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Newsletter (July 10, 2009)
In this issue
Featured- Failing Schools Mean Poor Public Debate
- In Political Ads, Christian Left Mounts Sermonic Campaigns
- The EPA Silences a Climate Skeptic
- Clean Air Act Regulation of CO2: Rough Road Ahead
Debate- Some Countries Rethinking Climate Change Measures
- No Climate Debate? Yes, There Is
Science- New Climate Change Report: More Scary Scenarios from Climate Extremists
- More Evidence that the Sun, Not Man, Controls Earth’s Temperature
Economics- Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour's Senate Testimony on Energy Policy
- What Will Cap and Trade Cost People in Your Congressional District?
Meet the Critics: Henrik Svensmark & Joanne Nova
Briefly Noted
Featuredby Anthony J. Sadar and Susan T. Cammarata
Certified Consulting Meteorologist (Sadar); Environmental Lawyer (Cammarata)
Washington Times, June 18, 2009
The answers to the age-old questions: "Why can't Johnny read?" "Why can't Johnny write?" and "Why can't Johnny do arithmetic?" are the solution to the inquiry "Why can't Johnny think for himself?" . . .
. . . a rapidly growing body of knowledgeable atmospheric and environmental scientists and engineers are becoming man-made global warming skeptics. These scientists and engineers, who typically are not beneficiaries of the bloated bag of government cash available for climate studies or are simply retired from the field, are discovering the substantial alternative explanations to "human-released CO2 = man-made global warming formula. Such alternative explanations include the overarching long-term balance in nature between what is exhaled by people and their industrial activities and what is "inhaled" by vegetation and the oceans, along with variability in incoming solar radiation, the disproportionate impact of cosmic rays on cloud condensation nuclei formation at different altitudes in the troposphere, and the combined contributions from naturally occurring El Nino, Pacific decadal and North Atlantic oscillation events, to name a few.
Why can't Johnny even consider these alternative views. The problem is that Johnny has not been instructed in how to think - how to evaluate a proposed cause and effect, how to weigh alternatives, how to distinguish between hypothesis and reality, or simply how to put things into perspective. Instead, Johnny has been hobbled in his assessment skills by a woefully inadequate early education. And higher education generally does little to remedy his situation. At graduation, Johnny has been largely indoctrinated, not educated. Thus, his cap and gown do little to cover his understanding of "cap and trade." . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Stephanie Simon
Reporter, Wall Street Journal
Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2009
Randy Brinson, a conservative political consultant in Alabama, has been fielding anxious calls for weeks from business interests across the South.
Their concern is massive ad blitz on Christian and country-music stations across 10 states. The ads, funded by a left-leaning coalition, urge support for congressional legislation to curb greenhouse-gas emissions -- by framing the issue as an urgent matter of Biblical morality. . . .
. . . Dr. Brinson tells his clients they are right to be worried. Such an aggressive political campaign by the religious left is unexpected, he says, and could prove powerful. "This is the first time I've seen a moderate group of evangelicals come together and do a coordinated campaign," said Dr. Brinson. He is warning clients: "You're going to hear a lot more of this."
Emboldened by what they see as a kindred spirit in the White House, progressive and liberal Christians are stepping up their political activism in a big way. . . .
. . . The religious right and secular conservatives are taking notice. In recent weeks, key religious-right groups such as Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council have heavily promoted the work of a group called the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. The Cornwall Alliance dismisses global-warming alarms as hype and argues that forceful action to cut greenhouse-gas emissions could cripple the economy and harm the poor. It is organizing conservative pastors to carry this message to the pews. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Kimberley A. Strassel
Columnist and Editorial Board Member, Wall Street Journal
Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2009
. . . one of President Barack Obama's first acts was a memo to agencies demanding new transparency in government, and science. The nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lisa Jackson, joined in, exclaiming, "As administrator, I will ensure EPA's efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and program, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency." In case anyone missed the point, Mr. Obama took another shot at his predecessors in April, vowing that "the days of science taking a backseat to ideology are over."
Except, that is, when it comes to Mr. Carlin, a senior analyst in the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics and a 35-year veteran of the agency. [Around] March . . . Mr. Carlin and a colleague presented a 98-page analysis arguing the agency should take another look, as the science behind man-made global warming is inconclusive at best. The analysis noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend. It pointed out problems with climate models. It highlighted new research that contradicts apocalyptic scenarios. "We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA," the report read.
The response to Mr. Carlin was an email from his boss, Al McGartland, forbidding him from "any direct communication" with anyone outside of his office with regard to his analysis. When Mr. Carlin tried again to disseminate his analysis, Mr. McGartland decreed: "The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office." (Emphasis added.)
Mr. McGartland blasted yet another email: "With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don't want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate." Ideology? Nope, not here. Just us science folk. Honest.
The emails were unearthed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Republican officials are calling for an investigation; House Energy Committee ranking member Joe Barton sent a letter with pointed questions to Mrs. Jackson, which she's yet to answer. The EPA has issued defensive statements, claiming Mr. Carlin wasn't ignored. But there is no getting around that the Obama administration has flouted its own promises of transparency. . . .
