The European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) based in Germany has sent a Letter of Protest to the Intendant of German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle demanding that it refrains from the illegal use of public funds and cancel its one-sided conference for journalists called: The Heat Is On - Climate Change and the Media.
The international conference, scheduled to take place in Bonn from June 21 till June 23, excludes all views that disagree with the extreme AGW gloom and doom, world downfall view. However, because Deutsche Welle is a publicly funded institution, it is required by German Law to remain neutral and honest.
Instead, Deutsche Welle has decided on its own to abandon journalism and to resort to promoting one single extreme view on the topic of climate change, and to shut out the rest. It’s activism run amok.
One workshop is How to professionally deal with climate scepticism. The workshop’s objective:
This workshop aims to point out what journalists must know about climate change policy, whom to trust and when to question their own professional procedures.
This conference has infuriated a number of scientists and citizens. As a result EIKE has drafted and dispatched a letter of protest to Deutsche Welle. The letter states:
It certainly cannot be in the interest of a publicly financed broadcaster to put its own existence into question with a debate over its objectivity.
and
Enlightened thinking has always been at the centre of our culture, along with sceptical, critical and scrutinising thought. It is intolerable that, here in Germany, public funds are being illegally used under your supervision and under your responsibility to marginalise a large number persons (the majority!) who share a different opinion.
More information about Deutsche Welle and its conference is here and here.
77 German Scientists sign a petition
To show that there is a wide range of opinions on the AGW topic in Germany, EIKE has a Petition refuting catastrophic AGW signed by 77 German scientists.
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Lindsey Graham Said What About Climate Change?
By Kate Sheppard
On Tuesday, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham told reporters that he would vote against the climate bill he helped author. Now he’s going one
step further. Graham, one of the few Republicans who claimed to care about climate change, now says global warming is no big deal.
Graham appeared on Wednesday at a press conference with Dick Lugar (R-Ind.), who was rolling out his own energy bill, a measure that relies heavily on expanding nuclear power and raising fuel economy standards without putting a cap on carbon dioxide emissions. Yesterday, Graham said he didn’t think any energy bill could get 60 votes this year because oil drilling has become too controversial. Today he decided, at the last minute, to back Lugar’s bill.
Reporters asked Graham several times about why he was supporting Lugar’s bill, when just a few months ago he had argued that the Senate shouldn’t pass a “half-assed” bill that lacked hard restrictions on carbon emissions. Graham replied that he now doesn’t think pricing carbon is that important. “The science about global warming has changed,” he noted, offhandedly. “I think they’ve oversold this stuff, quite frankly. I think they’ve been alarmist and the science is in question,” Graham told reporters. “The whole movement has taken a giant step backward.”
I followed up with him. “Can you clarify that statement that the science on global warming has changed?” I asked.
“The public acceptance about global warming has changed,” he said.
“Well, what do you think?” I replied.
I’ll print his response in full, because it’s a humdinger:
It makes sense to me that the planet is heating up because you can measure heat. It’s not a stretch to say that what goes into the air is contributing to global warming, but I don’t want to be in the camp that says I know people in Northern Virginia will never see snow. At the end of the day, I think carbon pollution is worthy of being controlled, whether you believe in global warming or not. I do believe that all the CO2 gases, greenhouse gases from cars, trucks, and utility plants is not making us a healthier place, is not making our society better, and it’s coming at the expense of our national security and our economic prosperity. So put me in the camp that it’s worthy to clean up the air and make money doing so. This idea that carbon’s good for you. I want that debate. There’s a wing of our party who thinks carbon pollution is okay. I’m not in that wing.
I asked him, if carbon emissions aren’t warming the planet, why are they bad? Here’s his reply:
I just think it’s bad...the reason I don’t hang out in traffic jams and get out and suck up the wind is I think this crap is bad for you. We’ve had an increase in asthma cases. If you’ve ever been to Thailand stuck behind 400 motorcycles, it’s a lousy place to be. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist in my view to understand that the stuff floating in the Gulf, if you burn it doesn’t make it better for you. If you wouldn’t go swimming in this stuff, why would you burn it and want to breath it?
Graham ended his commentary on the subject on this note: “I do believe the environmental benefit of a low carbon economy is worth the Republican party’s time and attention. Does climate change have to be your religion? No, it is not my religion, it is my concern.”
