'A government big enough to give you everything you want, is
big enough to take away everything you have.' .....Gerald Ford
******************
We start with an
important editorial by Steve Milloy [ITEM #1].
He relates how enviro-zealots are trying to stop the building of
coal-fired power plants, by cutting off investment funds from banks [see also
WSJ story – ITEM #2].
Will John McCain, if
elected, be willing to preside over the de-industrialization of the
nation? This is the inevitable
consequence of legislative efforts to control CO2 emissions. In the past, McCain has been a coauthor of
Cap-and-Trade legislation (which failed) and has recently reaffirmed his
concern about global warming [see ITEM #1].
The safest thing for him, as a candidate, is to make no commitments
concerning CO2 mitigation but simply state that he will follow the ‘best available
science.’ The party platform should use
similar words. Of course, I fully expect
it will become quite evident soon that CO2 is not an important factor in
climate change.
Let’s therefore restate
a rational energy policy, freed from irrational fears of GW, leading towards
energy independence [ITEM #3] [see TWTW Jan 12]
1. Climate
science has evolved during the past year.
Contrary to IPCC (and Al Gore) the data now give quite firm evidence
AGAINST any significant manmade warming (from greenhouse gases). [ITEM #4]
2. This means
that carbon dioxide (from fossil-fuel burning) is NOT a pollutant. Therefore
emission control of CO2 is pointless and also makes energy very costly.
3. It is also
counterproductive to energy security.
4. Our policy
recommendation is to phase out natural gas (methane) for electric power
generation (now about 20% in US and 40% (!) in UK), replace it with
coal/nuclear, and use gas as a clean transportation fuel (in the form of
Compressed Natural Gas -- CNG) for buses, trucks, and all fleet vehicles. NOTE: The additional CO2 from coal is not
relevant for climate.
5. In the
Such policies would
carry even more weight for the UK (which derives 40% of its electric power from
natural gas) – or for small countries like Israel or Taiwan that import nearly
all their energy fuels, yet feel called upon to ‘save the climate.’
****************************************
The Gore.niks Global
Warmers are in trouble:
Antarctic ice shelf
redux [ITEM #5]; Arctic ice redux [ITEM #6]; Biofuels redux [ITEM #7]
Late news: The blog desmog.blog,
which is being paid to smear skeptics, is linked to a criminal source of
funding [ITEM #8]
And finally: A Heartland Institute
invitation to the Climate Conference in NY City, March 2-4, with hundreds of GW
skeptics [ITEM #9]. This momentous event
will be difficult to ignore
################################################################################################
1.
The lights may soon go out in
“Electric power has already become painfully expensive in
The core of the problem is that the region’s ability to meet its
ever-increasing demand for electricity is being short-circuited by
environmental activists who are doing every thing they can to make it as
difficult as possible to generate and transmit power.
“Environmental groups say the region should try harder to save energy
before it goes out looking for more,” the Post reported. “The cheapest power
plant out there is the one you never have to build,” one activist told the
Post.
The euphemism the environmentalists use for this strategy is
“conservation.” But “rationing” is perhaps the most honest descriptor.
The environmentalists’ new tactic in their war against us meeting our
basic energy needs focuses on coal-burning power plants, which are at the top
of the list of carbon dioxide emitters. “Increasing electricity almost
inevitably leads to more global warming emissions,” an activist told the Post.
And the activists have used global warming fears to great effect.
“Stymied in their plans to build coal-burning power plants, American
utilities are turning to natural gas to meet expected growth in demand, risking
a new upward spiral in the price of that fuel,” the New York Times reported
this week.
Since environmentalist-fomented opposition to coal plants is rising
around the country -- including a new policy by major banks Citigroup, JPMorgan
Chase and Morgan Stanley to discourage coal-plant construction -- utility
executives say they have little choice even though the boom in natural gas demand
will send electricity prices even higher, according to the Times.
Once again, “environmental groups argue that utilities should focus on
cutting demand for power, rather than building new capacity,” the Times
reported.
One possible way out of the global warming-angle of this mess, is to
capture and sequester carbon dioxide emissions of power plants. Although this
column recently reported about the difficulty and expense of carbon capture and
sequestration (CCS), the Bush Administration has nevertheless been
participating in a project called FutureGen, a futuristic, zero-emission power
plant. The federal government was slated to pay for 75 percent of FutureGen’s
costs.
But just last week, the Department of Energy announced that it was
pulling out of FutureGen, after costs skyrocketed from $800 million to $1.8
billion. Undersecretary of Energy C.H. “Bud” Albright told FutureGen officials
that the agency wasn’t interested in “building Disneyland in some swamp in
With FutureGen off the drawing board, at least for the time being,
there are no significant CCS projects ongoing in the
Without a plan for CCS, environmental zealots will then be able to
continue their anti-energy jihad against an essentially defenseless coal-based
electricity producers and their consumers.
