Things Warmists don't want to know

The more I study climate change economics, the more astounded I become at the chasm between reality and what has been sold to the American public. I give another example in my IER analysis of a recent book review by William Nordhaus. Here’s an excerpt:

What is fascinating is that if you go to the actual book review and read the full discussion, you will see that people like Weitzman and Nordhaus are discussing whether people should even be conducting cursory research into geoengineering options.

Why in the world would interventionists who think the fate of humanity hangs in the balance not want scientists to broaden the options at our grandchildren’s disposal? What they fear is that if the public realizes there are techniques “on the shelf” that could very quickly and cheaply bring down global temperatures, then it would be hard to get humanity whipped up into a frenzy in spending trillions of dollars to merely reduce the probability of a future unlikely “fat tail” catastrophe.

Remember, the cutting-edge case for aggressive intervention against emissions has stopped trying to claim that a high carbon tax will likely produce large net benefits….

So already the aggressive interventionists have to make the “fat tail” argument of Weitzman and others—they have to say a disaster might occur if humans keep pumping lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But then in that case, it becomes very relevant to know that one of the leading geoengineering proposals would cost $250 million total to limit Earth’s warming. That’s less than Al Gore’s foundation is spending to “raise awareness” on the issue of climate change.

In contrast, if governments around the world implemented Nordhaus’ suggested “optimal carbon tax,” then his own model (in the 2008 calibration which I study here) shows that it would impose economic costs on the world of $2.2 trillion (see Table 4 at the link) in present-value terms.

Does anyone like that deal? Spending $2.2 trillion (in the form of forfeited conventional economic growth) merely to reduce the probability of catastrophe—because after all, we still might have a disaster even with a carbon tax—rather than waiting a bit longer to get more information, knowing that we’ve got the ability to indefinitely postpone global warming for a total cost of $250 million?

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Paper finds 'pronounced influence of solar activity on global climatic processes'

A paper published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology finds "a pronounced influence of solar activity on global climatic processes" including in "Asia, Europe, North and South America, Australia, and the Arctic and Antarctica."

The authors find evidence from spectral and wavelet analysis of influence of the de Vries (∼ 200-year) solar cycle on climate variation in Central Asia, and that:

"Analysis has shown that climate response to the long-term global solar forcing has a regional character. An appreciable delay in the climate response to the solar signal can occur (up to 150 years). In addition, the sign of the climate response can differ from the solar signal sign. The climate response to long-term solar activity variations (from 10s to 1000s years) manifests itself in different climatic parameters, such as temperature, precipitation and atmospheric and oceanic circulation. The climate response to the de Vries cycle has been found to occur not only during the last millennia but also in earlier epochs, up to hundreds of millions years ago."

The influence of the de Vries (∼ 200-year) solar cycle on climate variations: Results from the Central Asian Mountains and their global link

O.M. Raspopova et al.

Abstract

Long-term climatic changes related to solar forcing were examined using millennium-scale palaeoclimatic reconstructions from the Central Asian mountain region, i.e. summer temperature records for the Tien Shan mountains and precipitation records for the Tibetan Plateau. The reconstructions were based on juniper tree-ring width records, i.e. Juniperus turkestanica for the Tien Shan and Sabina przewalskii for the Tibetan Plateau. The data were processed using spectral and wavelet analysis and filtered in the frequency range related to major solar activity periodicities. The results obtained for various tree-ring chronologies indicate palaeoclimatic oscillations in the range of the de Vries (∼ 210-year) solar cycles through the last millennium.
The quasi-200-year variations revealed in the palaeoclimatic reconstructions correlate well (R2 = 0.58–0.94) with solar activity variations (Δ14C variations). The quasi-200-year climatic variations have also been detected in climate-linked processes in Asia, Europe, North and South America, Australia, and the Arctic and Antarctica. The results obtained point to a pronounced influence of solar activity on global climatic processes.
Analysis has shown that climate response to the long-term global solar forcing has a regional character. An appreciable delay in the climate response to the solar signal can occur (up to 150 years). In addition, the sign of the climate response can differ from the solar signal sign. The climate response to long-term solar activity variations (from 10s to 1000s years) manifests itself in different climatic parameters, such as temperature, precipitation and atmospheric and oceanic circulation. The climate response to the de Vries cycle has been found to occur not only during the last millennia but also in earlier epochs, up to hundreds of millions years ago.

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The Greenie crookedness never stops

A US environmental group has written to Lancashire County Council urging it to refuse permission to allow test drilling for fracking.

The letter, signed by 850 elected officials in New York State, comes days before the council decides whether to approve test drilling at two locations….

Elected Officials to Protect New York – made up of current and former politicians – has written to Lancashire’s councillors asking them to note the findings of a two-year study by New York State Department of Public Health.

In fact, the letter was not signed by “850 elected officials”, but just 10, not all of whom are elected either.

Many are no more than what we would call parish councillors. For instance, Cooperstown boasts an impressive population of just 1852, yet offers us two trustees to sign.

They have written the letter on behalf of a ragtag bunch of anti fracking lobbyists, called “Elected Officials to Protect New York”. They claim to have 850 members, though the website offers no confirmation or list to back this up.

Apparently, the other 840, if they exist, could not be bothered to sign the letter.

New York state has a population of over 19 million, so a collection of even 850 town and parish councillors is barely scratching the surface.

There is also evidence that some of these are not quite the “non-partisan” grouping they claim to be.

For instance, we find that Susan Zimet was out protesting in an Occupy Rally in 2012.

The BBC, of course, would like you to believe that hundreds of top rank New York politicians from all parties feel it their duty to warn us of t

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Professor Murry Salby: CO2, whether man-made or not, does not 'drive' the climate system

Author of the seminal book on climate: "Physics of the Atmosphere & Climate," Professor Murry Salby is without doubt one of the best Climate Scientists on the planet.  In a lecture in London on the 17th March, 2015, he reveals new work which shows that:

* The climate sensitivity is below 0.2c - confirmed by 3 independent methods.

* Most of the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 is not anthropogenic.

* CO2 movements and concentrations are largely determined by nature, not man; consequently, any cuts we make to our CO2 emissions will not have the desired effect, and are a costly waste of time.

* CO2, whether man-made or not, does not 'drive' the climate system.Professor Murry Salby has been vilified by enviro-alarmists and the left for his scientific results. Salby was disenfranchised and exiled from academia in Australia for daring to speak such “sacrilege.”

In a case similar to many others we have seen in Australia, and across the west, he was the subject of University hate and was finally sacked while he was on a lecture tour in Europe; his employer, Macquarie University of NSW, sacking him from his position as Professor of Climate Science. The University board cancelled his return ticket home, stranding him in Paris. All Salby's work was confiscated and has still not been returned to him.

The pursuit of genuine Science in the field of climate - and free speech -- are dead in most Western Universities

Other cases where top scientists were vilified and sacked or demoted by a University for the results of their science or for their views on the climate include: Bob Carter, Lennart Bengtsson, David Legates, George Taylor, Caleb Rossiter, Bjorn Lomborg, Henk Tennekes, Askel Winn-Nielsen, Alfonso Sutera, Anonio Speranza and scores of others.

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Global warming attributed to CO2 emissions a hoax

Bill Sandt replies to Warmist believers in his local paper

Global warming is a hoax particularly when attributed to CO2 emissions and the goals of those advocating an anti-fossil fuel agenda are totally ineffective in reducing alleged global warming. If anything they are destructive of the environment and they most certainly hurt our economy! The president’s assertions on Earth Day of global warming and its effects are false and misleading! There has been no global warming in the last 17 years despite increases in CO2 concentrations and even the United Nations environmental experts had to admit that there was no relation between any global warming and severe weather occurrences.

I read with interest a recent article by Jim Crissman, leader of the Midland group of the Citizens Climate Lobby, in your Sunday, March 1, edition and some of the later letters published In your paper on global warming. Mr. Crissman asserts that there are 10,000 papers published every year supporting the concept of global warming as being caused by human activity, i.e., carbon dioxide emission. But what he fails to mention is that there have been an increasing number of statements by environmental scientists that either outright deny the existence of global warming or at least state it to be premature (climatedepot.com).

And it is easy to see why. Average global temperatures have been at about 0.5 to 0.60 C above the average global temperatures for the last century for at least the last seventeen years despite increasing concentrations of CO2. Most recent data indicate that the trend is continuing. In other words, there has been no significant global warming in this century. Whatever slight increases there have been have been no larger than average increases in temperatures over the last hundred years and are less than the experimental error inherent in such data. This trend has occurred despite increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. If you don’t believe me, just Google global temperature charts. When doing so disregard those generated by clearly biased organizations such as the EPA and rely more on those of scientific organizations such as NASA.

Attached is one that clearly shows the lack of global warming (Chart 1). Funny thing about most charts used by global warming advocates, i.e., warmists, is that they stop the charts at the year 2000 when it became obvious that the warming predictions were not holding true.

