Increasing Clouds and Thunderstorms For Climate Alarmists

What a month it’s been. Rejecting claims of looming cataclysm, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change issued Climate Change Reconsidered-II on September 17. This report by 50 experts documents actual planetary temperature, climate and weather in recent decades – and the ways alarmist scientists have manipulated data, graphs, computer models and weather events to make it appear that human influences are much greater than they actually are.

On September 20, the US Environmental Protection Agency proposed tough new standards for carbon dioxide emissions (EPA calls it “carbon pollution”) from future power plants – ignoring the fact that this plant-fertilizing gas is essential for virtually all life on Earth. The standards would effectively prevent construction of new coal-fired plants, which could not possibly comply. Older plants would gradually be closed down and, as the limits are ratcheted downward, even gas-fired power plants would be affected.

The September 26 release of the fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report marked sea changes for this politicized organization. Though it tried to obfuscate the fact, the panel finally admitted that its models don’t work very well and there has been no global warming for 16 years. IPCC chairman Pachauri nevertheless still insisted that there is “definitely an increase in our belief” that humans are “responsible for climate change,” and the group is now 95% confident it’s been right all along.

On October 15, the US Supreme Court agreed to review a lower court decision that said EPA could use its regulation of automobile emissions as a springboard to issue power plant and other stationary source emission standards. The court said it would not reconsider its 2007 decision that allowed EPA to treat carbon dioxide as a “pollutant” and “threat to human health and welfare.” However, litigants are certain to raise that central issue in their coming arguments before the court.

Meanwhile, Australia’s new Prime Minister says he intends to scrap his country’s carbon dioxide cap-tax-and-trade law. European families are reeling from energy price shocks, elderly people are dying because they cannot afford proper heating and nutrition, and EU industry leaders are warning that and “green” energy and other climate change policies threaten “a systemic industrial massacre,” as soaring electricity, transportation and natural gas prices make companies less and less competitive in international markets.

All in all, for purveyors of climate alarmism, the forecast calls for increasing cloudiness, severe thunderstorms and even hurricanes for months and years to come. That is hardly surprising.

The alarmists have systematically corrupted and assaulted genuine science. They have injected subjective values and ideological tests, while eliminating the most vital components of the scientific method: comprehensive, independent, empirical and transparent processes that, above all, require that hypotheses and models be confirmed by actual observations, or be rejected and replaced by new ones.

What began as an honest inquiry into the possible roles of humans and human industrial activities on Earth’s climate evolved into an assertion that modern society’s carbon dioxide or “greenhouse gas” emissions have somehow replaced the multitude of complex, interrelated natural factors that have driven global warming, cooling and other climatic changes throughout geologic history.

Claims of “manmade climate disaster” are now zealously defended by politicians, eco-activists, alarmist scientists, government agencies, and executives running many scientific societies in the United States, Canada and Europe – at all costs, to the exclusion of all possible alternative explanations, with the rejection of debate, and through vicious vilification of all challengers to alarmist orthodoxy. The ultimate goals today are keeping climate chaos money flowing in – and justifying demands that fossil fuels be eliminated, even for developing nations that desperately need those fuels to lift their citizens out of poverty.

Brazil, China and India alone are emitting 180 times more carbon dioxide – the “gas of life” – than can be attributed to energy from Alberta’s oil sands: 9 billion tons versus 50 million tons per year! Moreover, oil sands fuels simply replace other oil that would be used instead. However, even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reach 400 ppm (0.04% of all the gases in Earth’s atmosphere), average planetary temperatures have remained stable for 16 years. That’s not surprising.

The models assume all warming since the industrial revolution began is due to human carbon dioxide; exaggerate climate sensitivity to CO2 levels; program in temperature data that is contaminated by urban heat sources; and simplify or ignore vital climate influences like solar energy variations, cosmic ray fluxes, clouds, precipitation, ocean currents, and recurrent phenomena like El Niño and La Niña. It’s garbage in – garbage out. No wonder every IPCC climate model predicted that average global temperatures would be as much as 1.6 degrees F higher than they actually were over the past 22 years.

