By Kimberley A. Strassel
Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation. If you haven’t heard of this politician, it’s because he’s a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country’s carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.
Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as “deniers.” The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.
In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country’s weeks-old cap-and-trade program.
The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N.—13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)
The collapse of the “consensus” has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.
Credit for Australia’s own era of renewed enlightenment goes to Dr. Ian Plimer, a well-known Australian geologist. Earlier this year he published “Heaven and Earth,” a damning critique of the “evidence” underpinning man-made global warming. The book is already in its fifth printing. So compelling is it that Paul Sheehan, a noted Australian columnist—and ardent global warming believer—in April humbly pronounced it “an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence.” Australian polls have shown a sharp uptick in public skepticism; the press is back to questioning scientific dogma; blogs are having a field day.
The rise in skepticism also came as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, elected like Mr. Obama on promises to combat global warming, was attempting his own emissions-reduction scheme. His administration was forced to delay the implementation of the program until at least 2011, just to get the legislation through Australia’s House. The Senate was not so easily swayed.
Mr. Fielding, a crucial vote on the bill, was so alarmed by the renewed science debate that he made a fact-finding trip to the U.S., attending the Heartland Institute’s annual conference for climate skeptics. He also visited with Joseph Aldy, Mr. Obama’s special assistant on energy and the environment, where he challenged the Obama team to address his doubts. They apparently didn’t.
This week Mr. Fielding issued a statement: He would not be voting for the bill. He would not risk job losses on “unconvincing green science.” The bill is set to founder as the Australian parliament breaks for the winter.
Republicans in the U.S. have, in recent years, turned ever more to the cost arguments against climate legislation. That’s made sense in light of the economic crisis. If Speaker Nancy Pelosi fails to push through her bill, it will be because rural and Blue Dog Democrats fret about the economic ramifications. Yet if the rest of the world is any indication, now might be the time for U.S. politicians to re-engage on the science. One thing for sure: They won’t be alone. See editorial here.
By Paul Cheshire on Report from Beacon Hill Institute
Recent studies forecasting the potential economic benefits of government green job programs are critically flawed and erroneously promote these jobs as a benefit, according to a report released today by The Beacon Hill Institute (BHI) at Suffolk University.
The economic analysis reviewed the primary claims of three of the most influential green jobs studies and found serious economic flaws in each.
“Contrary to the claims made in these studies, we found that the green job initiatives reviewed in each actually causes greater harm than good to the American economy and will cause growth to slow,” reported Paul Bachman, Director of Research at the Beacon Hill Institute, one of the report’s authors.
The studies reviewed by BHI include:
* The United Nations Environment Programme, International Labor Organization, International Trade Union Confederation’s Green Jobs Initiative, “Green Jobs: Towards Sustainable Work in a Low-Carbon World.”
* The Center for American Progress, “Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy.”
* The U.S. Conference of Mayors, “U.S. Metro Economics: Current and Potential Green Jobs in the U.S. Economy” prepared by Global Insight.
The authors of the BHI critique identified a fundamental error in each of these studies, specifically “counting the creation of a green job as a benefit and rationale for its proposed program in and of itself.”
The BHI study also stresses that “Jobs ? green or otherwise ? are not benefits but are instead costs. If the green job is a net benefit it has to be because the value the job produces for consumers is greater than the cost of performing the job. This argument is never made in any of these three green jobs studies.”
The executive director of the Beacon Hill Institute and co-author, David G. Tuerck, went further, noting that “these studies are based on arbitrary assumptions and use faulty methodologies to create an unreliable forecast for the future of green jobs.
“It appears these numbers are based more on wishful thinking than the appropriate economic models, and that must be taken into consideration when the government is trying to turn the economy around based on political studies and the wrong numbers,” Tuerck said.
According to BHI, the results of the study also show estimates on how a state-based cap and trade policy will negatively impact both job growth and wages. One specific critique involves job creation in the state of Indiana, where previous reports did not take increased energy costs from a “cap and trade” system into consideration when looking at job creation. In that case, BHI developed a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model and found that contrary to previous studies, Indiana would lose more than 18,000 jobs in 2009, up to nearly 29,000 job losses in 2011, and that real disposable income would be cut by nearly $1 billion in 2009 and close to $1.5 billion in 2011.
The authors concluded by noting that further economic analysis is needed before governments move forward on green job initiatives. “All three green jobs studies we reviewed are riddled with economic errors, incorrect methods, and dubious assumptions. Economic policy should not be based on such faulty analysis. Serious economic studies of costs and benefits are desperately needed before the adoption of any green jobs proposal.”
The complete study is available Full Text of Study (PDF) (Go to link here to access).
Loss of jobs also a theme of this week’s Scientific Alliance Newsletter - excerpted here.
