EPA endangerment finding endangers USA

Trump must reverse EPA’s climate change “Endangerment Finding”

Dennis T. Avery

Nine years ago, the Obama Environmental Protection Agency issued an “Endangerment Finding.” It claimed that methane leaks from natural gas production and pipelines, and manmade carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, cause dangerous global warming that poses an imminent danger to the health and wellbeing of Americans. However, the Finding was based on computerized climate models that couldn’t even successfully hind-cast the weather we’d had over the past century – much less forecast Earth’s climate 100 years into the future. In fact, Earth’s climate has changed frequently, often abruptly.

EPA essentially asserted that the 80% of our energy that comes from coal, oil and natural gas caused all our planet’s recent warming and any more warming is a long-term threat. Obama’s team thus bet in 2009 that Earth’s warming from 1976–98 would continue. But it didn’t. Never mind all those recent NOAA and NASA claims that 2016 was our “hottest year” ever. Satellites are our most honest indicator, and they say our planet’s temperature has risen an insignificant 0.02 degrees C (0.04 degrees F) since 1998.

That 20-year non-warming clearly shows that the models are worthless for prediction. But the Federal Appeals Court in Washington nevertheless recently cited methane emissions to block regulatory approval for a new natural gas pipeline. The ruling will encourage radical greens to keep thinking they can regulate gas and oil production and transport into oblivion. Alarmists across the country are already citing the new precedent in other cases, in effect demanding re-hearings on Trump’s entire energy plan.

If the courts decree that pipelines cause dangerous methane emissions, the U.S. will be forced to generate electricity increasingly via the infamous whimsies of wind and sunshine. But the models’ prediction of dangerously rising temperatures have proven wrong. The disparity between the models’ predictions and the thermometer readings is growing wider by the day. We should not base regulations on them.

In science, if your theory doesn’t take account of all the relevant data, you need a new theory.

Meanwhile, thousands of new coal-fired power plants are being built around the world – even in Europe. (Many Third World power plants are being built with Chinese financing.) The CO2 from this new coal-fired power will dwarf whatever emissions the judges hope to prevent in America.

The President now risks losing the economic growth and millions of new jobs that abundant, affordable energy could and should create. Without new pipelines, our “miraculous” fracked gas will be trapped in the semideserts and mountains where the gas is found.

What danger can today’s EPA find in earth’s current 20-year non-warming? What ice-melt will that trigger? What sea level rise? World food production has just set a new record, in large part because higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere act like fertilizer for crop plants (as well as for forests and grasslands).

Justice Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation to the Supreme Court should strongly encourage a Trump Endangerment reversal. Gorsuch stated in a 2016 opinion that the so-called Chevron Precedent is “difficult to square with the Constitution.” Chevron says courts should defer to federal judges on laws that are ambiguous. He believes it shifts too much power from Congress to unelected bureaucrats.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt will need to build a strong case for the reversal, however, because the Supreme Court still does not have a reliable 5–4 conservative majority. Pruitt’s current approach of setting up competing red-teams vs. blue teams must help convince Justice Kennedy that the world today looks much different from when the EPA rubberstamped the IPCC and its failed climate models.

The science was not settled in 2009; and, fortunately, the weight of evidence has since shifted importantly toward the skeptics. It starts with the still-continuing 20-year non-warming. The best “answer” the alarmists can find is that “extra” CO2 heat is hiding in the deep ocean depths. But cold water is heavier than warm water, so the warm water would have warmed the depths on its way down. NASA’s newer and more-accurate data comes from ARGO floats that periodically dive to sample water temperatures 2100 feet below the surface. They find no hidden heat.

Moreover, Earth has been warming, erratically but persistently, since 1715. How much of this warming was due to natural cycles, and how much was man-made? Of any manmade portion, how much was due to CO2, and how much to expanding Urban Heat Islands and cutting down forests? Climate realists say CO2 added barely one degree C; alarmists claim it will increase temperatures by up to 12 degrees C!