Most recently a hue and cry has been raised about the melting ice in West Antarctica as proof of global warming and the rise of the oceans as a result of that. But what is conveniently ignored is the record growth and size of sea ice in the rest of Antarctica, as measured by NASA, which exceeds by far the amount of ice melted. Warmists point to record high temperatures in various places but what about the record low temperatures we experienced this last winter? Clearly neither can be attributed to CO2.

The assertion by the president and others in his administration that increases in CO2 concentration are responsible for increased severe weather disturbances, such as tornadoes, can similarly be shown to be false. Even one of the greatest apostles of global warming, the UN, had to admit that weather disasters could not be attributed to changes in CO2 concentrations. ( 2012 Report on Extreme Weather Events by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

I wonder how many of the thousands of scientists alleged to support global warming are beholden to governments having ulterior motives in pushing global warming, none probably as extreme as our own federal government, which threatens to withhold FEMA funds to governors who do not agree with global warming. This is not surprising considering we have a president who blames global warming, i.e. CO2 emissions, for the asthma of his daughter.

I wonder how many of these thousands of the global warming scientists developed and/or supported the warming model published in 1995 by the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading agency for global warming, that predicted a rise of 2.780 C for the century and a rise of 0.70 C for the decade. This has been demonstrated to be absolutely wrong (see attached Chart 2) even though CO2 concentrations have continued to increase. Even the IPCC had to admit that they were wrong and modified its model in 2005 to show a significantly lower 10-year temperature rise of 0.170 C for the decade and a 1.670 C rise for the century.

Guess what? Even that modified model is way off base! The actual temperature rise has been 0.030 C or less in the last 10 years amounting at most to a 0.750 C rise for the century. So much for the reliability of the publications of 10,000 global warming scientists.

Not surprisingly, the president and his favorite agency, the EPA, continue to base their policies on the original erroneous predictions of these models. Thus Instead of being thankful to the fossil fuel technology and industry which now allows him to boast of accomplishing the current economic recovery, he is trying to throttle that industry. The most recent attempt by the Obama administration has been to force the NOAA to do something about the ever increasing evidence of lack of global warming. So after acknowledging the absence of global warming in the last 17 years but explaining it as a pause, the NOAA has “recalculated” its data and lo and behold discovered that there was global warming throughout that period. Critics claim that this was done by fudging and disregarding valid data.

Most recently, the president pledged arbitrarily and unilaterally to commit this country to a reduction in CO2 emissions of more than 25 percent by 2025 and more than 80 percent by 2050 without specific details on how this is to be accomplished. It is clear, however, given his anti-fossil fuel policies that he will in large measure force the utility industry to provide that reduction in CO2 emissions. The result will be tremendous cost increases in energy generation, unreliable energy supplies and energy rationing, all of which will be passed long to the consumer, you and me.

What is most upsetting is that essentially nothing will be accomplished by this program in so far as asserted global warming is concerned. In testimony before Congress, climate scientist Judith Curry stated that the president’s pledge is estimated to result in a reduction of about 0.030 C, hardly a drop in the bucket. Also administration officials in testimony before Congress indicated that the president’s clean power plan would reduce any sea level increase by less than half the thickness of a dime. The plan advocated to compensate the public for the increased cost in energy as a result of the anti-fossil fuel policies of the administration is a carbon tax on the use of fossil fuels which undoubtedly will be passed on to the consumer through increased prices in energy, however with subsidies for the “poor.” The president probably loves the idea since it is nothing more than another entitlement program where those who work for a living subsidize those who do not.

The anti-fossil fuel agenda proposed by warmists is also disastrous to the environment and human health as well. In particular using ethanol as an automotive fuel reduces little, if anything, in CO2 emissions, when considered from an overall production, and removes acreage that could be used for the production of edible crops to alleviate hunger and starvation. In Brazil, the use of ethanol is decimating the Amazon jungle, an environmental disaster. Preventing cheap fossil fuels to be used in Africa will force the continued use of wood fires for cooking in the simple homes prevalent there, that lack ventilation and cause continued disease and death as a result of smoke inhalation. Obviously the use of such wood will cause further deforestation.

What is most disturbing in this issue of climate change is the intolerance of those who believe in it against those who do not agree, not unlike religious extremism. Warming activists will not enter into any meaningful debate on the subject but try suppress the efforts of any scientist disagreeing with global warming. They maintain that debate is over and they have been saying this since about 2000 when they realized that they could no longer support their claim of global warming from CO2. They have gone so far as to lobby governments to stop funding such scientists, to prevent the publication of any paper contrary to their warming beliefs and ostracize them at meetings. (See climatedepot.com) If I am wrong on these points I raised I suggest we have a televised debate on these issues involving both scientists who believe in global warming as a result of CO2 emissions and those who do not.

One of the worst recent decisions of the Supreme Court has been to define CO2 as a pollutant. The fact is that life could not exist without it. Its called a greenhouse gas because it is used in greenhouses to grow bigger, healthier plants faster. Clearly higher CO2 concentrations are beneficial in agriculture to result in better and bigger crops thus alleviating hunger and starvation. If the Supreme Court knew its basic biology for a minimum they should have required the government to define the point at which CO2 turns from a life giving substance into a pollutant.

Stop following the pied piper of global warming, his tune is false and he will lead us into an economic abyss.

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Papal Nonsense

Pope Francis’ much ballyhooed encyclical on the environment is, unfortunately, riddled with error, unsound science and unwarranted visions of an imminent apocalypse generated to a large extent by free market economics. Like so much information spread by radical environmentalists, the encyclical makes numerous assertions that are either false or dubious, at best. Let’s examine some of the more egregious flaws in the encyclical:

1) The encyclical states, “A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system.” It’s true that there’s a consensus that the earth warmed about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century or so, but whether this is “disturbing” – or even unusual – is a matter of great uncertainty, even among participants in the UN’s alarmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In April, Philip Lloyd, who has served as an IPCC Lead Author, published a peer-reviewed paper that found that over the past 8,000 years temperature has varied an average of 1.7°F.

2) Moreover, most global warming scientists, even avid believers, now agree that global warming has stalled since about 1988. Even the IPCC admitted in its latest report the existence of what it called a “hiatus in GMST [global mean surface temperature] trend during the past 15 years” – although it buried this admission on page 769 of the report. Climate scientist Hans von Storch, Director of the Institute for Coastal Research at Germany’s Helmholtz Research Centre, agrees. He said in 2013, “according to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45°F) over the past 10 years. That hasn’t happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11°F) — a value very close to zero.” (Emphasis added)

3) Despite what the encyclical says, the best information that science has to offer today reveals that the earth has actually warmed far less than the models used by alarmists to predict catastrophe. For example, James Hansen of NASA, a leading propagandist for the climate change enthusiasts, kicked off the global warming scare in 1988 with scary testimony before Congress and an even scarier climate model that forecast temperature by 2014 a scary 2.34°F warmer than the 1951-1980 average. Now we know, thanks to NASA itself, that the actual temperature increased only about half as much as Hansen’s model projected – even though CO2 emissions were actually higher than in his projection. Observations suggest that the a doubling of atmospheric CO2 might lead to a relatively mild warming closer to the original 3.6°F projected by Manabe and Weatherald in 1967 than to Hansen’s frightening 1988 prediction of up to 9°F.

4) Despite the Pope’s suggestion that recent decades have seen “an increase of extreme weather events” and “melting in the polar ice caps,” the U.S., where records are good, has seen no significant increase whatsoever, for instance, in hurricanes or tornadoes, nor has the world seen any significant decrease in global sea ice. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concludes “there has been little trend in the frequency of the stronger tornadoes over the past 55 years.” Similarly, NOAA data record that during 1911-1960, the U.S. averaged 7.8 major hurricanes per decade, declining to 5.2 major hurricanes per decade during 1961-2010.  Likewise, NASA satellite data show global sea ice today at about the same level as when satellites started monitoring it in 1979.

5) The encyclical’s claim of a “very solid scientific consensus” that recent warming is “disturbing” is also false. While there is broad agreement that we have seen warming, and that some portion of this warming is attributable to human activities, there is great uncertainty regarding the size of this proportion, and how great a risk it poses.

Following the 1995 Kyoto Conference, some 80 scientists, including Frederick Seitz, former President of U.S. National Academy of Sciences and several who participated in the IPCC process, signed the Leipzig Declaration, stating in part, “We believe that the dire predictions of a future warming have not been validated by the historic climate record, which appears to be dominated by natural fluctuations, showing both warming and cooling. These predictions are based on nothing more than theoretical models and cannot be relied on to construct far-reaching policies.” (Emphasis added)

In the wake of that conference, more than 9,000 PhDs, among them Edward Teller, “father of the hydrogen bomb,” signed the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine’s Global Warming Petition, which reads in part, “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

6) More than 1,000 skeptical scientists are identified in a 2010 report by former Senate Committee on Public Works staffer Marc Morano. Many are former alarmists. Among those cited are:

-Richard Keen, climatologist, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Colorado. (Global warming ranges from “minor inconvenience that’s overblown” to “nothing – it doesn’t exist” or “a good thing.” “Earth has cooled since 1998 … in defiance of the predictions by the UN-IPCC.” Observing that the most Antarctic sea ice on record was recorded in 2007, Keen asked, “Did you see [that fact] reported in the news?” “U.S. carbon emission growth rate has slowed to 0.2 % per year since 2000,” Keen wrote.