Actually, a modest temperature rise like that, especially coupled with more carbon dioxide, would be good for greening the Earth, spurring plant growth, boosting crop yields, and feeding more people more nutritiously. However, many solar scientists now believe the sun has entered a low activity or cooling phase that could continue for decades. If that is the case, instead of average global temperatures increasing, they could well decrease a few degrees, which would adversely affect forests, grasslands, growing seasons and the extent of arable acreage. Thankfully, that has not happened so far.

However, several “cold weather extremes” have occurred in recent years over Europe, northern India, and parts of North and South America. Four of the five snowiest northern hemisphere winters in the last half century have occurred since 2008, closing down villages and killing wildlife, farm animals and people. Antarctic ice is at a record high. Arctic sea ice is back to normal, after the coldest summer in decades.

However, these heavy snows – along with the highly publicized 2010 Russian summer heat wave, severe floods in Pakistan that same summer, and the Midwestern United States 2012 summer heat wave – were all part of natural climate variability, as various books and research papers have documented.

Other alarmist predictions have proven equally far-fetched. Whereas climate chaos false prophets like Rajendra Pachauri, Al Gore and David Suzuki predicted steadily worsening “extreme weather” events, it has been eight years since a Category 3 hurricane hit the United States: Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma, in 2005. That is the most years since the 1860s with no major hurricane making landfall. Tornado frequency is the lowest on record. Droughts are shorter and less extreme than during the Dust Bowl and 1950s.

Sea levels continue to rise at a meager half-foot per century – which translates into a maximum possible increase just 25 mm or one inch by 2025. Such a modest rise in sea level poses no threat whatsoever to humanity or coastal communities. It’s also a far cry from the 1-2 feet by 2100 that the IPCC predicted in 2007; the nearly 1-3 feet that its 2013 “scientific report” predicts just for 2081-2100; or the ridiculous 20 feet of sea level rise by 2100 that media-hungry climate charlatan James Hansen has forecast.

2013 has brought the fewest US forest fires in a decade, and ranks second in the fewest acres burned – although such conflagrations are actually due to poor forest management and fire suppression policies.

In short, our Earth’s climate may well changing, as it has repeatedly throughout history. But the changes are natural, and they are thus far hardly catastrophic – nothing like the wooly mammoth ice ages or Little Ice Age, and little different from any of the 20th century. Moreover, the changes are natural in origin. They are not due to humans, and they are not occurring in ways the alarmists and their models predicted

We truly need hydrocarbon energy: to lift more people out of poverty, maintain our living standards, and ensure the wealth and technology to adapt to any climate changes that nature may visit upon us (with or without some contribution from human carbon dioxide). Climate alarmism undermines all of this.

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The Outlook for Modeling Clouds (Adequately) ... is Still Cloudy

Getting clouds right is an absolute linchpin of global warming theory.  Unless clouds warm us up, the whole theory falls flat

Discussing:  Lauer, A. and Hamilton, K. 2013. "Simulating clouds with global climate models: A comparison of CMIP5 results with CMIP3 and satellite data". Journal of Climate 26: 3823-3845.

In a revealing paper published in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate, Lauer and Hamilton (2013) report that numerous previous studies from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 3 (CMIP3) showed quite large biases in the simulated cloud climatology affecting all GCMs (Global Climate Models), as well as "a remarkable degree of variation among the models that represented the state of the art circa 2005." So what's the case today? The two researchers provide an update by describing the progress that has been made in recent years by comparing mean cloud properties, interannual variability, and the climatological seasonal cycle from the CMIP5 models with results from comparable CMIP3 experiments, as well as with actual satellite observations.

After conducting their several analyses, Lauer and Hamilton concluded that "the simulated cloud climate feedbacks activated in global warming projections differ enormously among state-of-the-art models," informing us that "this large degree of disagreement has been a constant feature documented for successive generations of GCMs from the time of the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment through the CMIP3 generation models used in the fourth IPCC assessment." And they add that "even the model-simulated cloud climatologies for present-day conditions are known to depart significantly from observations and, once again, the variation among models is quite remarkable (e.g., Weare, 2004; Zhang et al., 2005; Waliser et al., 2007, 2009; Lauer et al., 2010; Chen et al., 2011)."

