Global Warming Business Lobby

This article spells out the drivers behind the rush to judgment on the global warming front. Business has bought into a government managed revenue stream that they all think they can win at. This is why its proponents are continuing to turn a blind eye to the encroaching facts of global cooling.

We are having a sustained bitter cold winter that is wracking up numbers that when reported will show even greater cooling than last winter. The sea ice will jump to full thickness this winter matching any previous year. In fact we should not expect winter to end until March is over. We may get a late blizzard this year. This is my present prognosis.

We are now going to have at least three more winters just like this one before it lets up.

I am not a seer. The global temperature fell out of bed last year. It will lose at least a full degree and perhaps a little more. Most of it is lost now. It now needs to stabilize for a couple of years at least as the Earth adjusts.

Then it can begin the slow creep back up that will take about twenty years per half a degree.

If I have a concern, it is that the drop is good for two degrees, as occurred during the little ice age. That would hurt. It would not hurt to see the last true believers attempting to explain it all away.

Right now, global warming is over. Mother Nature is having the last laugh.


Climate Confusion

By Steven Milloy
FrontPageMagazine.com

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

As a new president takes office and elevates global warming alarmism to official federal policy, much of America is experiencing record low temperatures. While the deep freeze amounts to little more than irony, Americans should nevertheless take what could well be a last opportunity to reconsider the cliff off which Barack Obama, Al Gore and the rest of the global warming industry want us to jump.

No doubt many experiencing the bitter cold this January have muttered under their breath that we could actually use some global warming about now. But the ongoing cold spell no more debunks global warming alarmism than Hurricane Katrina proved it was real. Weather, a short-term phenomenon, is simply not evidence of climate change, a long-term phenomenon. Weather is not the only natural phenomenon that is often misused as evidence of manmade climate change.

We’ve all read and heard about shrinking polar ice, receding mountain glaciers, endangered polar bears and a variety of other environmental phenomena that supposedly reflect the allegedly harmful effects of manmade greenhouse gas emissions. Alarmists have tried to induce the public to think that simply because the Arctic ice cap has shrunk on our watch, for example, then industrialized man must have caused it. The reason they do this is because they have been unable to prove their fundamental contention in the global warming debate - that manmade emissions of greenhouse gases drive global climate - despite the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars on climate research over the last 25 years.

Here are three indisputable scientific facts about climate that are sufficient on their own to throttle any claims of manmade global warming. First, we know from studies of Antarctic ice that, over the last 650,000 years or so, warmer temperatures have preceded increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by hundreds, if not thousands of years. The ice studies indicate that the carbon-dioxide-causes-global warming theory is precisely backwards.

Second, during the 20th century, there is simply no correlation between carbon dioxide emissions and global temperature. Not only did most of the century’s temperature rise occur before most of the century’s manmade greenhouse gas emissions, but during 1940-1975 global temperatures actually declined while atmospheric carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide emission levels steadily increased.

Finally, the ultimate test of a scientific theory is whether it has predictive value. We used Newton’s laws of physics, for example, to land men on the moon. Unfortunately, there are no climate models that predict trends and changes in global climate with any degree of accuracy. Think about the recent failures with hurricane season predictions or even the risk of relying on what your local weatherman predicts for tomorrow’s weather - and you’ll start to get an idea of how far away science is from predicting global climate 10, 50 and 100 years from now.

Although none of this is rocket science or a state secret, our government is nevertheless on the verge of saddling our society with draconian energy-use and rationing laws that will harm our economy and reduce our standard of living. How did we find ourselves in this position?

You may be surprised to learn that it’s not only or even mostly due to the persuasiveness and persistence of environmental activists. After all, how many people really believe Al Gore and Greenpeace? Ironically, we’re in crushing jaws of global warming regulation thanks to big business and other rent-seekers, including Gore, who hope to profit from new laws.

Leading the lobbying charge on Capitol Hill is the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a big business-environmental activist group coalition that is urging Congress to enact a so-called cap-and-trade bill. Under such legislation, Congress would issue permits to emit greenhouse gases (also called “carbon credits”) to electric utility companies and other major emitters. The permits represent more than mere regulation since they have monetary value and are tradable among emitters. An electric utility, say, that emits more greenhouse gases than it has permits for, would be forced to purchase additional permits from another utility that had excess permits. Under cap-and-trade, Congress would issue more than one trillion dollars worth of permits over the programs first ten years - so there’s a lot of money at stake. Who’s set to profit from all this?