Of course, coal-based electricity producers and consumers aren’t really
defenseless. They could (gasp!) challenge the dubious notion that manmade
carbon dioxide emissions drive global climate -- click to view a video on this
subject -- rather than just accepting politically correct myths that have been
rammed down their throats without, so far, meaningful opportunity for debate.
It’s an idea that’s worth considering, especially given the apparent
lack of understanding of the climate issue, even among those who aspire to be
president.
In response to a question on global warming during the last Republican
presidential debate before the Super Tuesday primaries, for example, Sen. John
McCain declared that, “I applaud [efforts] to try to eliminate the greenhouse
gas emissions that are causing climate change. Now, suppose that [I am] wrong,
and there's no such thing as climate change. And we adopt these green
technologies… Then all we’ve done is
give our kids a cleaner world.”
But if we rush to blindly adopt greenhouse gas emission controls, we
could disrupt energy markets and cause much economic harm. And in real life, a
poorer world tends to be a dirtier world. Moreover, since carbon dioxide is a
colorless and odorless gas that naturally makes up a very small part of our
atmosphere and since manmade carbon dioxide is an exceedingly small part of
total global carbon dioxide emissions, it’s hard to see how reducing emissions
will make the world “cleaner.”
Sen. McCain continued, “But suppose we do nothing…and we don't
eliminate this $400 billion dependence we have on foreign oil. Some of that
money goes to terrorist organizations and also contributes to greenhouse gas
emissions. Then what kind of a world have we given our children?”
Earth to Sen. McCain:
If we don’t have serious debate on these issues, the combination of
unscrupulous anti-growth environmentalists and uninformed grandstanding
politicians will certainly lead to lights out for
-----------------------------------------------------
Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and DemandDebate.com. He is a
junk science expert, and advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at
the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
*******************************************
Three major investment banks,
Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley, will announce new
environmental standards today that are expected to make it more difficult for
large coal-fired power plants in the
*************************
3. REDUCING OIL IMPORTS
SFS/
2/9/08
During
the same decade, US oil consumption rose, from 18.6 million barrels per day
(mbd) to 20.7 mbd; it actually peaked at 20.8 in 2005. Sales of gasoline increased from 8.2 to 9.0
mbd – also by over 10 percent, while diesel went from 2.4 to 3.5 mbd. But as domestic production declined, oil
imports rose from 8.2 to 10.1 mbd, an increase of 23%.
How
much of the (9.0+3.5) mbd of oil can be replaced by natural gas? Recall that on a BTU basis, 1 mbd = 2.1
TCF/yr. Over time, methane now burned in
utility boilers, could replace nearly 3 mbd of gasoline and diesel – and
therefore gradually reduce oil imports by the same amount, roughly 30%, to
7mbd. According to national
transportation statistics, trucks and buses consumed about 1.7 mbd of petroleum-based
fuels; they could readily switch to using lower-priced (and cleaner) compressed
natural gas (CNG). Other fleet vehicles
might also find CNG to be advantageous.
Oil
imports can be reduced further by improvements in efficiency. Over a period of years, a fleet of
hybrid-electric cars might achieve a fuel reduction of 50% (or roughly 2mbd);
plug-in commuter cars can cut their oil consumption to zero, saving perhaps
another 2mbd. Stranded gas can boost the
supply of liquid transportation fuel by being turned into methanol and dimethyl
ether (DME). Access to domestic oil
resources currently locked up on federal lands can do the rest and make the
nation energy independent -- or close to
it – reducing the outflow of dollars and improving the
Similar
actions by oil consumers everywhere will substantially reduce the world price
of oil, the income of oil-exporting nations – and perhaps also the funding for
international terrorism.
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4. COMPUTER MODELS FAIL TO PREDICT CLIMATE
Drew Thornley, The Heartland
Institute
Environment News, February 2008
Computer models
that form the basis for future global warming predictions have projected
significantly more warming in recent years than has actually occurred,
concludes a comprehensive new scientific study.
"A Comparison
of Tropical Temperature Trends with Model Predictions," published in the
December 2007 International Journal of Climatology, is the latest study
to cast doubt on the efficacy of climate modeling. Climate scientists David H.
Douglass, John Christy, and S. Fred Singer analyzed 22 climate models and found
their predictions at odds with actual warming over the past 30 years.
No Human
Fingerprint
Most of the models
predicted significant middle- and upper-troposphere warming, yet actual warming
was minimal.
Douglass and his
colleagues write, "Model results and observed temperature trends are in
disagreement in most of the tropical troposphere, being separated by more than
twice the uncertainty of the model mean. In layers near 5 km, the modelled
trend is 100 to 300% higher than observed, and, above 8 km, modelled and
observed trends have opposite signs."