-Douglas V. Hoyt, solar physicist and climatologist, formerly of NOAA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research; coauthor, The Role of the Sun in Climate Change (“Starting in 1997, we created a scorecard to see how climate model predictions were matching observations. The picture is not pretty with most of the predictions being wrong in magnitude and often in sign.”)

-John T. Everett, former IPCC Lead Author, ocean researcher, former senior manager, NOAA (“It is time for a reality check … Warming is not a big deal and is not a bad thing…. The one degree F rise since about 1860, indeed since the year 1000, has brought the global average temperature from 56.5 to 57.5 degrees. . . .The NOAA PaleoClimate Program shows us that when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, the earth was much warmer, the CO2 levels were 2 to 4 times higher, and coral reefs were much more expansive.”)

7. Prominent among former alarmists is Green guru James Lovelock, best known for the “Gaia hypothesis.” In 2006, Lovelock wrote that “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”

Lovelock was immediately feted as a sage and a prophet: from the Washington Post, to Time magazine, to Rolling Stone, the media could not praise him enough. The UK Geological Society even awarded him its prestigious Wollaston Medal. But in 2012, Lovelock reversed himself, according to MSNBC:

“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said…

“We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.

“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added.

8) Perhaps most noteworthy among the skeptics is Freeman Dyson, emeritus professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he worked with Albert Einstein. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London.

Dyson is a member of “Jason, a small government-financed group of the country’s finest scientists, whose members gather each summer near San Diego to work on (often) classified (usually) scientific dilemmas of (frequently) military interest to the government.” According to the New York Times:

Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen … an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet….”

9) The Pope’s call for the “gradual framing and acceptance of binding commitments” has been read as reproaching the U.S. for not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. But Canada did ratify the protocol in 1997; a decade later, 60 scientists signed a letter urging withdrawal from Kyoto, arguing, “Significant [scientific] advances have been made since the protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases.” One signatory, Chris de Freitas, a climate scientist at the University of Auckland, N.Z., and a former supporter of Kyoto, wrote:

At first I accepted that increases in human-caused additions of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere would … lead to dangerous ‘global warming,’ but with … the results of research, I formed the view that … it is unlikely that the man-made changes are drivers of significant climate variation….

… the billions of dollars committed to GW research and lobbying … could be better spent on uncontroversial and very real environmental problems (such as air pollution, poor sanitation, provision of clean water and improved health services) that we know affect tens of millions of people.

10) Even before the Pope embraced current scientific orthodoxy, defenders of this new faith were demanding that “heretics” be arrested, prosecuted, and punished. But as another heretic who challenged the scientific orthodoxy of his day put it, “in questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” It took 350 years for the Vatican to admit Galileo was right. What will our descendants think of today’s orthodoxy 350 years from now?

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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The crooked Mike Lockwood (Professor of Space Environment Physics at Reading University, England

In Christopher Booker’s book, The Real Global Warming Disaster, (page 186/7), he writes about the Channel Four programme, “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, produced by Martin Durkin: 

What enraged the upholders of the ‘consensus’ more than anything else, however, was the publicity Durkin’s film gave to those scientists who believed that the real cause of global warming (and cooling) lay in the activity of the sun, particularly the theories of Friis-Christensen and Svensmark. Friis-Christensen’s work, it was pointed out on various blogs, had been wholly discredited. One graph shown in the film, it was claimed, had deliberately omitted the last few years of solar activity, because to have included these would have shown that it had been declining just when global temperatures were rising, thus exposing the theory as false (Durkin amended this for the DVD version of his film by adding the missing years).

So concerned were the advocates of the ‘consensus’ by the interest now being shown in the view that global warming might be related to the activity of the sun that some more formal riposte was inevitable. On July 11 2007 it came. Bearing all the signs of a carefully planned operation, the media, led by the BBC and Nature, suddenly came out with a rash of news items trailing a new study which, it was claimed, had completely demolished the ‘solar warming’ thesis.

The paper, published online by the Royal Society, was by Professor Mike Lockwood, a physicist at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory, and Claus Frőhlich of the World Radiation Center in Davos, Switzerland.They claimed that a fresh look at the data for the previous 100 years showed that Svensmark’s solar data were seriously wrong. They conceded that the sun’s magnetic activity had been higher in the 20th century than in previous centuries, and also, perhaps surprisingly, admitted that in earlier years this had significantly influenced global temperatures. But in 1985 it had peaked and started to decline, and it was at just this time that global surface temperatures had continued to rise, higher than ever. This was the proof, they claimed, that solar activity could not be the cause of recent warming.

Supporters of the ‘consensus’ were exultant at their coup. ‘This paper is the final nail in the coffin for people who would like to make the Sun responsible for present global warming’, one German climate scientist told Nature‘This should settle the debate’, said Lockwood himself, expressing particular anger at the Channel Four programme, which he described as ‘so bad it was almost fraudulent’

Yet the Royal Society’s paper had a number of odd features. One was that its seven pages of text were written so opaquely, citing so many sources, that it looked as though the authors’ chief purpose was just to put across their central headline message.   

They were at pains, for instance, not to argue with the mass of research showing that, up to recent times, solar effects had played a significant part in influencing global temperatures (‘it is becoming feasible’, they conceded, ‘to detect genuine solar forcing in climate records’). The focus of their concern was the period since 1985, in assessing whether ‘solar variations could have played any role in observed present-day global warming’. Here, having established that solar activity had weakened, they could put across their central message: that, because surface temperatures had continued to rise, there could be no connection between current warming and the Sun. 

But herein lay several disconcerting features of their argument. One was that a graph allegedly showing the cosmic ray count (gleefully reproduced by the BBC) in fact showed something quite unrelated to cosmic rays. A graph of the actual cosmic ray count (from the Climax neutron monitor) showed, for instance, that in the early 1990s it was very low, indicating the likely onset of a strong warming phase over the following years. Why had this evidence been misrepresented and omitted?

Then why had they only included a graph of recent surface temperatures and not one showing satellite data? The latest satellite record of lower air temperatures since 1979 showed that, following the El Nino year 1998, levels had fallen markedly, even, in 2000, by as much as a full degree, Although it had risen again, with a spike in 2006, a further sharp fall in 2007 had already taken it down to a level 0.6 of a degree lower than it was in 1998, Indeed it was slightly lower than a level it had reached in 1983.

Not to include this was suspect enough. But even more so was the way in which the record of surface temperatures on which Lockwood and Frőlich hung their case, instead of giving year-by-year figures, was smoothed out to show a continuous warming. Looked at on a year-by-year basis, the latest data from the Hadley Centre gave a very different picture. These showed that, in the six years between 2000 and 2006, even the trend line of surface temperatures had not continued to rise, flattening out around an average level more than 0.2 degrees lower than in 1998. Now in 2007, as was already apparent, it was falling further still.

Why did the authors prefer such long-term averages to the simpler message of year-by-year data? The latter would have exposed a crucial flaw in their argument. If rising CO2 levels were the main driver of global warming, then temperatures should also have continued to rise. If temperatures were flattening out at a time when CO2 levels were still increasing, this questioned the entire case for CO2-driven global warming.

Despite such determined efforts being made to discredit the findings of Svensmark’s SKY experiment, not all the world’s more established scientists were so easily satisfied. It had already been announced that in 2010 an international team at CERN, the world’s largest sub-atomic particle laboratory based in Geneva, would be carrying out a very much larger-scale test of Svensmark’s theory, in a project named CLOUD.

A quick glance at the HADCRUT trends from 2001 to 2007 show that, far from continuing to rise as Lockwood claimed, temperatures were if anything dropping.

As we know, the pause in satellite temperatures can be traced back even earlier to 1998, blowing a huge hole in Lockwood’s argument. Given the time lags and state of the ocean cycles, the rise in temperatures between 1985 and 1998 would not have been incompatible with the Svensmark theory.

It appears then that the Lockwood paper of 2007, rather than being an objective piece of science, was simply an attempt to discredit Svensmark's theory and the Channel Four programme.

FOOTNOTE

In September 2007, two months after the Lockwood paper had been released, Svensmark & Friis-Christensen issued a trenchant rebuttal to Lockwood’s conclusions, finding many flaws in his work.

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The green energy mirage – and con job

Musk, Schmidt, Simons and billionaire buddies build empire based on climate and energy BS

Paul Driessen and Tom Tamarkin

Elon Musk and his fellow barons of Climate Crisis, Inc. recently got a huge boost from Pope Francis. Musk et al. say fossil fuels are causing unprecedented warming and weather disasters. The Pope agrees and says Catholics must “ask God for a positive outcome” to negotiations over another UN climate treaty.

It matters not that the predicted calamities are not happening. There has been no warming in 19 years, no category 3-5 hurricanes making US landfall for a record 9-1/2 years, indeed none of the over-hyped climate disasters occurring in the real world outside the alarmists’ windows. In fact, poor nations support the treaty mostly because it promises some $100 billion per year in adaptation, mitigation and compensation money from FRCs: Formerly Rich Countries that have shackled their own job creation, economic growth and living standards in the name of stabilizing Earth’s perpetually fluctuating climate.