By Christopher Monckton, SPPI
The warming effect of greenhouse gases is less than one-tenth the UN’s central estimate.
Spencer et al. (2008, cloud albedo); Douglass (2008, tropical mid-troposphere temperature change); Lindzen & Choi (2009 in press, outgoing long-wave radiation); and Armstrong, Green & Soon (2009 in press, zero-change benchmarking of climate forecasts) empirically confirm theoretical demonstrations (Schwartz, 2007; Monckton, 2008; Monckton & Evans, 2009 in draft) that climate sensitivity - the warming effect of all greenhouse gases, not just of CO2 - is less than one-fourth of the UN’s current central estimate. A CO2 doubling would cause just 1.5 F warming, not the 5.9 F imagined by the UN.
Global warming’ is nothing new
It was 10 F warmer than today in each of the past four interglacial periods; 2-3 F warmer for most of the past 10,000 years; warmer in the Minoan, medieval, and Roman warm periods. The rate of warming is nothing new either: the warming rate equivalent to 2.9 F/century from 1975-1998, when humankind might have had a small influence, was exactly the same as the warming rates from 1860-1880 and from 1910-1940 (House of Lords Written Answer, 2009).
There has been no statistically-significant ‘global warming’ for almost 15 years.
In fact, for almost eight years, on all measures, there has been global cooling at 3.4 F/century. Oceans have also been cooling ever since 3300 automated
bathythermographs were deployed in 2005. The ocean cooling definitively proves the UN wrong about “global warming”: if there were any, 80% of it would have to show up in the top 400 fathoms of the world’s oceans, but it is not happening. It follows that all recent reports that “global warming” has caused adverse weather events must be incorrect, because there has not been any. The UN’s central estimate, on its “business-as-usual” scenario, is for 6 F warming in the 21st century, but in the 30 years since accurate satellite temperatures became available in 1980 the warming rate has averaged just 2.7 F/century - less than half the UN’s prediction.
CO2 concentration is rising at less than half the UN’s predicted rate.
The UN’s central estimate is that CO2 concentration will grow exponentially to reach 836 parts per million by volume this century, but in fact it is growing
linearly towards just 575 ppm. This factor alone demands a halving of all UN temperature predictions. Methane concentration stopped rising in 2000 and has
hardly changed since.
Contrary to reports, the climate is doing just fine
- Global Sea-ice Extent A steady heartbeat for 30 years.
- Arctic Sea Ice Normal in winter, down a little in recent summers, but well within natural variability. Arctic Temperature Warmer in the 1930s and early 1940s than today. North-West Passage Amundsen sailed through it in 1903. It was also open in the mid-1940s
- Greenland Mean ice-sheet thickness grew by 2 in/yr from 1993-2003 (Johannessen et al., 2005).
- Polar Bears Population up fivefold since the 1940s.
- Antarctic Sea Ice Growing for 30 years. Antarctic Temperature Little change in 50 years. Antarctic Peninsula Ice-shelves about 1/55 the area of Texas have gone, but were not there in the Middle Ages.
- Sahara Desert Greening so fast that 300,000 km2 has become vegetated, allowing nomadic tribes to settle where they haveN’t been seen in living memory.
- Droughts and Floods Variable as usual.
- Hurricanes and OtherTropical Cyclones Lowest activity for 30 years.
- Sea Level Rising at 1 ft/century since satellite measurements began in 1993, compared with average 4 ft/century over the past 10,000 years. No sea-level rise in the last three years. UN High-end Forecast Slashed from 3ft to <2ft sea-level rise by 2100: UN best current estimate 1 ft 5 in. Bangladesh Has gained 70,000 km2 land area confounding UN sea-level forecasts. Pacific Atolls Not at risk: corals can grow towards the light at 10x the rate of sea-level rise, which is why so many atolls are just above sea level. Maldives No sea-level rise in 1250 years (Morner, 2004).
Ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility
Henry’s Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN’s own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models’ guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.
There is no economic case for costly measures to mitigate greenhouse-gas emissions.
To prevent 1 F of warming, 1-10 trillion tons of CO2 emission would have to be foregone - the equivalent of shutting down the entire US economy for 170-1700 years. The Waxman/Markey Climate Bill would cost $160 billion/year (White House estimate) and, even if implemented fully, would cool the climate by just 0.0005-0.005 F/yr. Secretary Chu’s grand plan to paint the world white would cool the climate 0.2 F at the very most, at a cost of $200 trillion.
Overtaxing & overregulating US fossil-fuel industries would increase the world carbon footprint
Not that the carbon footprint matters (see point 1). However, if the US kills its own fossil-fuel industry, US corporations and jobs will move to China and other third-world economies, where carbon emissions per unit of output are higher than in the US. China and India will not be cutting their emissions. (PDF)