Christy, an
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contributor, noted in a
December 6 press statement, "Satellite data and independent balloon data
agree that atmospheric warming trends do not exceed those of the surface.
Greenhouse models, on the other hand, demand that atmospheric trend values be
2-3 times greater. Satellite observations suggest that greenhouse models ignore
negative feedbacks, produced by clouds and by water vapor, that diminish the
warming effects of carbon dioxide."
Many top climate
scientists point out climate models are incapable of handling confounding
factors such as cloud cover and water vapor (the dominant greenhouse gas), thus
distorting climate predictions.
Additionally, they
note, the models do not reflect the actual causes of warming. Richard Lindzen,
a professor of meteorology at MIT, says the models used by the IPCC and other
alarmists assign too much warming resulting from increases in atmospheric
carbon dioxide, rendering the models' predictions inaccurate.
Singer writes,
"Dire predictions of future warming are based almost entirely on computer
climate models, yet these models do not accurately understand the role of water
vapor. Plus, computer models cannot account for the observed cooling of much of
the past century (1940-75), nor for the observed patterns of warming. For
example, the Antarctic is cooling while models predict warming. And where the
models call for the middle atmosphere to warm faster than the surface, the
observations show the exact opposite."
Computer
Programs Inadequate
Computers, no
matter how big, cannot take account of all of the earth's complexities and
processes, critics of the alarmist models also note. As a result, no current
climate model can explain the causes of climate changes, accurately predict
future climate, or form a sound basis for environmental policy.
"Mother Nature
simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, beyond the
mastery of mere mortals (such as scientists) and the tools available to
us," Christy was quoted as saying in The Wall Street Journal on
November 1.
"Can the
models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? It seems that the
answer is no," summarized Douglass in the press statement.
"This new
study adds another nail to the coffin of alarmist global warming theory,"
said Sterling Burnett, senior fellow at the
"Alarmist
global warming theory is totally dependent on computer models predicting
accelerating warming in the future," Burnett noted, "yet the models
have predicted such warming in the past, and the predicted warming has failed
to materialize. This hardly seems a reliable indicator of future warming."
Drew Thornley (dthornley@texaspolicy.com) is
a policy analyst at the
*****************************************************************
5.
EXPERTS CHALLENGE ICE SHELF CLAIM
Two scientists have claimed
that climate change was not the only cause of the collapse of a 500bn tonne ice
shelf in Antarctica six years ago. The 656ft (200m) thick, 1,255 sq mile (3,250
sq km) Larsen B shelf broke apart in March 2002.
But Neil Glasser of
In a paper published in the Journal of Glaciology, the pair say that when
Larsen B collapsed it appeared to be the latest in a long line of victims of
Antarctic summer heat waves linked to global warming.
Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey predicted in 1998 that several
ice shelves around the peninsula were doomed because of rising temperatures in
the region, but the speed with which Larsen B went shocked them in 2002.
But Prof Glasser said the dramatic event was "not as simple as we first
thought".
He acknowledged that global warming had a major part to play in the collapse,
but emphasised that it was only one of a number of contributory factors.
"Because large amounts of meltwater appeared on the ice shelf just before
it collapsed, we had always assumed that air temperature increases were to
blame," he added. "But our new
study shows that ice-shelf break up is not controlled simply by climate.
"A number of other atmospheric, oceanic and glaciological factors are
involved. "For example, the location
and spacing of fractures on the ice shelf such as crevasses and rifts are very
important too because they determine how strong or weak the ice shelf is."
Dr Scambos, of the
-----------------------
Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/wales/mid_/7231372.stm
*****************************************
6. ARCTIC ICE REDUX
By Christopher
Booker, 04/02/2008
Last autumn the BBC
and others could scarcely contain their excitement in reporting that the Arctic
ice was melting so fast there would soon be none left.
Sea ice cover had shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded. But for some reason
the warmists are less keen on the latest satellite findings, reported by the US
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on the website
Cryosphere Today by the University of Illinois http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
This body is committed to warmist orthodoxy and contributes to the work of the
UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Yet its graph of northern
hemisphere sea ice area, which shows the ice shrinking from 13,000 million sq
km to just 4 million from the start of 2007 to October, also shows it now
almost back to 13 million sq km.
[http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg]
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.jpg
A second graph, "Global Ice Area", shows a similar
pattern repeated every year since satellite records began in 1979; while a
third, "Southern Hemisphere Ice", shows that sea ice has actually
expanded in recent years, well above its 30-year mean.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg
Still more
inconvenient was the truth about an image that has been relentlessly exploited
to promote this panic over the "vanishing" Arctic ice. It is the
photograph of two polar bears standing forlornly on the fast-melting remains of
an iceberg which has been reproduced thousands of times to show that there will
soon be no bears left (ignoring evidence that their numbers have risen
recently).