Any money that is transferred will end up in the pockets of governing elites. Poor families will get little or no cash – and will be told their dreams of better lives must be limited to jobs and living standards that can be supported by solar panels on their huts and a few wind turbines near their villages.

Simply put, the Musk-Obama-Pope-Climate Crisis schemes will save humanity from exaggerated and fabricated climate disasters decades from now – by impoverishing billions and killing millions tomorrow.

For the catechism of climate cataclysm coalition, the essential thing is that we believe the hysterical assertions and computer models – and support endless renewable energy mandates and subsidies.

Musk and his Tesla and SolarCity companies have already pocketed $4.9 billion in taxpayer-financed subsidies, and even long-elusive profitability has not ended the handouts. Now he claims a small “blue square” on a map represents the “very little” land required to “get rid of all fossil fuel electricity generation” in the USA and prevent a non-existent climate cataclysm. We just need rooftop solar panels linked to wall-mounted battery packs – a mere 160 million Tesla Powerwalls – to eliminate the need for all coal and natural gas electricity generation in the United States, he insists.

Hogwash (from pork barrel political pig farms). As a careful and extensive analysis demonstrates, even without considering the monumental electricity demand required to convert America’s vehicles to electric-battery versions, providing today’s baseload and peak demand electricity would require 29.3 billion one-square-meter solar panels. Assuming adequate yearlong daily sunlight, that’s 29,333 square kilometers of active solar panel surface area: 7.2 million acres – or nearly all of Maryland and Delaware!

The analysis is technical, beyond the ability of most voters, journalists, politicians and regulators to comprehend fully. Read it anyway, if only to understand the enormity of financing, raw materials, mining, manufacturing and electricity required to make and ship the panels (some 40 million per year), battery packs and inverters (to convert low-voltage solar electricity to 120 or 240 Volt alternating current).

We are clearly dealing with an unprecedented green mirage and con job. It will drive average retail electricity prices from the 8-9 cents per kilowatt-hour in coal and gas-reliant states, to the 15-17 cents per kWh in California, Connecticut and New York – or even the 36-40 cents in Germany and Denmark, where unsubsidized rates are 70-80 cents per kWh! The impact of such prices on people’s jobs, living standards, health and welfare would be devastating. But Musk and his “clean” energy friends ignore this.

Musk has a BS in physics – and obviously holds advanced BS degrees in lobbying and con-artistry about climate disasters and renewable energy solutions, mandated by government decrees and financed by endless billions in subsidies. He has made numerous personal visits to legislative offices in Sacramento and Washington, to promote more such schemes, and aligns his efforts with those of Eric Schmidt, Nat Simons, Tom Steyer, Al Gore and members of the Clean Tech Syndicate: eleven secretive families with total wealth of over $60 billion, who want to get even richer off taxpayers and consumers.

They assume (demand) that bogus climate cataclysms will continue to bring them billions in climate cash payouts from Washington and state capitals, along with more exemptions from endangered species and environmental cleanup laws and regulations that are applied with a vengeance to fossil fuel projects.

Google scientists finally admitted that existing and near-term renewable energy technologies simply do not work as advertised and cannot meet their political or climate promises. The technologies are all hat, no cattle. However, the Climate Crisis and Clean Tech industries are determined to push ahead – using our money, risking little of their own, and getting reimbursed by us when their investments turn sour. 

Google and NRG now want a $539-million federal grant to bail them out of $1.6 billion in taxpayer loans for the bird-roasting Ivanpah concentrated solar power project in California, because it does not work and needs so much natural gas to keep its water hot that it doesn’t meet state renewable energy standards. Other Obama “greenbacks” energy “investments” have also drowned in red ink, leaving taxpayers to pay the tab: Solyndra, Abound Solar, Solar Trust, Ener1, Beacon Power, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Musk is nevertheless lobbying for SB-350, which would require that 50% of California’s electricity be produced via “renewable” sources, such as wind, solar, biofuels and politicians’ hot air. Meanwhile, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s family and corporate foundations give millions to alarmist climate scientists, the ultra-green Energy Foundation, and rabid anti-fracking groups like the World Wildlife Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council. NRDC also gets millions from EPA, to promote the agency’s anti-fossil fuel agenda and place 33 of its employees on 21 EPA “advisory” committees.

Schmidt and Warren Buffett also support the secretive far-left Tides Foundation, which has given millions to groups opposed to coal and hydraulic fracturing, the Keystone XL and Sandpiper pipeline projects, and countless other job-creating hydrocarbon programs. Canadian researcher Cory Morningstar accurately describes Tides as a “magical, money-funneling machine of epic proportions.”

Billionaire Nat Simons and his Sea Change Foundation spend tens of millions annually promoting and lobbying for “renewable” energy policies, mandates and subsidies; investing in wind, solar and biofuel companies; supporting environmentalist pressure groups; and contributing to Democrat politicians who perpetuate the crony corporatist arrangements. Simons, his wife and various Vladimir Putin cronies (via Klein, Ltd. and the shadowy Bermuda Wakefield Quin law firm) are the only contributors to Sea Change.

We often rail against Third World corruption. Our American (and European) environmental corruption is simply more subtle and sophisticated. It is legalized deception and theft – a massive wealth transfer from poor and middle class consumers and taxpayers to billionaires who are raking in still more billions, thanks to brilliantly crafted alarmist campaigns. And let’s not forget Al Gore, Mike Mann, Tom Steyer, James Hansen and all the others who likewise profit immensely from these arrangements – and the constant vilification of scientists who question climate catastrophe mantras.

Pressure groups and governing elites used to argue that we are running out of oil and natural gas. That ploy no longer works. While fossil fuels may eventually prove finite, fracking has given us vast new supplies of petroleum – and huge coal, oil and gas deposits have been placed off limits by government decree. We have at least a century to develop alternative energy sources that actually work – that create real jobs, actual revenues, lower energy prices and true prosperity – without the mandates, subsidies, deception, fraud and corruption that are the hallmark of “green” energy schemes.

No wonder the “clean tech” crowd is financing anti-hydrocarbon and climate chaos campaigns. But despite the Pope’s belated rescue attempt, the pseudo-science of “dangerous manmade global warming” is slowly succumbing to climate reality. And any new UN climate treaty will founder once poor nations realize the promised hundreds of billions a year will not materialize.

Those still impoverished nations should not do what rich countries are doing now that they are rich. They should do what rich countries did to become rich.

Via email

Pentagon Ships Military Off to Battle 'Climate Change'

In January 2012, Barack Obama said, “As we look beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan … we’ll be able to ensure our security with smaller conventional ground forces.” In other words, even though America’s military is being downsized, our military prowess will remain untarnished. “[Y]es, our military will be leaner, but the world must know the United States is going to maintain our military superiority with armed forces that are agile, flexible and ready for the full range of contingencies and threats,” he explained. 

Who knew that meant documenting the effects of climate change — even as terrorism-fueled crises in the Middle East rage on? According to The Washington Times, “Though stretched thin by the aftermath of two wars and the current fight against the Islamic State, the Obama administration has enlisted the Pentagon to measure the shrinking ice in the Arctic in the latest example of the president’s climate agenda being extended to the military. 

A recent Government Accountability Office report examined the Defense Department’s role in the Arctic, which increasingly will include ‘monitoring the changing Arctic conditions,’ such as ice levels.” America’s retreat — not climate change, as this administration posits — facilitated the Islamic State’s rise. And pulling even more resources away from the real fight to wage war on a straw man isn’t going to make them go away.

SOURCE 

Rep. Smith (R-TX) Rips Secret Science, Unconstitutional Regulations

Stuart Varney, host of FOX Business’ Varney & Co., complained about President Barack Obama’s unconstitutional executive orders during the June 10 broadcast of the show, focusing specifically on the administration’s climate change regulations.

Varney said to his final guest, Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, Chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, “My point is that there’s nothing you can do about this, is there?”

Smith responded with a long list of actions his committee was undertaking to rein in the administration.

In his luncheon keynote address at the Tenth International Conference on Climate Change, Smith detailed his efforts to counteract the Obama administration’s executive actions and graciously opened his remarks with “appreciation of the Heartland Institute’s fact-checking of the administration’s claims about climate change.”

Reining in the EPA

The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee has jurisdiction over federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Smith said, “As chairman, it is my responsibility to ensure that the federal government is efficient, effective, and accountable to the American people. Regulations should be based on sound science, not science fiction.”

EPA behaves otherwise, hiding regulatory data and silencing its taxpayer-funded scientists.

Smith told the conference, “Earlier this year, the House passed the Secret Science Reform Act of 2015, which will greatly improve transparency and accountability at EPA. The bill simply requires EPA to base its regulations on publicly available data, not secret science.”

Smith says EPA has gone rogue.

“When EPA refused to release the data it uses to justify its Clean Air Act regulations, the Science Committee issued its first subpoena in 21 years to retrieve the information,” said Smith.

