By Adrienne Selko, Industry Week
The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) released an analysis of the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill (S. 2191), which causes the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) to comment that the bill has sobering economic and social costs, particularly the hike in future natural gas prices. “Natural gas prices are the linchpin for manufacturers in any proposed climate change solution,” said NAM CEO John Engler. “Manufacturers are the most natural gas intensive sector, and affordable natural gas is essential to the long-term competitiveness of manufacturing and the U.S. economy. According to the EIA, the price of natural gas would nearly double from $11 per MMBTU today to $19 per MMBTU under the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill. Clearly, the proposed legislation now before Congress runs the risk of doing more economic harm than environmental good,” he said.
Engler added that the NAM commissioned a joint study with the American Council for Capital Formation (ACCF) which found that the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill would “reduce U.S. gross domestic product by up to $210 billion per year by 2020—imposing more economic damage than the housing financial crisis each and every year-- including employment losses of up to 1.8 million jobs in 2020. With the nation on the brink of recession, federal climate change policies that would further slow the economy in return for indeterminate benefits are ill-advised.”
“We can not continue to propose increases in the price of natural gas while failing to expand domestic gas exploration and increased investment in nuclear energy technology,” Engler concluded. See story and more here.
By Jeff Poor, Business and Media Institute
Using tragedy to advance an agenda has been a strategy for many global warming activists, and it was just a matter of time before someone found a way to tie the recent Myanmar cyclone to global warming. Former Vice President Al Gore in an interview on NPR’s May 6 “Fresh Air” broadcast did just that. He was interviewed by “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross about the release of his book, “The Assault on Reason,” in paperback.
“And as we’re talking today, Terry, the death count in Myanmar from the cyclone that hit there yesterday has been rising from 15,000 to way on up there to much higher numbers now being speculated,” Gore said. “And last year a catastrophic storm from last fall hit Bangladesh. The year before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China - and we’re seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming.” Gore claimed global warming is forcing ocean temperatures to rise, which is causing storms, including cyclones and hurricanes, to intensify. Read more here.
Icecap Note: Someone needs to let Al know that NOAA’s global 3000 buoys have shown a slight cooling not warming since their deployment in 2003. That temperatures according to satellites (MSU UAH) and the Hadley Center agree with cooling back to at least 2002.
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Another inconvenient truth is that major devastating storms have been part of the history of the region even back in the Little Ice Age in 1584 when a major cyclone killed 200,000. After a series of killer cyclones in the globally cold 1960s (1963, 22,000; 1965, 57,000 (3 storms), in 1970, during the peak of the mid 20th century cool period, the famous Bhola cyclone killed 300,000-500,000. Another Bangladesh storm in 1991, killed 150,000. See the top ten killer storms in this story today here.
Finally someone needs to show Al the current sea surface temperature analysis chart for the globe where most of the Pacific and Indian Ocean including the waters near Myanmar are cooler than the long term normal.
See full size image here
Global Warming Politics
“The warmers are getting more and more like those traditional predictors of the end of the world who, when the event fails to happen on the due date, announce an error in their calculations and a new date."[Dr. John Brignell, Emeritus Engineering Professor at the University of Southampton, on Number Watch (May 1)]
Oh dear! The inevitable is happening. The ‘global warming’ trope is unravelling on a daily basis - scientifically, economically, and politically. The wheels are coming off the hysterical bandwagon, and it is not going to be a salutary sight watching the politicians and the media junkies jumping cart and trying to throw mud in everyone’s eyes.
Pathetic Sophistry. First, climate - as long predicted here - just won’t play ball. We now know that there has been no ‘global warming’ since 1998, a fact unpredicted by the models and despite an above-average rise in ‘greenhouse’ gas emissions. Moreover, new computer models show that the Earth’s temperature may stay roughly the same for at least a further decade through the workings of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) [for example, among many reports: ‘Next decade “may see no warming“‘, BBC Online Science/Nature News, May 1]. And, even the Solar Cycle 24 sunspots are refusing to flare up.
It is pathetic sophistry to claim, as some are wont, that ‘natural forces’ are having the temerity to “suppress” ‘global warming’. The fundamental point has ever been this: climate change is governed by hundreds of factors. The very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins just one politically-selected factor is about as bonkers as it gets. How on Earth have folk been conned into believing such hubris? It is so like The Prophecies by Nostradamus - the vagueness and lack of dating make it easy to quote ‘evidence’ selectively after every major dramatic event, and retrospectively claim them as a ‘hit’! Read more here.