Manufacturing companies and USCAP members like Alcoa, Dow Chemical and Dupont want Congress to award them free carbon credits for actions they’ve taken since 1992 to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. - like moving manufacturing operations to other countries. They’ve not reduced their emissions so much as they’ve displaced them.

Other USCAP members include electric utilities like Exelon, Florida Power & Light, and NRG Energy. They use emission-free nuclear power to generate much of their electricity and anticipate having extra carbon credits that they can sell at high prices to major greenhouse gas emitters like coal burning utilities. Wall Street is also a big proponent of cap-and-trade in anticipation of investing in and facilitating the trading of carbon credits. Goldman Sachs, for example, owns part of the Chicago Climate Exchange and European Climate Exchange where carbon credits would be traded.

Many would-be climate profiteers don’t care so much about cap-and-trade per se as they do any legislation that would mandate America’s switch to new and more expensive forms of energy production and energy efficiency. USCAP member General Electric, for example, wants to sell wind turbines, pricey equipment for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired utilities and high-priced but more energy-efficient industrial and consumer products. Al Gore is a partner in the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins which, as described in a New York Times Magazine cover story hopes to make billions of dollars of profits off global warming legislation.

Regular Americans who are not part of some global warming special interest group will be paying the price for all this. Expect the price of electricity and gasoline to skyrocket, as well as the prices of goods and services that are produced with energy. Remember the 2007-2008 spike in food prices caused by higher gasoline prices as well as the ethanol mandate? That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Much more than mere money is at stake. The global warming mob wants to tell you where to live, what to drive, how many children you can have, what you can eat - all in the name of reducing your carbon footprint. Energy efficiency can be a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing when it’s forced down your throat, costs you more money than it saves and robs you of your freedoms and dignity.

Action to reduce the dreaded “global” warming, of course, needs to be coordinated on a global basis, hence the need, climate alarmists intimate, for global government. “We are one” was a theme of Barack Obama’s inauguration festivities - disturbingly similar to the Communist Chinese theme for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, “One World, One Dream.” While such rhetoric may sound inspiring, the reality is that it is little more than a euphemism for central planning and, ultimately, “the road to serfdom” as economist Friedrich Hayek might say.

America’s strength lies not in its one-ness, but in its diversity of beliefs and efforts. And it will take all our strength in the coming years to combat global warming alarmism and to keep America from falling into the totalitarian green abyss.

Lorne Gunter writes on Global Warming

This short column by Lorne Gunter nicely outlines the body of evidence that has accumulated against the ongoing continuance of rising global temperatures. Global temperatures do clearly fluctuate and we are still experiencing a period of increased heat in the Northern Hemisphere which continues to defy satisfactory explanation unless one wishes to argue that the slight increase in CO2 content is better at allowing the atmosphere to retain heat in the face of declining energy input.

The chart tracks temperature in the troposphere and is thought to be good proxy for solar energy input because of its apparent stability. Thus the sharp lift in 1998 is very noteworthy since it suggests that we had a strong input of extra heat that year that was unprecedented. At least this bit of evidence suggests that. If the atmosphere was in fact heated up, then we have an explanation for the succeeding warm climate in the Northern Hemisphere. What impresses me is how little we noticed.

This all suggests that we should expect a fairly significant cooling cycle, except if you look at the chart and actually expect it to be an indicator, you will observe that the present low has only now dropped below the line previously set as a good zero. It spent the past decade firmly well over that line and real lows occurred only back in 1992 and before. In fact this chart very nicely confirms that by and large it has been warmer for a decade and that it has not actually fallen back to the historic trend line or medium.

We do not understand why the troposphere warmed up and stayed that way. But we do understand that this is surely linked to the clear evidence of surplus heat flowing into the Arctic. It may now cool off but I would not count on this at all. The solar cooling that is perhaps affecting this may only be good enough to give us the present bottom which is simply not low enough.