Reports then surfaced EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy deleted almost 6,000 text messages sent and received by her on her official agency mobile device.

In response, Smith delivered the laugh line: “Yet she claimed—unbelievably—that only one was official. That was when we realized that she and Hillary Clinton must share the same private e-mail server.”

EPA ignores the Law

Despite issuing a second subpoena in March 2015 to obtain McCarthy’s documents, the committee is still awaiting for delivery. Smith says McCarthy is not the first EPA official to disdain Americans’ right to know.

“In 2014, a federal judge held EPA in contempt for disregarding a court order not to destroy records,” said Smith.

“Last March, a federal judge called the EPA’s handling of a 2012 Freedom of Information Act request ‘suspicious,’” said Smith.

The court found, according to Smith, “‘The agency either intentionally sought to evade the [Freedom of Information Act] request in order to destroy documents or demonstrated extreme apathy and carelessness.’

“This same discredited EPA now seeks to pursue the most aggressive regulatory agenda in its 44-year history,” said Smith. “One regulation on the horizon is the Obama Administration’s sweeping new electricity regulation, the so-called Clean Power Plan. The president’s power plan is nothing more than a power grab to give the government more control over Americans’ daily lives. These regulations stifle economic growth, destroy jobs, and increase energy prices. That means everything will cost more—from electricity to gasoline to food.”

Control Water, Control People

In May, Smith said, “The EPA submitted its final rule to define the ‘Waters of the United States.’ This is the EPA’s latest attempt to expand its jurisdiction and increase its power to regulate American waterways, claiming unprecedented jurisdiction over many different bodies of water, including those that temporarily result from a ‘drizzle.’ The EPA actually uses the word, ‘drizzle.’

“The [Obama] administration’s regulations appear to be designed to achieve more government control of the lives of the American people, with little environmental benefit. This is the definition of all pain and no gain.”

Americans are noticing.

“Despite the intense media coverage given to climate change, the American people, for good reason, still are skeptical,” said Smith. “A recent Gallup survey revealed a 43 percent plurality of Americans feel climate change is ‘generally exaggerated,’ and only 31 percent think it is ‘generally underestimated.’”

The public has the power to change things.

Smith closed by saying, “That is why we need The Heartland Institute to continue to provide a fact-filled perspective that benefits the public and informs scientific debate. Thank you again for trying to prevent Americans from being burdened by many costly and unnecessary regulations that are often justified by spurious science and a liberal political agenda.”

True to his word, four days after the conference, Smith demanded EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy provide long-withheld documents by June 22, 2015, or face a court order to compel their production. 

SOURCE  

Poll Shows the Public Supports Fracking

A new poll from Robert Morris University (RMU) shows the public overwhelmingly supports fracking for natural gas and oil production. Even before the EPA released its long awaited report largely exonerating fracking from charges it was causing water pollution, the poll showed more than 57% of Pennsylvanians support fracking. Nationally, 56 percent of those survey supported fracking.

Among those surveyed in Pennsylvania, 74 percent said fracking would have a positive economic impact on the country, compared to 73 percent nationwide.

When asked whether fracking can “move the US to energy independence“, nationally 69 percent of those polled agreed, compared to 70 percent of Pennsylvanians.

The poll indicated a number of those surveyed were concerned fracking could cause or was causing air and water pollution and earthquakes. This fear evidently reduced support for fracking from the more than 70 percent who agreed it was good for the economy and national security, to the 56 percent nationally who supported fracking overall. 

Shale Energy Insider quoted Tony Kerzmann, professor of engineering at RMU, saying “I think probably the biggest thing you can make of these findings is people want cheap energy and are willing to accept environmental impacts.”

Awareness Breeds Comfort not Contempt

In a positive sign for the oil and gas industry, which is spending millions of dollars to raise awareness of the fracking’s economic benefits and the fact it is environmentally benign, it seems the more the public knows about fracking, the more comfortable and supportive they are of the activity. Support for fracking grew nationwide from 42 percent in 2013, to 56 percent today, coinciding with an 25 percent increase in the awareness of fracking. Seventy percent of those surveyed in this year’s poll were aware of fracking, up from 45 percent in 2013.

“One of the things we have to realize is that the awareness is mostly industry driven. I think the fracking awareness and the increase in support go hand-in-hand,” Kerzmann suggested.

The poll was conducted by the Robert Morris University Polling Institute and sponsored by Trib Total Media, sampling the opinions of 1,003 adults nationwide resulting in a +/- 3.0-percentage point margin of error. RMU also polled 529 Pennsylvania residents separately during the same time period.

SOURCE  

Climate skeptics vocal within Australia's main conservative  party

Prime Minister Tony Abbott is facing a push from inside the Liberal Party to prevent Australia signing up to any binding emissions reduction targets at the upcoming Paris climate talks.

A cabal of regional and rural Liberal members, centred in Western Australia and supported by a number of conservative MPs, will force a vote at Saturday's federal council meeting in Melbourne on whether Parliament should "examine the evidence" around climate change before agreeing to any post-2020 emissions cuts.

Liberal sources told Fairfax Media that Environment Minister Greg Hunt is likely to be forced to step in and fight off the motion on Saturday by asserting the Abbott government accepts climate change is real and is willing to work with other nations to combat its effects.

The timing of the intervention will be a headache for Mr Hunt who has over recent months moved the government towards accepting tougher emissions targets, as revealed by Fairfax Media on Tuesday.

A Liberal moderate who will attend the federal council meeting said the group of elected Liberals and members behind the motion should be given an audience with the Pope so they can be "brought up to speed by a new age person living in this century".

The party's regional and rural committee, chaired by WA farmer Brian Mayfield, has submitted the motion, which will call for a House of Representatives committee to "examine the scientific evidence that underpins the man-made global warming theory".

It also calls for investigation into "the reasons for the failure of computer models, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and prominent individuals to predict, among other things, the pause in global warming this century".

"In light of the uncertainty around this issue, Australia does not sign any binding agreement at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris later this year," it says.

Mr Mayfield declined to comment but Liberal Senator Chris Back and Western Australian colleague Dennis Jensen both told Fairfax Media that an examination of whether the science supported climate change was worthy of party debate.

Mr Jensen said the push was coming out of WA because the state has a "reputation for independent thinking". In 2009, a similar campaign was aimed at then opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull who was urged by WA members not to negotiate with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd ahead of the Copenhagen summit.  "The science is absolutely not settled. This argument that it's all done and dusted is rubbish," he said.

Farmers see more climate variability in their working lives than most people and the view that everything is in stasis except for the human influence on the climate was nonsense, he said.

A senior Liberal source said the motion would have to be "derailed" by Mr Hunt. "It's something that will appeal to some conservatives but he will have to head it off. There is more and more a view that Hunt has got the government to a point of being ready to act and accept the climate science, so the timing could not be worse."

"This sort of talk takes us back to the Neanderthal age. It's flat earth stuff."

But Senator Back said: "I think it is certainly worthy of debate but the question is can you get all the information between now and Paris [in December]."

Climate sceptic Tasmanian Liberal Senator Richard Colbeck said he expected the motion would "dead batted" on Saturday. "It's not a can of worms I would want to open up," he said.

Mr Hunt said: "We firmly and absolutely accept that climate change is real and taking action to combat it as imperative. We are already taking strong action and achieving significant reductions through the Emissions Reduction Fund.

"We will shortly announce our post-2020 target. There should be no doubt that our target will be significant and Australia will play a constructive role in global talks in Paris."

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

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Pope Francis versus the scientific facts

James Rust

On May 24, 2015, Pope Francis issued his ENCYCLICAL LETTER LAUDATO SI (Praise Be To You) OF THE HOLY FATHER FRANCIS ON CARE OF OUR COMMON HOME.

The 184-page letter consists of 246 paragraphs of which 7 (paragraphs 20-26) are devoted to POLLUTION AND CLIMATE CHANGE.

Paragraph 20 deals with pollution caused by all forms of human activity.  The serious pollution due to energy use is uncontrolled pollution in homes and urban areas where environmental controls are unavailable on combustion products. Central power generation allows these controls such as electrostatic precipitators, scrubbers, etc. use on electric power generation.  Thus modern society energy sources using fossil fuels are clean energy sources as demonstrated by vast improvements in the United States air quality the past forty years.

Paragraph 21 deals with pollution caused by waste—residues from home and industrial activities that produce garbage that is not properly disposed.

Paragraph 22 deals with waste due to our throwaway culture.  This can be alleviated by stringent recycle programs.

The rest of the paragraphs are listed under the sub-heading “Climate as a common good”.

Climate as a common good

Paragraph 23 is written as follows:

The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all.  At the global level, it is a complex system linked to many of the essential conditions for human life.  A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system. In recent decades this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events, even if a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon.  Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it.  It is true that there are other factors (such as volcanic activity, variations in the earth’s orbit and axis, the solar cycle), yet a number of scientific studies indicate that most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and others) released mainly as a result of human activity. Concentrated in the atmosphere, these gases do not allow the warmth of the sun’s rays reflected by the earth to be dispersed in space. The problem is aggravated by a model of development based on the intensive use of fossil fuels, which is at the heart of the worldwide energy system. Another determining factor has been an increase in changed uses of the soil, principally deforestation for agricultural purposes.