How did hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria destroy so much property with only 0.02 degrees C of warming? Britain’s wooden-ship logbooks from 1700 to1850 confirm that there were twice as many major landfalling Caribbean hurricanes per decade during the cold Little Ice Age as during the far warmer years from 1950 to 2000. Nor has the post-1998 weather produced more frequent to intensive storms, longer droughts, or any of the other climate impacts that Obama’s EPA insisted would happen.

The simple truth is that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation has given the world a climate scare every 25 to 30 years since we got thermometers around 1850 (even though the PDO wasn’t even recognized until 1996). In 1845, the ships of Sir John Franklin’s Arctic expedition were crushed by ice. Just 64 years later, in 1909, Roald Amundsen sailed through a relatively warm, ice-free Northwest Passage. In the 1970s, we were warned urgently of a new Ice Age. And then came the “overheated” Al Gore years, 1976–1998.

The huge Pacific Ocean’s 60-year oscillation raises ocean temperatures – and thus the world’s – by 1 to 2 degrees C (1.8 to 3.6 degrees F) for about 30 years, then shifts back again for another 30 years. Every time it shifted in the past, alarmists extended the latest reading in a straight line for five or 20 years and screamed: “ Global Disaster!”  This time, the alarmists claim the non-warming isn’t real!

Today, there’s no doubt the models have predicted more than twice as much warming as we’ve observed. Given the high number of official thermometers that are located in urban areas and near airport tarmac, the models may be overpredicting by three-fold!

Another major new scientific finding also goes against the alarmists. Last year CERN (the multi-billion-dollar Institute for European Nuclear Research) told CERN Courier subscribers that all the climate models must be re-done. CERN reported that its CLOUD experiment had used its huge particle accelerator and a giant cloud chamber to demonstrate that the sun and cosmic rays are the real “mystery factors” in earth’s climate. The research supports the contention that CO2 is only a bit player.

CERN says the sun was weak during the Little Ice Age (indeed, during all the “little ice ages”). This allowed far more cosmic rays to hit our atmosphere. Those extra hits shattered millions more molecules into zillions of tiny “cloud seeds.” Each cloud seed carried an electric charge that attracted other molecules to form clumps – and gave us up to ten times as many low clouds. Earth cooled for centuries under overcast skies, as if under a giant awning. Then the sun became more active, there were fewer cosmic rays, the skies got sunnier, and Earth warmed – for centuries.

History says the Modern Warming is likely to last at least another two centuries. The Medieval Warming (350 years long) was the shortest past warming we can find. But first, CERN says, we will have to go through a 60-year Solar Sunspot Minimum that will drop Earth’s temperatures even lower than today for the next 60 years. The Minimums are another recently-recognized cycle: up to 200 years long.

How will a century of non-warming possibly endanger Americans? Trump should be eager to take on Obama’s outdated and ill-informed Endangerment Finding.

Via email





Fat healthy polar bear update: hundreds of not-starving bears attracted to dead whale

Are the hundreds of polar bears spending the summer on Wrangel Island in the Chukchi Sea starving and desperate for any scrap of food? Hardly! Photos taken by Russian tourists on a cruise ship (19 September 2017) show a huge number of already-fat, healthy bears converging on a dead bowhead whale washed up on a beach.

The extraordinary sight was witnessed by tourists on an Arctic cruise aboard the Finnish-built MV Akademik Shokalskiy.

A source at Wrangel Island Nature Reserve said: “There were at least 230 polar bears, including single males, single females, mothers with cubs and even two mothers with four cubs each.”

Experts called the sight of so many polar bears together “unique”. The huge number could in fact amount to as much one per cent of the entire world’s population of the creatures.

Tourists initially thought the bears were a flock of sheep after viewing them from a distance, The Siberian Times reports.

But as the boat drew closer, the lucky holidaymakers realised what they were witnessing.

A self-proclaimed science-based news site (LiveScience, 29 September) that picked up the story of this unique event had the temerity to suggest the bears might have been “hungrier than usual” due to global warming.