The chart actually shows that there is normally a rapid decline followed by an upward trending recovery of the temperature. We just had the rapid decline which I expect will not be continued into next year. In that case the sea ice removal program is well on the way for the next five years.

This once again shows why CO2 emissions should not be linked to global warming over which we have little or no control or reliable understanding.

The mission of our generation is to replace fossil fuels from the energy equation and to manufacture soils throughout the globe by converting CO2 into biochar and stop wasting our energies second guessing the weather. The Holocene is maturing very nicely and is proving to be as stable as a rock.

Lorne Gunter: Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof

http://www.nationalpost.com/893554.bin

In early September, I began noticing a string of news stories about scientists rejecting the orthodoxy on global warming. Actually, it was more like a string of guest columns and long letters to the editor since it is hard for skeptical scientists to get published in the cabal of climate journals now controlled by the Great Sanhedrin of the environmental movement.

Still, the number of climate change skeptics is growing rapidly. Because a funny thing is happening to global temperatures -- they're going down, not up.

On the same day (Sept. 5) that areas of southern Brazil were recording one of their latest winter snowfalls ever and entering what turned out to be their coldest September in a century, Brazilian meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart explained that extreme cold or snowfall events in his country have always been tied to "a negative PDO" or Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Positive PDOs -- El Ninos -- produce above-average temperatures in South America while negative ones -- La Ninas -- produce below average ones.

Dr. Hackbart also pointed out that periods of solar inactivity known as "solar minimums" magnify cold spells on his continent. So, given that August was the first month since 1913 in which no sunspot activity was recorded -- none -- and during which solar winds were at a 50-year low, he was not surprised that Brazilians were suffering (for them) a brutal cold snap. "This is no coincidence," he said as he scoffed at the notion that manmade carbon emissions had more impact than the sun and oceans on global climate.

Also in September, American Craig Loehle, a scientist who conducts computer modelling on global climate change, confirmed his earlier findings that the so-called Medieval Warm Period (MWP) of about 1,000 years ago did in fact exist and was even warmer than 20th-century temperatures.

Prior to the past decade of climate hysteria and Kyoto hype, the MWP was a given in the scientific community. Several hundred studies of tree rings, lake and ocean floor sediment, ice cores and early written records of weather -- even harvest totals and censuses --confirmed that the period from 800 AD to 1300 AD was unusually warm, particularly in Northern Europe.

But in order to prove the climate scaremongers' claim that 20th-century warming had been dangerous and unprecedented -- a result of human, not natural factors -- the MWP had to be made to disappear. So studies such as Michael Mann's "hockey stick," in which there is no MWP and global temperatures rise gradually until they jump up in the industrial age, have been adopted by the UN as proof that recent climate change necessitates a reordering of human economies and societies.

Dr. Loehle's work helps end this deception.

Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University, says, "It's practically a slam dunk that we are in for about 30 years of global cooling," as the sun enters a particularly inactive phase. His examination of warming and cooling trends over the past four centuries shows an "almost exact correlation" between climate fluctuations and solar energy received on Earth, while showing almost "no correlation at all with CO2."

An analytical chemist who works in spectroscopy and atmospheric sensing, Michael J. Myers of Hilton Head, S. C., declared, "Man-made global warming is junk science," explaining that worldwide manmade CO2 emission each year "equals about 0.0168% of the atmosphere's CO2 concentration ... This results in a 0.00064% increase in the absorption of the sun's radiation. This is an insignificantly small number."

Other international scientists have called the manmade warming theory a "hoax," a "fraud" and simply "not credible."

While not stooping to such name-calling, weather-satellite scientists David Douglass of the University of Rochester and John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville nonetheless dealt the True Believers a devastating blow last month.

For nearly 30 years, Professor Christy has been in charge of NASA's eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily around the globe. In a paper co-written with Dr. Douglass, he concludes that while manmade emissions may be having a slight impact, "variations in global temperatures since 1978 ... cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide."

Moreover, while the chart below was not produced by Douglass and Christy, it was produced using their data and it clearly shows that in the past four years -- the period corresponding to reduced solar activity -- all of the rise in global temperatures since 1979 has disappeared.

It may be that more global warming doubters are surfacing because there just isn't any global warming.

National Post