This is quite different from what Graham has been saying for the past eight months. Last October, he co-authored an op-ed with John Kerry (D-Mass.) arguing that that “climate change is real and threatens our economy and national security.” Now he’s fumbling to figure out how to make it seem like he still cares - but not too much. Read more on Mother Jones news here.
By Dennis Ambler for SPPI
This is really very, very good, but politicians will not read it through, it is 79 pages long. It is a lawyer’s examination of the IPCC evidence as in a courtroom. He takes apart the IPCC conclusions and presents other evidence that disproves their insistence on incontrovertible evidence of AGW.
An example of his approach:
The Ability of Climate Models to Explain Past Climate
The IPCC and the climate establishment have vastly oversold climate models by declaring that such models are able to quite accurately reproduce past climates, including most importantly the warming climate of the late twentieth century. Mainstream climate modelers have themselves explained that climate models disagree tremendously in their predicted climate sensitivity - response of temperature to a CO2 increase - and are able to reproduce twentieth century climate only by assuming whatever (negative) aerosol forcing effect is necessary to get agreement with observations.
These kind of explanations, by leading climate modelers, suggest that climate models do not in fact reflect understanding of the key physical climate processes well enough to generate projections of future climate that one could rely upon. It seems unlikely that climate model projections would be accorded much policy significance if the way in which they were able to “reproduce” past climate was generally understood. It seems more than plausible that policymakers (let alone the general public), take a model’s purported ability reproduce past temperatures as an indication that the model’s assumption about climate sensitivity is correct.
If policymakers were told that this is not so, that ability to reproduce past temperatures indicates only that a particular pairing of assumptions about climate sensitivity and aerosol forcing allowed the reproduction of past temperatures, then the logical question would be: which model gets the correct pairing of sensitivity and aerosol forcing? In answer to this, climate modelers would have to say that they do not know, and the best that could be done would be to use all the models (this is called the ensemble approach). But of course it is possible that all the models were very badly wrong in what they assumed about sensitivity.
A policymaker aware of this would then have to ask whether it would be better to base policy on climate models, or a more naive climate forecasting method, and whether further public funding of efforts to improve climate models was worthwhile.
The Existence of Significant Alternative Explanations for Twentieth Century Warming
The IPCC and the climate establishment story expresses great certainty in arguing that late twentieth century global warming was caused by the atmospheric buildup of human ghg emissions (this is the anthropogenic global warming or AGW story).
The IPCC reports confidently assert that solar activity could not have accounted for warming during this period, because this was a period of weakening and not strengthening solar 76 irradiance, and that there was no natural forcing during this period that could have accounted for the warming.
Yet a closer look at the literature shows that there is ongoing dispute about the possible role of the sun, with the debate coming down to conflicting views about the reliability of alternative datasets on solar activity. Perhaps even more importantly, a growing body of sophisticated theoretical work confirms that the nonlinear global climate is subject to inherent warm and cool cycles of about 20 to 30 years in duration, with substantial evidence that a warm cycle was likely to have begun in 1976.
The existence of alternative explanations for twentieth century warming obviously has enormous implications for policy, for in order to determine how much to spend to reduce human GHG emissions, one must know first have some idea how harmful those emissions will be if they continue unabated.
Questionable methodology underlying highly publicized projected impacts of global warming
One of the most widely publicized numbers in the establishment climate story is the projection that 20-30 per cent of plant and animal species now existing may become extinct due to global warming. This number is also one of the most troubling, because it comes from a single study whose methodological validity has been severely questioned by a large number of biologists. These biologists agree that the methodology neglects many key processes that determine how the number of species will respond to changing climate, and will always lead to an overestimate of species loss due to climatic change.
Among the most surprising and yet standard practices is a tendency in establishment climate science to simply ignore published studies that develop and/or present evidence tending to disconfirm various predictions or assumptions of the establishment view that increases in CO2 explain virtually all recent climate change.
Perhaps even more troubling, when establishment climate scientists do respond to studies supporting alternative hypotheses to the CO2 primacy view, they more often than not rely upon completely different observational datasets which they say confirm (or at least don’t disconfirm) climate model predictions.
We should not be using public money to pay for faster and faster computers so that increasingly fine-grained climate models can be subjected to ever larger numbers of simulations until we have got the data to test whether the predictions of existing models are confirmed (or not disconfirmed) by the evidence.