As for some other specifics, the two researchers determined that (1) "long-term mean vertically integrated cloud fields have quite significant deficiencies in all the CMIP5 model simulations," that (2) "both the CMIP5 and CMIP3 models display a clear bias in simulating too high LWP [liquid water path] in mid-latitudes," that (3) "this bias is not reduced in the CMIP5 models," that (4) there have been "little to no changes in the skill of reproducing the observed LWP and CA [cloud amount]," that (5) "inter-model differences are still large in the CMIP5 simulations," and that (6) "there is very little to no improvement apparent in the tropical and subtropical regions in CMIP5."

In closing, Lauer and Hamilton indicate there is "only very modest improvement in the simulated cloud climatology in CMIP5 compared with CMIP3," and they sadly state that even this slightest of improvements "is mainly a result of careful model tuning rather than an accurate fundamental representation of cloud processes in the models."

So, the outlook for adequately modeling clouds and cloud processes, after all these years of trying, must still be characterized as cloudy.

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IPCC exaggerates risks

Joseph L. Bast

Environmentalists hoped the latest study from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would finally end the increasingly acrimonious debate over the causes and consequences of climate change. It has had the opposite effect.

MIT physicist Richard Lindzen called the IPCC report "hilarious incoherence." British historian Rupert Darwall labeled it "nonsense" and "the manipulation of science for political ends." Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology says the IPCC suffers from "paradigm paralysis" and should be "put down."

The most precise criticism of the IPCC's report came from the editors of Nature, one of the world's most distinguished science journals: "Scientists cannot say with any certainty what rate of warming might be expected, or what effects humanity might want to prepare for, hedge against or avoid at all costs."

Despite decades of research funded by taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars, we are no more certain about the impact of man-made greenhouse gases than we were in 1990, or even in 1979 when the National Academy of Sciences estimated the effect of a doubling of carbon dioxide to be "near 3 degrees C with a probable error of plus or minus 1.5 degrees C."

The lower end of that range, which is where the best research on the likely sensitivity of climate to carbon dioxide lands, is well within the bounds of natural variability.

Significantly, the IPCC has backed down from its previous forecasts of increases in droughts and hurricanes. And it admits, but does not explain, why no warming has occurred for the past 15 years.

Due to its charter and sheer bureaucratic momentum, the IPCC is compelled to claim it is more confident than ever in its alarmist predictions, even as real-world evidence falsifies them at every turn. Policymakers and the public have no reason to believe this discredited oracle.

It's time to start listening to other voices in the debate, such as the 50-some scientists who make up the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

According to its latest report, "the IPCC has exaggerated the amount of warming likely to occur if the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide were to double, and such warming as occurs is likely to be modest and cause no net harm to the global environment or to human well-being."

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Reindeer Reproduction in a Warming World: Will it be Helped or Hindered by the Changing Climate?

This study appears to be a response to another study that I debunked on 2nd.

Reference
Tveraa, T., Stien, A., Bardsen, B.-J. and Fauchald, P. 2013. "Population densities, vegetation green-up, and plant productivity: Impacts on reproductive success and juvenile body mass in reindeer". PLoS ONE 8: 10.1371/journal.pone.0056450.

Introducing their work, Tveraa et al. (2013) write that "for caribou in Greenland earlier springs have been suggested to result in a lower reproductive success," based on the assumption that "Rangifer (caribou/reindeer) might be unable to adjust their timing of reproduction to the earlier surge of high quality food," which potential failure could "cause a mismatch between optimal forage conditions and the timing of reproduction." And, therefore, they state that "concerns have been raised regarding the future viability of Rangifer in Arctic and sub-Arctic tundra ecosystems."

In a study designed to further explore this unsettled situation, Tveraa et al. "analyzed a 10-year dataset of satellite derived measures of vegetation green-up, population densities, calf body masses and female reproductive success in 19 reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) populations in Northern Norway." Based on their analysis, the four Norwegian researchers report that "an early onset of spring and high peak plant productivity had positive effects on calf autumn body masses and female reproductive success," and that "the quantity of food available, as determined by the onset of vegetation green-up and plant productivity over the summer, were the main drivers of body mass growth and reproductive success."

Hence, they found no evidence for a negative effect of the speed of spring green-up, nor did they detect "a negative mismatch between early springs and subsequent recruitment." As such, Tveraa et al. very simply concluded that the "effects of global warming on plant productivity and onset of spring are likely to positively affect sub-Arctic reindeer."