Paragraph 23  is given in entirety due to many errors in statements.  The constant rise in sea level has been constant across the planet for more than a century as shown by tidal gauge measurements posted on the Internet by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.  The rate of rise averages about 8 inches per century.   For many weather events, rates of occurrences have declined in recent decades.  The U. S. government provides data on various climate events Pope Francis claims are increasing—heat waves, record high temperatures, flooding, drought, wildfires, reduced snowfall, tornadoes,hurricanes, sea level rise, and Arctic ice melting.  Paragraph 23 states recent warming is mostly due to increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide which “do not allow the warmth of the sun’s rays reflected by the earth to be dispersed in space”.  Greenhouse gases don’t influence the sun’s rays because they are transparent to high wavelength energy from the sun.  The scientific community acknowledges increased global warming due to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide from fossil fuel use has only been a factor since 1950 when carbon dioxide was 310 parts per million (ppm) and rising to 400 ppm by 2015.  The alleged dangers from global warming cited by Pope Francis have not occurred.

Paragraph 23 demonstrates Pope Francis did not have expert advice in writing about climate change.

Paragraph 24 is written as follows:

Warming has effects on the carbon cycle. It creates a vicious circle which aggravates the situation even more, affecting the availability of essential resources like drinking water, energy and agricultural production in warmer regions, and leading to the extinction of part of the planet’s biodiversity. The melting in the polar ice caps and in high altitude plains can lead to the dangerous release of methane gas, while the decomposition of frozen organic material can further increase the emission of carbon dioxide. Things are made worse by the loss of tropical forests which would otherwise help to mitigate climate change. Carbon dioxide pollution increases the acidification of the oceans and compromises the marine food chain. If present trends continue, this century may well witness extraordinary climate change and an unprecedented destruction of ecosystems, with serious consequences for all of us. A rise in the sea level, for example, can create extremely serious situations, if we consider that a quarter of the world’s population lives on the coast or nearby, and that the majority of our megacities are situated in coastal areas.

This paragraph complains about loss of tropical rain forests which may be caused by Pope Francis’ suggestion fossil fuels be replaced by solar and wind energy sources that require vast land areas for their implementation.

Examination of land requirements show it takes 6 acres per megawatt for solar energy and 60 acres per megawatt for wind energy.  The typical megawatts of solar and wind energy to produce the same output of a 1000 megawatt nuclear power plant would be 5000 megawatts solar and 3000 megawatts wind, respectively.  Thus land requirements for the solar plant are 47 square miles and 281 square miles for the wind farm.

The United States’ annual electricity production is a little greater than 4 billion megawatt-hours.  It would take 500 1000-megawatt nuclear power plants to generate that amount of electricity.  Dividing that electric power production equally with solar and wind energy would require 11,800 square miles of solar farms and 70,000 square miles of wind farms.  No mention is made about energy storage problems.

[Rusty James above has been polite enough above not to spell out fully the land use requirements of "alternative" energy. Note that 70,000 sq miles for wind farms adds up to over 40 million acres.  That's a lot of acres to pull out of other uses]                              

Problems with ocean rise were covered in the discussion of Paragraph 23.  The expected rise of about 8 inches per century is a known quantity and takes place without regards to carbon dioxide increases.

In reality carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels is a positive benefit to society as explained by Princeton University Emeritus Professor William Happer in his October 15, 2014 lecture “The Myth of Carbon Pollution”.  Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is an airborne fertilizer that causes increased plant growth, larger plant root systems that decrease plant water demands, and decreases in plant water expiration which also decreases plant water demands.  The slight increase in global warming by increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is a positive benefit producing longer growing seasons.

A report on social benefits of carbon dioxide for agriculture alone is estimated at $3.2 trillion from 1961 to 2011.  Benefits from 2012 to 2050 are estimated $9.8 trillion.  These economic benefits from increased atmospheric carbon dioxide make any suggested economic benefits from carbon dioxide curtailment by Pope Francis, President Obama, or others irrelevant.

Paragraph 25 contains the following statement:

Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day. Its worst impact will probably be felt by developing countries in coming decades. Many of the poor live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to warming, and their means of subsistence are largely dependent on natural reserves and ecosystemic services such as agriculture, fishing and forestry. They have no other financial activities or resources which can enable them to adapt to climate change or to face natural disasters, and their access to social services and protection is very limited. For example, changes in climate, to which animals and plants cannot adapt, lead them to migrate; this in turn affects the livelihood of the poor, who are then forced to leave their homes, with great uncertainty for their future and that of their children. There has been a tragic rise in the number of migrants seeking to flee from the growing poverty caused by environmental degradation. They are not recognized by international conventions as refugees; they bear the loss of the lives they have left behind, without enjoying any legal protection whatsoever. Sadly, there is widespread indifference to such suffering, which is even now taking place throughout our world. Our lack of response to these tragedies involving our brothers and sisters points to the loss of that sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded.

Migrants fleeing to better lands isn’t because of “environmental degradation”; but wars that threaten their survival. Christians are being beheaded by Muslim terrorists, various Muslim sects won’t peacefully resolve differences, etc.  Pope Francis has failed to observe the distinguishing feature between poor and rich countries is rich countries have successfully developed their fossil fuel energy resources to provide low cost and abundant transportation, heating, cooling, cooking, refrigeration,  vast communication systems, entertainment, etc. that practically eliminates the burdens of daily living.  By denying poor countries access to fossil fuels, Pope Francis condemns them to perpetual poverty.

Paragraph 26 contains the following statement:

Many of those who possess more resources and economic or political power seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms, simply making efforts to reduce some of the negative impacts of climate change. However, many of these symptoms indicate that such effects will continue to worsen if we continue with current models of production and consumption. There is an urgent need to develop policies so that, in the next few years, the emission of carbon dioxide and other highly polluting gases can be drastically reduced, for example, substituting for fossil fuels and developing sources of renewable energy. Worldwide there is minimal access to clean and renewable energy. There is still a need to develop adequate storage technologies. Some countries have made considerable progress, although it is far from constituting a significant proportion. Investments have also been made in means of production and transportation which consume less energy and require fewer raw materials, as well as in methods of construction and renovating buildings which improve their energy efficiency. But these good practices are still far from widespread.

Pope Francis wants to replace fossil fuel energy sources with solar, wind, biomass (wood), ethanol from corn, other biofuels, etc. as future energy sources.  These energy sources are too expensive for developing nations.  Solar and wind energy are available for small periods of time and require backup energy sources when unavailable.  Present technology has not given us economical and practical energy storage systems.  Environmental issues from vast wind and solar farms ruing nature’s beauty, incorporating hazardous materials, and having useful lifetimes of about 25 years are not addressed.

In addition, these energy sources require vast land areas in order to produce significant amounts of energy.  This requires destroying millions of square miles of forest land that cleans our air and water, creates oxygen, helps cool the planet, and provides recreation.  Forest land is a sink for carbon dioxide; thus renewable energy sources may add to global carbon dioxide.

Aftermath

Positive issues from Pope Francis’ encyclical are stop wasting food, recycle all that is practical, practice energy efficiency, and clean up our environment.  These are attributes taught by good parents to their children.  My parents never wasted food, made us turn off light bulbs upon leaving a chair after reading, make your beds and allow no cloths strewn on bedroom floors, recycled all paper and cans, etc.  These issues can be resolved by global education and reducing carbon dioxide levels is of no importance.

Pope Francis is making a grievous mistake entering the debate on fossil fuels causing catastrophic global warming due to live-giving combustion gas carbon dioxide.  His policies will leave the planet poorer, less healthy, drudgery for a lifestyle, and lacking creature comforts.  History has not forgotten the Church’s 17th century involvement with science caused the Inquisition in 1633 to force Galileo Galilei to recant the Sun was the center of our universe instead of the Earth.  Galileo was held in house arrest until his death in 1642.  The consequences of the Church’s actions may have set astronomy back a few years; but did not lead to a calamitous future for the planet by denying our population life-giving energy sources of abundant, inexpensive, and geographically distributed fossil fuels of coal, oil, and natural gas.  In 1992 the Vatican formally announced its mistake in condemning Galileo.

The attack on life-giving carbon dioxide may require new attitudes on its existence.  We might paraphrase the famous song of the 1970s peace movement by John Lennon “Give Peace a Chance” with “All we are saying is give CO-2 a chance”.

SOURCE





NOAA Says It’s a Record: No Major Hurricane Has Struck U.S. Mainland in 10 Years

Hey Popey! Are you listening?

No “major” hurricane--defined as a Category 3 or above--has made landfall on the continental United States since 2005, according to records compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Hurricane Research Division.

That is the longest stretch of time the United States has gone without a Category 3 or above hurricane striking somewhere on the mainland of the country, according to NOAA hurricane records going back to 1851.

“It’s easily the record -- with all the necessary caveats,” the National Hurricane Center’s Eric Blake told CNSNews.com.