Policy carrying potential costs in the trillions of dollars ought not to be based on stories and photos confirming faith in models, but rather on precise and replicable testing of the models’ predictions against solid observational data. See post here.
Wall Street Journal
Not too many weeks ago it looked as if President Obama’s cap-and-tax program for energy was dead for this year. But with the political and media left whacking the President for his handling of the worst spill in U.S. history, Democrats have suddenly decided that this is one more crisis that shouldn’t go to waste.
Consult Mr. Obama’s remarks last Wednesday about “the future we must seize” at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon. “The time has come, once and for all, for this nation to fully embrace a clean energy future,” he said. “I want you to know, the votes may not be there now, but I intend to find them in the coming months.”
Nancy Pelosi forced House Democrats to walk the cap-and-tax plank last July, and the White House now plans a summer push in the Senate, where Midwest and coal-state Democrats are still leery of imposing huge new energy costs on their constituents. But Democrats won’t stop merely because cap and tax is unpopular and destructive. ObamaCare was too.
As with health care, the strategy is to ram the thing through by any means necessary. Amid a revolt against government excess, and a rising liberal panic about November losses, Democrats understand that the political window for their green ambitions is closing. Without any policy concessions to the public mood, they’ve simply decided that they haven’t done enough to convince voters how great their plans are.
Wednesday’s speech was a preview of this new rhetorical campaign: The Gulf crisis will replace the artist formerly known as the climate bill. “The next generation will not be held hostage to energy sources from the last century,” Mr. Obama said, throwing in some banalities about GOP narrow-mindedness and dependence on foreign oil at no extra charge. BP will play the political foil, like the insurer WellPoint did during the health-care debate.
As policy, this is a non sequitor. Cap and trade will do little or nothing to end U.S. oil dependence. It will merely make a globally traded commodity more expensive domestically. Oil consumption will naturally decline somewhat, but the reality is that there isn’t a viable oil substitute-especially for the transportation that accounts for about 70% of U.S. consumption. Electric cars are years if not decades away from commercial viability, while ethanol isn’t energy-dense enough to get a jet off the tarmac. Maybe hot air balloons?
Mr. Obama conceded as much in March when he bid for Republican support for a carbon tax by expanding offshore drilling. “Given our energy needs, in order to sustain economic growth and produce jobs, and to keep our businesses competitive,” he said, “we are going to need to harness traditional sources of fuel even as we ramp up production of new sources of renewable, homegrown energy.” He noted only days before the BP rig exploded that “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills.”
Er, about those spills. Even if Mr. Obama’s current drilling moratorium is extended ad infinitum, the U.S. will simply import more from Canada and Mexico (the main sources of “foreign oil") as well as the rest of the world, most of it with more lenient environmental regulations. At any rate, the emphasis of the Senate bill rolled out last month by John Kerry and Joe Lieberman is on emissions from coal-fired electricity. Utilities will mostly fuel-switch to natural gas, which is produced by . . drilling.
As for the idea that cap and tax is the best way to punish BP and Big Oil, it’d be more convincing if Kerry-Lieberman hadn’t been written in concert with ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and-bad-timing department-BP. “Ironically, we’ve been working very closely with some of these oil companies in the last months,” Mr. Kerry said in early May.
The Senator from Nantucket added that “they’ve acted in good faith and they’ve worked hard with us to try to find a way to get us to a solution that meets all of our needs.” Lobbyists for the three oil majors were regular visitors to Mr. Kerry’s closed-door negotiations.
Democrats have also co-opted other should-be opponents, and not only in the oil industry. Corporate cap-and-tax enthusiasts include Duke Energy and most of the other utilities, as well as Honeywell, DuPont and other large corporations on the Business Roundtable. General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt captured this mentality best, as he so often does. “National policy-including an effective price on carbon and a strong, nationwide clean energy standard-is needed to drive increased investment, which in turn creates new technologies and jobs,” he wrote in endorsing Kerry-Lieberman.
Like the medical-industrial complex, these businesses will soon come to rue their concessions for a seat at the table and some momentary corporate welfare. But everyone else should understand the stakes. Democrats know this is their last opportunity to control another huge chunk of the economy. Facing diminished majorities next year if not an outright loss of power on Capitol Hill, liberals are going to make one more bloody-minded charge to do for energy what they’ve already done for health care. See editorial here.