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Mini-nukes’ better for Britain than monster wind farms

Foreign-owned firms are building expensive turbines offshore but there is a far more efficient alternative

As the shambles of Britain’s energy policy and soaring bills continues to make shock headlines, many in the south-west of England are staring in angry amazement at plans by foreign-owned firms to build two of the largest offshore wind farms in the world just off their coastlines. The German power company RWE hopes to spend £4 billion on its “Atlantic Array”, covering 125 square miles of sea between Devon and South Wales with 240 vast 5MW turbines, more than 600ft high. Owing to the wind’s intermittency, these will generate, on average, just 400MW of electricity – but will earn RWE £525 million a year, of which £350 million will be from subsidies we all pay through our electricity bills.

Meanwhile, dominating the views from Dorset’s Jurassic Coast, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, the £3.6 billion “Navitus Bay” scheme, proposed by the French state-owned firm EDF and a Dutch partner, will cover 76 square miles of sea with 218 5MW turbines generating an average of 350MW. It will be worth £450 million a year to its owners, £270 million of it in subsidies. In addition, locals are horrified to learn that to connect these turbines to the grid will involve 22 miles of cabling, in a trench up to 140ft wide across the New Forest and Dorset.

The combined contribution of these two gigantic wind farms, at a capital cost of £7.6 billion and earning subsidies of £620 million a year, will average 750MW – less than that of the single unsubsidised gas-fired power station recently built in Plymouth at a capital cost of £1 billion.

At the same time, George Osborne, the Chancellor, boasts of his hope that China will join EDF in financing a giant £14 billion nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset, to generate 3,200MW of much more reliable CO2-free electricity –but at such colossal cost that its owners will be allowed to charge users almost double the £50 per megawatt-hour paid for power from gas or coal.

As we look on in mounting horror at the incredible crisis being created by our government’s insanely skewed “green” energy policies, it is time for a new ingredient to be inserted into the debate: the possibility of producing almost unlimited quantities of reliable, CO2-free electricity very much cheaper than that from those absurdly inefficient wind farms.

Two American firms, backed by the US Department of Energy, are now well advanced in developing factory-built “mini-nuclear power plants”, wholly safe and offering a mouthwatering range of advantages over their competitors. The mPower company in North Carolina is developing a two-reactor nuclear power station covering just 40 acres, but capable of generating 360MW round the clock: more than would be produced by the Navitus Bay wind farm at less than two-thirds of the price, and occupying only one 1,200th of the same area. These could be installed on old power station sites next to the grid, and the company tells me that they should be commercially available within nine or 10 years, much sooner than that monster at Hinkley Point.

A Colorado-based firm, Gen4 Energy (formerly Hyperion), is using Los Alamos technology to develop an even smaller nuclear generator, to produce 70MW of heat, to include 25MW of electricity. If we want efficient CO2-free electricity at competitive prices, this is where we should be looking. And anyone worried about the safety of siting these mini-reactors conveniently near to cities should remember that for 50 years, Rolls-Royce has been running a small nuclear reactor right next to Derby County football ground. As yet, not a single death has been reported.

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Heartland Institute Experts Respond to Supreme Court Acceptance of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Case

The U.S. Supreme Court today agreed to scrutinize a narrow aspect of the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources of pollution, including power plants and factories. The Court declined to hear an appeal that challenged EPA’s endangerment finding on carbon dioxide, which treats the gas as a harmful pollutant.

The Heartland Institute has submitted several comments and briefs in response to rulings by the Environmental Protection Agency, including: “Comments in response to EPA’s ANPR entitled Regulating Greenhouse Gas Emissions Under the Clean Air Act” in 2008; an amicus brief in support of the Deseret Power Electric Cooperative in 2008; “Comments in Response to Proposed Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases” in 2009; and “Comments to EPA (MACT): Standards of Performance for Greenhouse Gas Emissions for New Stationary Sources: Electric Utility Generating Units” in 2012.

The following statements from experts in environment policy and legal affairs, and policy advisors at The Heartland Institute – a free-market think tank – may be used for attribution. For more comments, refer to the contact information below. To book a Heartland guest on your program, please contact Director of Communications Jim Lakely at jlakely@heartland.org and 312/377-4000 or (cell) 312/731-9364.