Now, thanks to a
Canadian journalist, Carole Williams (on
NewsWithViews.com), we can read the story behind this picture, which was
taken in 2004 just off
The image was copied by another member of the crew and passed on to Environment
Canada. Then it was eagerly adopted by the warmist propaganda machine - above
all by Al Gore, who used it to powerful effect as an emotive backdrop to his
highly lucrative lectures.
"Their habitat is melting," he likes to declaim, "beautiful
animals, literally being forced off the planet."
As the old joke has it, it seems those famous bears were not drowning after
all, they were just waving. But the BBC is no more likely to tell us that than
it was to lead the news with last week's snow in
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7. USE OF
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1151861v1
E-mail: tsearchi@princeton.edu
Most prior studies have found
that substituting biofuels for gasoline will reduce greenhouse gases because
biofuels sequester carbon through the growth of the feedstock. These analyses
have failed to count the carbon emissions that occur as farmers worldwide
respond to higher prices and convert forest and grassland to new cropland to
replace the grain (or cropland) diverted to biofuels. Using a worldwide
agricultural model to estimate emissions from land use change, we found that
corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles
greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167
years. Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on
============================================
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1152747v1
E-mail: tilman@umn.edu
Increasing energy use, climate
change, and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels make switching to
low-carbon fuels a high priority. Biofuels are a potential low-carbon energy
source, but whether biofuels offer carbon savings depends on how they are
produced. Converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands to produce
food-based biofuels in
*****************************
8. BLOG FUNDER GUILTY OF MONEY-LAUNDERING
James M. Taylor, The
Heartland Institute
Published in: Environment News ,: February 2008
John Lefebvre, the
top financial benefactor of the DeSmog Blog, is facing substantial prison time
after pleading guilty to federal money-laundering charges.
The DeSmog Blog is
operated by a small group of public relations people who specialize in
attempting to discredit respected scientists and policy analysts who disagree
with alarmist global warming theory.
Ironically, DeSmog
Blog's favorite tactic is to claim scientists and policy analysts who disagree
with alarmist global warming theory are funded by "dirty money."
The revelation of
the blog's major source of funding as a convicted money launderer may undermine
DeSmog's attempts to smear the integrity of respected, law-abiding scientists
who disagree with them.
Apparently
unashamed by their criminal connections, the DeSmog Blog Web site proclaims,
"The DeSmogBlog team is especially grateful to our benefactor John
Lefebvre. ... John has been outspoken, uncompromising, and courageous in
challenging those who would muddy the climate change debate, and he has enabled
and inspired the same standard on the blog."
Lefebvre, who
pleaded guilty in June 2007, faces up to 20 years in a federal penitentiary.
James M. Taylor (taylor@heartland.org) is a
senior fellow of The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment
& Climate News.
********************************************************
9. GLOBAL WARMING SKEPTICS PREPARE FOR
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE IN
James M. Taylor, The Heartland Institute
Environment News, February 2008
Hundreds of the
world's leading "skeptics" of the theory of man-made global warming
will meet in
The conference is
being organized by The Heartland Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, and
cosponsoring organizations including the International Climate Science
Coalition, Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, and Science &
Environmental Policy Project. The
Heartland Institute is the publisher of Environment & Climate News.
"The purpose
of the conference is to provide a platform for the hundreds of scientists,
economists, and policy experts who dissent from the so-called 'consensus' on
global warming," said Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute.
"Hundreds of
scientists, many of them with distinguished careers and many appearances in the
peer-reviewed literature, believe the Modern Warming is natural and
moderate," Bast noted. "They are being censored by the press and
demonized by environmental advocacy groups.
"This is their
chance to speak out," said Bast. "If 400 or 500 'skeptics' from
around the world assemble in
-----------------------
Plans for the
conference include five keynote presentations and 25 panels of scientists
discussing a wide variety of global warming-related issues. Approximately 100
experts will give formal presentations at the conference, with several hundred
others expected to attend and share information in a more informal manner.
Five tracks of
panels will address paleoclimatology, climatology, global warming impacts, the
economics of global warming, and political factors. Each track will consist of four or five
panels composed of experts on some aspect of the general topic.
Many of the
presenters will provide written papers to supplement their presentations, which
will be collected and edited for publication following the event. Other follow-up activities include planning
for a follow-up conference in
---------------------------
The Heartland
Institute is providing travel scholarships to qualified scientists, economists,
and policy experts willing to speak at the event. A limited number of scholarships also will be
available to elected officials and government officials interested in
attending.
Registration for
the event is $625 (€ 415) before February 15, and $720 (€ 480) after that date.
Media and students may attend at the special rate of $312 (€ 200) before
February 15, and $360 (€ 240) after that date.