Blake, a specialist with the center, is the co-author of The Deadliest, Costliest, and Most Intense United States Tropical Cyclones from 1851 to 2010.

Blake said that the ability to measure hurricanes is better now than it was in the past.

Prior to the current pause in major hurricanes striking the U.S. mainland, the longest pause had been the eight years between 1860 and 1869—146 years ago. NOAA has published its calculation of the categories of all hurricanes striking the U.S. going back to 1851.

In the 164 years for which hurricane data has been collected, 72 have had at least one major hurricane. There have also been two periods of five-straight years (1915 throuhg 1919 and 1932 through 1936) where at least one major hurricane has struck they U.S. mainland each year. (See chart below.)

The U.S. Census Bureau noted the fact that it has now been ten years since the last major hurricane struck the U.S. mainland in information it published this month to mark the beginning of hurricane season, which runs from June 1 through November 30.

The last major hurricane to strike the U.S. “was Hurricane Wilma in October 2005 over Southwest Florida,” the Census Bureau said.

In 2005, according to NOAA, a greater number of major hurricanes struck the U.S. mainland than any year on record. That year, four Category 3 storms hit the U.S.: Dennis, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.

Sometimes major hurricanes--such as Ike in 2008--are Category 3 or higher before they strike the U.S. mainland, but then they diminish to a lower category of storm before they do strike.

The Saffir-Simpson Scale rates hurricanes according to their sustained wind speed and potential for damage. Category 1 storms produce wind speeds between 74-95 mph. Category 2 winds are between 96-110 mph.

While Category 1 and 2 storms are still considered dangerous, Category 3, 4, and 5 hurricanes are considered “major” because their sustained wind speeds of 111-129 mph, 130-156 mph, and more than 157 mph respectively can produce catastrophic damage.

In describing Category 2 storms, with sustained winds of 96-110 miles per hour, NOAA says: “Well-constructed frame homes could sustain major roof and siding damage. Many shallowly rooted trees will be snapped or uprooted and block numerous roads. Near-total power loss is expected with outages that could last from several days to weeks.”

In describing Category 3 storms, with sustained winds of 111 to 129 miles per hour, NOAA says: “Well-built framed homes may incur major damage or removal of roof decking and gable ends. Many trees will be snapped or uprooted, blocking numerous roads. Electricity and water will be unavailable for several days to weeks after the storm passes.”

The National Hurricane Centers’ Eric Blake told CNSNews.com that the criteria for hurricane categorization has been altered over the years.

According to Blake's report, “category assignment is based on wind speed from 1851-1930 and 1990-2010 and on a combination of wind, pressure and storm surge from 1931-1989.” The Saffir-Simpson Scale was developed in 1969, and hurricanes prior to that were assigned categories retroactively, using the available data.

"Small differences today that we could detect, you couldn’t detect a long time ago,” Blake told CNSNews.com. “Given that we just see things a little better, we‘ve got more data and better satellite data, we can give a little better estimate than we could a generation ago.

“But nonetheless, it is a record,” Blake said of the 10-year pause in major hurricanes striking the U.S. mainland. “It’s easily the record--with all the necessary caveats.”

SOURCE





Atlantic Ocean's Circulation Yields Inevitable Surprises

The term “settled science” gets tossed around in the media a lot these days. Mostly by non-scientists, who know no better, and by some errant scientists, who should. In 2002, the U.S. National Research Council Committee on Abrupt Climate Change published its findings in a book entitled Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises. A new report in Science recaps the surprising discoveries made since then, and they are big. So big that ocean circulation models, integral parts of all climate models, do not accurately predict reality. The observed change in AMOC strength was found to lie well outside the range of interannual variability predicted by coupled atmosphere-ocean climate models. Sounds like circulation in the Atlantic Ocean is not so settled.

I have reported on ocean circulation before, popularly known as the great ocean conveyor belt, and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) in particular. While the simplistic conveyor belt model, origonally described by Wally Broecker, has fallen out of favor in recent years, study of ocean circulation patterns is more intensive than ever. This is because ocean currents are the major movers of heat energy around the globe, and as such are a primary influence on Earth's climate. A review article published in the journal Science, titled “Observing the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation yields a decade of inevitable surprises,” by oceanographers M. A. Srokosz and H. L. Bryden, reviews some surprising new findings from the past decade of observation. The importance of recent findings is revealed in the report's abstract:

The importance of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) heat transport for climate is well acknowledged. Climate models predict that the AMOC will slow down under global warming, with substantial impacts, but measurements of ocean circulation have been inadequate to evaluate these predictions. Observations over the past decade have changed that situation, providing a detailed picture of variations in the AMOC. These observations reveal a surprising degree of AMOC variability in terms of the interannual range, the amplitude and phase of the seasonal cycle, the interannual changes in strength affecting the ocean heat content, and the decline of the AMOC over the decade, both of the latter two exceeding the variations seen in climate models.

The major characteristics of the AMOC are a near-surface, northward flow of warm water and a colder southward return flow at depth. As the ocean loses heat to the atmosphere at high latitudes in the North Atlantic, the northward-flowing surface waters cool and become denser. These waters then sink and form the deep return flow of the overturning circulation. This is shown in the figure below, taken from the report.

Scientists are interested in the AMOC because changes in ocean circulation can have significant impact on global and regional climate. Unlike the Indian and Pacific Oceans, where the ocean transports heat away from the equator toward the poles, the AMOC transports heat northward across the equator. The maximum northward oceanic heat transport in the Atlantic is 1.3 petawatts (1 PW = 1015 watts) at 24° to 26°N, which is ~25 percent of the total heat transport toward the pole at these latitudes. Further north, at mid-latitudes, the temperate climate of northwest Europe is maintained by the strong transfer of heat from ocean to atmosphere. Even sea level changes are affected by the AMOC.

Scientists discovered that the flow of water in the Atlantic was much more complex than the old conveyor belt model when they started deploying an observing system across the Atlantic at 26.5°N in 2004. Last year that system marked a decade of measurements, the highlights of which are the subject of the M. A. Srokosz and H. L. Bryden report. The 26.5°N AMOC observations have produced a number of surprises on time scales of less than a year to several years. Here are the four major observation made by the author's (note that the standard unit for measuring ocean circulation is the Sverdrup (Sv), a million cubic meters per second):

The range of AMOC variability found in the first year, 4 to 35 Sv, was larger than the 15 to 23 Sv found previously from five ship-based observations over 50 years. A similarly large range to that at 26.5°N has subsequently been observed at 34.5°S.

The amplitude of the seasonal cycle, with a minimum in the spring and a maximum in the autumn, was much larger (~6.7 Sv) than anticipated, and the driving mechanism of wind stress in the eastern Atlantic was unexpected as well. The conventional wisdom was that seasonality in the AMOC would be dominated by wind-driven northward Ekman transport, but this was found to be small.

The 30% decline in the AMOC during 2009–2010 was totally unexpected and exceeded the range of interannual variability found in climate models used for the IPCC assessments. This event was also captured by Argo and altimetry observations of the upper limb of the AMOC at 41°N. This dip was accompanied by significant changes in the heat content of the ocean, with potential impacts on weather that are the subject of active research.

Finally, over the period of the 26.5°N observations, the AMOC has been declining at a rate of about 0.5 Sv per year, 10 times as fast as predicted by climate models.

AMOC flow reduction during 2009–2010 had a considerable impact on the heat transport into the North Atlantic. The heat transported north by the AMOC at 26.5°N in previous years was ~1.3 PW, but this transport was reduced by 0.4 PW. This resulted in cooler waters in the north Atlantic and warmer waters to the south. Observations showed that there was an abrupt and sustained cooling of the subtropical North Atlantic in the upper 2000 m between 2010 and 2012. Because the AMOC carries ~90% of the ocean heat transport at this latitude, the cooling seems primarily due to the reduction of the AMOC. This cooling has affected weather in the eastern US and the formation and paths of Atlantic hurricanes.

Indeed, the more observations reveal about the AMOC the more questions arise. Scientists worry if the AMOC will continue to decline or even stop all together. Such events are thought to have happened in the past, for example at the very start of the current interglacial period. Another possible effect of the AMOC slowdown may be the “hiatus” in global warming. In “Varying planetary heat sink led to global-warming slowdown and acceleration,” Xianyao Chen and Ka-Kit Tung conclude that the deep Atlantic and Southern Oceans, but not the Pacific, have absorbed the excess heat that would otherwise have contributed to global temperature rise. But the role of the AMOC in the hiatus remains uncertain and others have denied that there is any “missing heat” at all.

Srokosz and Bryden speculate on the implications of the past decade of observation—real science, the actual study of nature—and the impact the resulting data may have on climate models. Some of their comments focus on the possible bistability of the AMOC. They cast doubt on the predictive ability of today's crop of climate models.

