion exonerated the leading institutions and decision-makers, so too did the Hutton Report into the Invasion of Iraq.
For Stringer, policy needs to be justified by the evidence.
“Vast amounts of money are going to be spent on climate change policy, it’s billions and eventually could be trillions. Knowing what is accurate and what is inaccurate is important.”
“I view this as a Parliamentarian for one of the poorest constituencies in the country. Putting up the price of fuel for poor people on such a low level of evidence, hoping it will have the desired effect, is not acceptable. I need to know what’s going on.”
Climategate may finally be living up to its name. If you recall, it wasn’t the burglary or use of funding that led to the impeachment of Nixon, but the cover-up. Now, ominously, three inquiries into affair have raised more questions than there were before. Read post here.
Popular Technology
Peter Sinclair AKA “Greenman” a cartoonist and Al Gore disciple has been hard at work creating YouTube videos that smear skeptics and their arguments. The following is a complete rebuttal to his “Flogging the Scientists” video.
1. Sinclair claims that as a “non-scientist” he has found that the most “reliable” scientific information comes from “respected” peer-reviewed science journals. The problem with this statement is the use of subjective criteria. First he is admitting to be a “non-scientist” so why would anyone take his advice on where to find “reliable” scientific information or on what journals are more “respected”? Regardless what is considered “reliable” or “respected” is purely subjective and cannot be objectively determined. Now it is true that within the scientific community more scientific credibility is applied to “peer-reviewed” publications which is why skeptics have extensively published in peer-reviewed journals. Being peer-reviewed however does not mean something is a scientific truth, only that it has passed a certain level of scrutiny within the scientific community. There are documented cases of the corruption of this process,
(1) A Climatology Conspiracy? (David H. Douglass, Ph.D. Professor of Physics; John R. Christy, Ph.D. Professor of Atmospheric Science)
(2)Caspar and the Jesus paper (AT) (Andrew W. Montford, B.Sc. Chemistry)
(2) Circling the Bandwagons: My Adventures Correcting the IPCC (PDF) (Ross McKitrick, Ph.D. Professor of Environmental Economics)
(3)The Double Standard in Environmental Science (PDF) (Stanley W. Trimble, Ph.D. Professor of Geography)
2. Sinclair then uses a strawman argument by comparing peer-reviewed journals to the conspiracy website InfoWars, the conservative news site WorldNetDaily and the UK’s conservative newspaper the Daily Mail. Despite these site’s excellent coverage of Climategate (even conspiracy sites get some things right) they are never confused by prominent skeptics with peer-reviewed journals.
3. In an attempt to attack the Daily Mail article, “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995” Sinclair uses an article from what he calls, the “conservative” Economist magazine. The problem is the Economist magazine is not conservative,
“...the Economist’s philosophy has always been liberal, not conservative” - Former Economist Editor Bill Emmott
This appears to be a failed attempt by Sinclair to pretend a conservative source agrees with his position.
4. Sinclair uses a quote from the original BBC interview with Phil Jones that actually makes the skeptics case,
BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?
Phil Jones: Yes
This question originated with Dr. Richard Lindzen, Ph.D. Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT who has been trying to make a point about the ridiculously small fractions of a degree in temperature change that are being debated. When standard error bars are applied to these, you are left with no statistically significant warming in 15 years. Without statistical significance you cannot rule out that any recent positive warming trend did not occur by chance or in this case, measurement error (below, enlarged here).
5. Sinclair then dishonestly implies that Dr. Lindzen is “denying” the mild warming trend over the last century which is blatantly not true,
“Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century,” - Dr. Richard Lindzen
6. Sinclair harps on a recently retracted paper on sea-level rise that for obvious reasons was widely discussed on skeptic websites prior to it’s retraction. The retraction he claims was based on the findings of a recent PNAS paper by Steven Rahmstorf who’s 2007 paper on the exact same subject in the journal Science was discredited,
- Comment on “A Semi-Empirical Approach to Projecting Future Sea-Level Rise” (PDF) (Science, Volume 317, Number 5846, pp. 1866, September 2007)- Torben Schmith, Soren Johansen, Peter Thejll
“We revisit the application of the statistical methods used and show that estimation of the regression coefficient is not robust.” - Comment on “A Semi-Empirical Approach to Projecting Future Sea-Level Rise” (PDF) (Science, Volume 317, Number 5846, pp. 1866, September 2007) - Simon Holgate, Svetlana Jevrejeva, Philip Woodworth, Simon Brewer
“Although we agree that there is considerable uncertainty in the prediction of future sea-level rise, this approach does not meaningfully contribute to quantifying that uncertainty.”
7. Sinclair then goes off promoting Al Gore like fear-mongering of over 6 ft of sea-level rise by the end of the century, ignoring both the IPCC and a recent review of the science in an article in the journal Nature,
“This issue was highlighted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 2007 assessment report. They concluded that ‘understanding of these effects is too limited ... to provide a best estimate or an upper bound for sea level rise’ in the twenty-first century. Excluding these effects, they projected a sea level rise of 0.26–0.59 metres [10-23 inches] by the 2090s for their highest-emissions scenario.
The available evidence still doesn’t allow us to say with certainty whether sea level rise could exceed the IPCC’s projections.
...Although increases of up to two metres this century can’t be ruled out, this does not mean that they are inevitable or even likely.” Other peer-reviewed papers show even less to worry about,
New Perspective on Global Warming & Sea Level Rise: Modest Future Rise with Reduced Threat (PDF) (Energy & Environment, Volume 20, Number 7, pp. 1067-1074, November 2009) - Madhav L. Khandekar
“It is concluded that the best guess value of Sea Level Rise for the next 100 years is a relatively modest 23 cm +/ - 5 cm [9 +/- 2 inches] which poses little threat to coastal areas of the world either at present or in future.”
8. Sinclair repeats the big lie that the Climategate emails do not undermine climate science. The significance of the emails and how they undermined the credibility of the climate science community and thus the science itself was exposed in a 2010 U.S. Senate report,
The CRU emails show scientists,
- Obstructing release of damaging data and information;
- Manipulating data to reach preconceived conclusions;
- Colluding to pressure journal editors who published work questioning the climate science “consensus”; and
- Assuming activist roles to influence the political process
9. Sinclair lies that the South Dakota legislature passed a resolution urging schools not to teach the science of climate change, when the resolution says no such thing. It explicitly states that they recommend some points be included with the instruction of global warming. You can pause the video and read this for yourself. The wording of the resolution is also poor and it is fairly clear the legislature meant astronomical not astrological and geothermal not thermological. All the more reason politicians should consult scientists if they are not sure about scientific terminology.
10. Finally Sinclair lies about Marc Morano’s comment about public flogging when the website it was quoted from explicitly says, “He doesn’t wish anyone harm”. For someone who likes to use clips from Monty Python Sinclair sure has a hard time identifying sarcastic remarks from those he is trying to smear.