The Heartland Institute in September published Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science, an examination of peer-reviewed science by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). Digital copies of the 1,000-page report and 20-page Summary for Policy Makers is available at ClimateChangeReconsidered.org.

The statements:

* “The Supreme Court’s decision to reject an appeal of its 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA is seriously bad news. For energy consumers – and that is all of us – it means the court will stand by and do nothing while the Obama Administration wages war on fossil fuels. That war already has raised energy costs unnecessarily and threatens to cause electrical rates to ‘skyrocket’ (in then-candidate Barack Obama’s own words). For citizens concerned about the integrity of the Constitution – and that should be all of us – the court gave a free pass to a rogue agency of government that threatens our most basic economic liberties. And for those aware of the collapse of support in the science community for the theory of man-made global warming, the court let stand a decision that accepted without question some of the worst junk science ever to be allowed to be introduced in a courtroom.

“The court missed an opportunity to examine the underlying science of the man-made global warming hypothesis. As the recent release of the report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) makes clear, there is no scientific basis for EPA’s ruling because there is no likely threat to human health and well-being. The court could have ‘looked under the hood’ at the science behind the global warming movement and made its own informed decision. Now it is up to Congress to use its ‘power of the purse’ to rein in the EPA.”

Joseph Bast
President
The Heartland Institute
jbast@heartland.org
312/377-4000

* “The justices did an injustice to the American people by not hearing challenges to the seriously flawed endangerment finding. The EPA’s own Office of Inspector General (OIG), an independent auditing office within the agency, concluded that EPA did not follow all the peer review procedures it was supposed to follow in developing the scientific document supporting its endangerment finding.

“In its report, ‘Procedural Review of EPA’s Greenhouse Gases Endangerment Finding Data Quality Processes,’ the Inspector General concluded that the process of developing EPA’s endangerment finding did not comply fully with applicable peer review requirements. The Inspector General determined the 2009 finding needed to follow the procedures for peer review of a ‘highly influential scientific assessment’ as defined by the Information Quality Act. The Inspector General’s office found the agency failed to release publicly the results of its peer review process and the office drew issue with the fact that one of the peer reviewers was an EPA staff member.”

Joseph D’Aleo
Executive Director, Icecap.us
Policy Advisor, Environment Policy
The Heartland Institute
JDaleo6331@aol.com
312/377-4000

* “The U.S. Supreme Court has made a colossal mistake by concluding that they won’t review the EPA’s misguided decision that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions endanger public health and the planet. Since CO2 is not a pollutant, the only conceivable reason to regulate emissions would be if they were causing dangerous climate change or ocean ‘acidification.’ But the empirical evidence collected across the world and assessed by thousands of scientists whose research is cited by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate change shows clearly that neither of these fears are even remotely likely.”

Tom Harris
Executive Director
International Climate Science Coalition
Policy Advisor, Energy and Environment
The Heartland Institute
tom.harris@climatescienceinternational.net
312/377-4000

* “Today’s Supreme Court decision to decline hearing the appeal that challenged EPA’s endangerment finding on carbon dioxide, which treats the gas as a harmful pollutant, is further confirmation of the inability of the majority of justices to see either the forest or the trees.”

David Littmann
Senior Economist
Mackinac Center for Public Policy
author@mackinac.org
989/631-0900

* “This is yet another example of why the evolved government fails to represent the best interests of the country. A nine-member oligarchy was never meant to rule us. Who gave the Supreme Court the right to make decisions reversible only unto itself? CO2 as a Supreme-Court-defined ‘evil’ leads to far-ranging detrimental EPA results. CO2 needs to be removed from the reeducation list and returned to its rightful status as a basic good of nature. We should not have to beg the Imperial Nine to do what logic and necessity require.”

Christopher Garbacz
Director of Economics and Planning Division
Mississippi Public Utilities Staff
c.garbacz@psc.state.ms.us
312/377-4000

* “However encouraging it may superficially appear from the standpoint of constitutional government and separation of powers, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to determine whether the EPA is acting lawfully in setting up permit requirements for stationary sources of pollution is too little, too late.