It deliberately conflates predictions of future starving bears due to low sea ice levels with this observation of many obviously not-starving bears checking out an attractive food source

“It’s unclear, however, whether climate change had made these particular bears hungrier than usual. The frequency of starving polar bears is expected to increase as the climate warms and sea ice declines — not just because of climate change directly, but because ice loss is taking away seals, their main food source, Steven Amstrup, chief scientist at Polar Bears International, a nonprofit research organization dedicated to studying polar bears, told Live Science in 2015.”

Except that there is no evidence that ice loss is “taking seals away” — certainly not in the Chukchi Sea. Chukchi Sea seals have been found to be doing better with less ice than they were when there was more ice in the 1980s.

SOURCE





Hurricanes, Global Warming, and the Straitjacketing of Science

It was the most intense tropical cyclone ever to hit the mainland of the United States. Having a pressure of 892 millibars at landfall in the Florida Keys, it packed winds of an estimated 185 miles per hour and carried a storm surge of 20 feet. More than 400 people lost their lives from the storm.

Another hurricane slammed into the Gulf Coast, carrying winds close to 180 miles an hour, and even after it had weakened into a tropical depression, it deposited 40 or more inches of rain, causing massive flooding and killing more than 100 people.

The first storm, the Labor Day Hurricane, happened in 1935, while the second is the infamous Hurricane Camille, which came ashore in 1969. While they still remain the two most intense hurricanes ever to strike the USA, no one ever has suggested that either had anything to do with climate change.

No one doubts, however, that if either of those two Category 5 hurricanes were to occur today, a chorus of scientists, politicians, and journalists would claim that their intensity was due unequivocally to global warming. Global warming activists Michael E. Mann, Susan J. Hassol, and Thomas C. Peterson recently wrote in the Washington Post:

"Hurricanes get their energy from warm ocean waters, and the oceans are warming because of the human-caused buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, primarily from the burning of coal, oil, and gas. The strongest hurricanes have gotten stronger because of global warming. Over the past two years, we have witnessed the most intense hurricanes on record for the globe, both hemispheres, the Pacific and now, with Irma, the Atlantic."

As Roy Spencer and other scientists have noted, however, there is no scientific proof that storms are becoming stronger than they were before. Simple observation tells us that if storm intensity were due simply to global warming – with earth becoming increasingly warmer each year and a steady upward pattern – then the Atlantic Ocean that produced a Category 5 hurricane nearly a century ago should be producing out-of-category storms on a regular basis today.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, climate change advocates intoned that similar storms would become a “new normal,” but neither their climate models nor their own logic could have predicted a 12-year hiatus in major hurricanes striking the USA. That the hiatus would violate their own predictive models simply was ignored, as activists have turned to a new strategy: criminalizing so-called climate denial.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, The Nation declared that people who deny that climate change is responsible for bad weather are guilty of murder and should be criminally punished:

"It is past time to call out Trump and all climate deniers for this crime against humanity. No more treating climate denial like an honest difference of opinion."

One might recall that following World War II, Nazi officials and collaborators were tried on charges of “crimes against humanity.” Many were executed, and thousands more were imprisoned. While The Nation has not yet called for mass executions and imprisonment of those who do not share the beliefs of the publication, one might recall that The Nation has supported communist revolutions for the past century in which mass executions, torture, and imprisonment were the norm.

It is not only The Nation that is calling for harsh sanctions against so-called climate deniers. In 2016, then-U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch told Congress her office not only was looking into civil action against the “deniers,” but also had “referred it to the FBI to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for which we could take action.”Likewise, when she was California attorney general, Kamala Harris, now a U.S. Senator and a reported candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2020, ordered a criminal investigation of Exxon-Mobil Corporation to see if the company had deliberately lied to the public about the so-called dangers of climate change.

As more and more politicians and journalists call for criminal prosecutions of scientists and their associates for simply disagreeing with people like Michael Mann, the dangers of an American version of Lysenkoism increase. (Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet scientist whose dangerously wrong views on agriculture gained Stalin’s support. Dissenting scientists were fired, imprisoned, and even executed for their alleged apostasy.)