On a more speculative note, one possibility for future AMOC surprises is the issue of the bistability of the AMOC noted earlier. This is related to the transport of freshwater in and out of the South Atlantic. Observations suggest that the AMOC transports freshwater southward in the South Atlantic, implying that the AMOC could be bistable with on and off modes. Most climate models exhibit northward freshwater transport, seemingly at odds with the observations, implying that the AMOC is stable. Some recent climate model results show that their freshwater transports can match the southward freshwater transport in the observations, but in such climate models the AMOC does not shut down under greenhouse gas forcing. In point of fact, most climate models do not include a dynamically interactive Greenland ice sheet, so they are unlikely to correctly account for freshwater input into the Atlantic from Greenland melting. In addition, the Arctic Ocean supplies freshwater to the North Atlantic, which would affect the stability of the AMOC. If the rate of freshwater input were to be greater than currently anticipated, that could lead to unexpected changes in the AMOC. Thus, there is a possibility that the ocean might respond in a way that most climate models cannot. This point has been made previously from a paleoclimate perspective, because paleoclimatic evidence suggests that the AMOC can undergo rapid changes that are difficult to reproduce with climate models.

This is more unsettling science than settled science. What does the future hold in store? Science in general, and climate science in particular, has a poor record when it comes to predicting the future. As much as we think we know about Earth's climate system there is much more that we do not know. Here are Srokosz and Bryden's list of immediate unknowns:

Despite the observational efforts over the past decade, many questions remain unanswered. First, the AMOC is changing, but will these changes persist or will the AMOC “bounce back” to its earlier strength? Second, are the changes being observed at 26.5°N coherent latitudinally in the Atlantic? Third, was the 2009–2010 decrease in the AMOC unusual or not? Fourth, is the AMOC bistable? Could it “flip” from one state to another? Finally, and perhaps most important, what are the effects of changes in the AMOC?

So there we have it, in the words of scientists involved with actually studying nature, not a bunch of armchair climatologists playing with computer models—models that have been based on false assumptions and data for years. There are questions galore that need to be answered before we even begin to understand the AMOC, one of the most important factors regulation our planet's climate. The lie that climate science is settled science can not be exposed more plainly than this.

SOURCE.  (See the original for links and graphics)





The sun raises the seas

Nir Shaviv

For many years we have been told that global warming is unprecedented over the past 100 years, that human industrial activity is by far the dominant driver of 20th century climate change, and that nothing else is important.

Years ago, I too accepted this idea. After all, it came from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was supposed to summarize the leading consensus on the subject. Having grown up in a solar house, it also naturally fit my environment-friendly background.

However, a casual question back in 2000, from a colleague while I was doing post-doctoral work at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Toronto, led to surprising revelations on climate change. My colleague, an astrophysicist, asked me how cosmic rays from supernovae could affect life on earth, which led me to explore this area of study. I found that the sun’s variability as well as unrelated cosmic ray variations, explain a surprisingly large amount of the observed climate variations, from the 11-year solar cycle to geological time scales. In fact, models including the real effect of the sun also do a much better job in explaining 20th century global warming than those limited to the influence of human carbon dioxide emissions alone.

Most importantly, empirical evidence shows that the sun’s influence on climate is very large, much larger than expected from variations in the Total Solar Irradiance — the only solar forcing that is considered by the IPCC. The full forcing, which is large, can be quantified by studying the sea level as it is linked to heat going into the oceans and therefore the radiative forcings through thermal expansion.

This can be seen in the figure, where the tide-gauges-based sea level change rate is seen to vary in sync with the solar cycle, averaging close to 2 mm a year. The amount of heat inferred from this large correlation corresponds to at least six times the forcing of the irradiance alone. However, this empirical evidence and its implications are ignored in models considered by the IPCC.

As an astrophysicist, I see that the scope of solar effects considered by the IPCC is very limited; thus it arrives at wrong conclusions about what causes climate change.

For instance, the increase in solar activity over the 20th century implies that more than half of the warming should be attributed to the sun, not to emissions from human activity.

I have reviewed the IPCC climate models and the evidence shows that their “climate sensitivity,” such as to CO2 variations, is far too high. Models which exclude the real effect of the sun require an artificially high climate sensitivity to explain 20th century warming. This high sensitivity then predicts a high temperature rise for any given scenario over the 21st century.

But models are computer simulations of which the predictive power is limited by large uncertainties in the input physics, such as feedbacks through cloud cover variations. Cloud modelling remains a major challenge and an uncertainty factor in climate modelling.

Instead of the model simulations, if we look at the evidence we see a different story.

A range of empirical evidence points to a low climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO2), meaning that CO2 has limited effect on warming. In particular, large CO2 variations over geological time scales give rise to no apparent temperature variations and large volcanic eruptions cool the planet by only 0.1°C on average (compared with 0.3-0.5 predicted by models employed by the IPCC).

And of course there is the “hiatus.” The IPCC concluded in Chapter 9 of its September 2013 Working Group I report that there had been a 15-year hiatus in Global Surface Meant Temperatures (GSMT) that had not been predicted by a single computer model.

Currently, satellite data show that the hiatus has continued over 18 years, even though carbon dioxide has risen significantly. This implies that Earth’s temperature increases less (from the influence of CO2) than IPCC predictions, because those were based on a high climate sensitivity ascribed to CO2.

In my research, when the sun’s role is considered, 20th-century warming is much better explained and has a better fit to the observed data while requiring a low climate sensitivity.

The low climate sensitivity implies that typical emission scenarios will result in about a 1°C increase between the present temperature and that which is likely in 2100.

Some aspects of solar activity that affect global climate change are too complex to explain in a short newspaper op-ed. I have a blog called “ScienceBits” where I explain my work in lay terms, including links to the scientific papers supporting those conclusions.

In short, the research work that my colleagues and I carry out shows that the leading mechanism to link solar activity with climate is that of cosmic ray modulation. This is supported by a range of empirical evidence including paleo-climate variations associated with variations in the cosmic ray flux density around the solar system (from spiral arm passages and the motion of the solar system perpendicular to the galactic plane).

There are many good reasons why we should reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, but carbon dioxide emissions is not one of them.

I am optimistic that humanity will switch to alternative energy sources within a few decades once they become cheaper than fossil fuels, which they will. Based on the significant costs and market disruptions caused by extreme carbon reduction policies, it would be best if this transition happen due to innovation and technological advances, without the current large subsidies, most of which are driven by fear of a climate catastrophe. Such irrational behaviour has already led to many negative, unintended consequences for the environment and national economies. Thus, the precautionary principle could have detrimental repercussions.

Based on my “galactic view” of climate change, the good news is we’re not doomed. The “carbon risk” of catastrophic global warming or climate change is low. The sun has a far greater, natural influence on climate than many are willing to admit.

SOURCE





Hey Liberals: Your "Economically Friendly" Cars Are Actually Causing More Pollution

So often the left entices their party with "Eco-friendly," science savvy, earth loving phenomenons. However, the National Bureau of Economic Research just found that on a per-mile basis electric cars are on average worse for the environment when compared to their gas-powered friends.

This new study proves that subsidizing these environmental "friendly" cars should be put to a halt.

In monetary terms, electric cars are about half-a-cent worse per mile for the environment than gas-powered cars, on average. This means that if a government wants to tax a car based on how much it pollutes, electric cars should be taxed half of one cent more per mile driven than gasoline cars.

While much is dependent on where exactly the cars are driven, this finding that electric cars are on average half-a-cent worse per mile than gas-powered cars blows out the common assumption that electric cars are the "clean" thing to do.

This past Tuesday the Obama administration gathered to rally support on climate change mainly stressing the impacts of on public health and the shortening of life:

casting "climate change as a moral issue, saying its health effects target society's most vulnerable, including children, the elderly and the poor.

Contrary to Obama's measures is the ever true reality that in purchasing an electric car it actually "makes society as a whole worse off because electric vehicles tend to export air pollution to other states more than gasoline vehicles."

Ironically, in 2008 Obama promoted electric cars by administering "an ambitious goal of putting 1 million advanced technology vehicles on the road by 2015."

With these efforts Obama was trying to reduce oil consumption, however this new study proves that the power for electric cars has a new source of energy that needs tackling: coal.

Although the typical assumption is that electric cars are cleaner than gasoline-fueled cars, the power for electric cars has to come from somewhere, and it's often from coal-fired power plants. "Rather than simply accepting the assertion of environmental benefits from electric vehicle use, this paper conducts a rigorous comparison of the environmental consequences of gasoline and electric powered vehicles, specifically by quantifying the externalities (both greenhouse gases and local air pollution) generated by driving these vehicles," the authors write.

SOURCE





House challenges Obama on climate change

 The House passed legislation Wednesday that would delay emission rules that are the centerpiece of President Obama's plan to combat global warming.

The Ratepayer Protection Act was approved 247-180. It would allow states to opt out of complying with rules to cut carbon dioxide from existing power plants. Many scientists say the emissions are causing manmade climate change. The bill now goes to the Senate.

Sponsors of the bill say the Environmental Protection Agency's emission rules, known as the Clean Power Plan, would harm consumers by driving up energy costs and creating the potential for rolling blackouts.

Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., the author of the bill, said the Clean Power Plan is an example of regulatory overreach that his colleagues, states and many others believe is illegal. The bill also would allow states to delay compliance until judicial review has concluded.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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