“Although wisely not injecting itself into whether carbon emissions threaten public health and contribute to climate change, the court’s refusal to revisit its 2007 decision ordering the EPA to consider regulating greenhouse-gas emissions reflects a court that remains in too many ways political and not jurisprudential. If the Affordable Care Act case is any indication, then look for a further extension come June of what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has labeled in its briefs ‘the costliest, farthest-reaching and most intrusive regulatory apparatus in the history of the American administrative state.’ “

David L. Applegate
Policy Advisor, Legal Affairs
The Heartland Institute
media@heartland.org
312/377-4000

* “We thought this case appropriately presented to the Supreme Court the broad and crucial question of EPA’s power to make an endangerment finding on carbon dioxide, which treats a harmless natural byproduct of human respiration as a dangerous pollutant. Obviously, the court did not agree. We appreciate the court taking up the narrower question of EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources of pollution, including power plants and factories, and we look forward to its judgment on that issue. Meanwhile, we will search for a case that appropriately presents the bigger question for court consideration in its time.”

Chris Robling
Policy Advisor, Legal Affairs
The Heartland Institute
media@heartland.org
312/377-4000

* “The decision not to review the endangerment finding is particularly disappointing in light of the overwhelming body of observational evidence that computer climate models that are the sole basis of fears of dangerous global warming vastly exaggerate the warming effect of added carbon dioxide. This action by the court could mean that Congress will have to legislate to strip EPA of the authority it arrogated to itself when it presumed to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act.”

E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D.
Founder and National Spokesman
Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
calvin@cornwallalliance.org
703/569-4653

* “In 30 years, EPA hasn’t issued a rule with supporting evidence that it did not pay for, or with evidence that was not contradicted by evidence EPA did not pay for. No objective evidence for a rule-making, no more EPA rule-makings. It is that simple.”

Brian G Valentine, D Engr
General Engineer
Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy
U.S. Dept of Energy
brian.valentine@ee.doe.gov
202/586-9741

* “There is simply no hiding the devastation this decision causes. The simple refutation of the EPA is there for any sane person to see. Yet the Supreme Court, much like with Obamacare, chose to sit on the side and allow the destruction of the American Dream to proceed – even though its based on lies.

“Given what we see across the board today, this is par for the course. There is a force that hides truth – and by doing so, allows the light of America to dim each day. This decision only affirms that.”

Joe Bastardi
Chief Forecaster
Weatherbell.com
312/377-4000
Bastardi@weatherbell.com

* “This case reminds me of the asbestos scandal, as well as the chlorofluorocarbon vs. the ozone layer misery. Now we are fighting this new hype: the asserted ‘climate change’ by heat-trapping ‘greenhouse gases,’ especially carbon dioxide. I started opposing this hype publicly in 1989.

“CO2 is the ‘gas of life.’ Without CO2 life on this planet would have big problems. Carbon isotopes show that just some 4 percent of the atmospheric CO2 comes from man’s burning of fossil fuel. Hence the asserted rise in atmospheric CO2 is not mainly due to man, but caused by nature. This is enough information to stop this hype – if anyone cares to listen.”

Tom Segalstad
Resource and Environmental Geology
University of Oslo, Norway
312/377-4000
media@heartland.org

* “I am not much encouraged by the fact that the Supreme Court is going to revisit the question of whether carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions must be reduced to save the Earth from global warming. The issue before the court will be whether the Environmental Protection Agency was justified in setting new permit requirements for stationary sources such as power plants and factories.

“The court has already ruled that CO2 – whose importance to all life on Earth is comparable to oxygen – is a ‘pollutant,’ a conclusion that defies logic and the known science that CO2 plays no role whatever regarding the Earth’s climate. It ignores the fact that, while levels of CO2 have risen, the Earth has not warmed for the past fifteen years or more. There is no global warming. And it ignores the fact that a single volcano eruption puts more CO2 into the atmosphere than all the power plants in the USA could in a year’s time.

“It ignores, finally, that every single human being on Earth exhales approximately six pounds of CO2 every day and that imposing emissions limits on the USA ignores all the CO2 emissions from other nations worldwide. The Court has already demonstrated its ignorance regarding the simple science involved, but it does have a chance again to reverse seriously damaging the economy. Let’s hope they take it!”

Alan Caruba
Founder, The National Anxiety Center
Policy Advisor, The Heartland Institute
acaruba@aol.com
312/377-4000

SOURCE

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