Unfortunately, we seem to beyond a point where even honest discussions about the weather are possible. Not that long ago, a politician that ran on a platform of giving us better weather would have been relegated to the Pantheon of Losers. Today, at least one major political party requires such promises as a condition of nomination, and they are fast moving to a place of no return. Any scientific discussion that questions “orthodoxy” at all is considered heresy.

SOURCE




Can we really limit global warming to “well below” two degrees centigrade?

Some Greenie pessimism below

Yes, but only in a model. We have essentially emitted too much carbon dioxide already, and the most feasible pathways to stay “well below” two degrees all require removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at an unprecedented scale.

Will we retire existing fossil fuel infrastructure at the required rates to limit global temperature rise to well below two degrees? (Photo: Shutterstock)
It is a question that I am asked a lot: Is the “well below” two degree target set out in the Paris Climate Agreement feasible?

Most recently, a study published in Nature Geoscience suggests that it could indeed still be feasible.

My answer is, yes, I think it is. But only in a theoretical sense, in a model. Not in practice. Here is why.

Defining “well below” two degrees

The ambition of the Paris Agreement has become well-known:

“Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.”

But the text is suitably ambiguous that many different interpretations are possible. Rather convenient for policy makers who need some wiggle room if they don’t deliver on their promises.

If we are to stand any chance of meeting the ambitions of the Paris Agreement, we first need to define exactly what “well below” two degrees centigrade means in practice.

The scientific community often expresses temperature targets with a given probability, to encompass uncertainties in the climate system. An important uncertainty is how much the climate may warm for a given amount of carbon dioxide emissions.

SOURCE





Despite Greenie prophecies of doom, the Great Barrier Reef is bouncing back from its recent stresses

Researchers have observed signs of new life in some of the worst affected areas of coral bleaching of Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

The corals of the Great Barrier Reef have undergone two successive bleaching events, in 2016 and earlier this year, raising experts' concerns about the capacity for reefs to survive under global-warming induced events.

But after a coral reef survey in September, researchers found tiny sacs of white eggs in bleached coral reefs, raising new hope for the reefs after the recent bleaching events, which affected close to two thirds of the Great Barrier Reef.

The tiny coral eggs were found in coral reefs between Townsville and Cairns, by researchers with the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS).

Dr Neal Cantin and project leader Dr Line Bay, who are part of the coral bleaching response team, were surprised to discover early signs of new life.

Dr Cantin says they'd returned to assess the mortality and survivorship from the central sector of the Great Barrier Reef.

'We travelled to 14 reefs between Townsville and Cairns, including Fitzroy Island where we saw surviving coral producing eggs, which was not expected at all,' Dr Cantin said.

'Previous studies have shown a two to three year delay in reproduction after severe bleaching but at most of the reefs we are finding colonies of Acropora (branching hard coral) colonies with early signs of egg development in shallow waters, 3m to 6m deep.'

Dr Bay said that the researchers took samples from six different coral species across inshore and offshore environments to help them understand how water quality may also affect bleaching susceptibility and recovery.

While the researchers still have to analyze the data, the reaf bserved significant recovery, particularly on the inshore reefs.

'The majority of coral colonies on the inshore reefs have regained their color and the growth of some colonies was so good they had overgrown our original research tags,' Dr Bay said.

However, the news was not all good. 'Some of the more sensitive corals are now rare even in areas where they had been abundant in March,' Dr Bay said.

Dr Cantin says that fertilization of the tiny eggs happens during the annual spawning event, which is due on the full moon of December 5, and the AIMS research team will test whether the eggs are able to be fertilized. "There is concern the eggs may not be able to successfully fertilize and develop into coral larvae,' Dr Cantin said. 'The eggs are now white, and just before the spawning event they should turn pink when they are preparing for the spawning.'

Dr Cantin says each coral could produce eight to 12 eggs per polyp in colonies of thousands of connected polyps.

SOURCE

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