. . . The Carlin dustup falls into a murkier category. Unlike annual reports, the Obama EPA's endangerment finding is a policy act. As such, EPA is required to make public those agency documents that pertain to the decision, to allow for public comment. Court rulings say rulemaking records must include both "the evidence relied upon and the evidence discarded." In refusing to allow Mr. Carlin's study to be circulated, the agency essentially hid it from the docket.
. . . Unable to defend the EPA's actions, the climate-change crew -- , led by anonymous EPA officials -- is doing what it does best: trashing Mr. Carlin as a "denier." He is, we are told, "only" an economist (he in fact holds a degree in physics from CalTech). It wasn't his "job" to look at this issue (he in fact works in an office tasked with "informing important policy decisions with sound economics and other sciences.") His study was full of sham science. (The majority of it in fact references peer-reviewed studies.) . . .
Related item: Carlin's Report
Read the rest.Back to top by Marlo Lewis
Senior Fellow, Competitive Enterprise Institute
MasterResource, June 3, 2009
Even if energy realists and their allies fend off Waxman-Markey, wave after wave of global warming regulation could still sweep across the U.S. economy under the aegis of EPA and the Clean Air Act.
As explained in a previous post, the carbon dioxide (CO2) litigation campaign that begat the Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA decision (April 2007) could shut down much of our economy and replace self-government via the people’s elected representatives with the rule of bureaucrats and courts.
Energy realists need to school themselves in this constellation of issues, because the clock is ticking. On April 17, the Environmental Protection Agency, responding to Mass. v. EPA, published a proposed rule concluding that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from new motor vehicles cause or contribute to health- and welfare-endangering “air pollution.” The comment period ends on June 23.Once EPA finalizes the rule, commonly known as an “endangerment finding,” the agency will be required, under Section 202 of the Clean Air Act, to establish first-ever greenhouse gas emission standards for new motor vehicles. But because the Clean Air Act is a highly interconnected statute, with similar endangerment tests dispersed through multiple provisions of the Act, the Sec. 202 endangerment finding and associated emission standards will ignite a regulatory cascade. . . .
. . . The politics of CO2 regulation are ultimately more important than the legalities. My hunch is that EPA will not be able to control the cascading effects of CO2 regulation, and that sooner or later the backlash will come. As a ’60s poet once put it, the darkest hour is just before the dawn.
Read the rest.Back to top Debateby Chuck Colson
Chairman and Founder, Prison Fellowship Ministries
BreakPoint, July 6, 2009
. . . As a recent article in the Wall Street Journal tells us, at the same time that the House was debating its bill, other countries were having second thoughts about their already enacted measures.
The Polish Academy of Sciences, for one, has publicly challenged the science behind man-made global warming. And only 11 percent of Czech citizens believe that human activity contributes to the measured rise in temperatures. Even New Zealand, rightly regarded as an ecological wonderland, suspended its emissions-reduction program.
Then there’s Australia. Earlier this year, the government submitted its proposal to limit CO2 emissions. Given the potential costs and the prospect of, as some Australian commentators put it, “carbon cops” knocking on people’s doors, Australian senator Steve Fielding asked the obvious question: Is this necessary?
Fielding, an engineer, was concerned that the government had accepted “one scientific explanation for climate change at face value.” So he examined the science himself, including asking the Obama administration to address his concerns about the science.
While the administration didn’t respond to his request, what Fielding learned persuaded him not to support the proposal. He wasn’t willing to risk job losses for “unconvincing green science.”
And he’s not alone. As the Journal put it, “The number of [global warming] skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling.” . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Jeff Jacoby
Columnist, Boston Globe
Boston Globe, July 1, 2009
. . . No debate? The debate over global warming is more robust than it has been in years, and not only in America. “In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming,’’ Kimberly Strassel noted in The Wall Street Journal the other day. “In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted . . . Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the ‘new religion.’ ’’
Closer to home, the noted physicist Hal Lewis (emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara) e-mails me a copy of a statement he and several fellow scientists, including physicists Will Happer and Robert Austin of Princeton, Laurence Gould of the University of Hartford, and climatologist Richard Lindzen of MIT, have sent to Congress. “The sky is not falling,’’ they write. Far from warming, “the Earth has been cooling for 10 years’’ - a trend that “was not predicted by the alarmists’ computer models.’’
Fortune magazine recently profiled veteran climatologist John Christy, a lead author of the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. With his green credentials, Fortune observed, Christy is the warm-mongers’ “worst nightmare - an accomplished climate scientist with no ties to Big Oil who has produced reams and reams of data that undermine arguments that the earth’s atmosphere is warming at an unusual rate and question whether the remedies being talked about in Congress will actually do any good.’’
No one who cares about the environment or the nation’s economic well-being should take it on faith that climate change is a crisis, or that drastic changes to the economy are essential to “save the planet.’’ Hundreds of scientists reject the alarmist narrative. For non-experts, a steadily-widening shelf of excellent books surveys the data in laymen’s terms and exposes the weaknesses in the doomsday scenario - among others, “Climate Confusion’’ by Roy W. Spencer, “Climate of Fear’’ by Thomas Gale Moore, “Taken by Storm’’ by Christopher Essex and Ross McKitrick, and “Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years’’ by S. Fred Singer and Dennis Avery.
If the case for a war on carbon dioxide were unassailable, no one would have to warn against debating it. The 212 House members who voted against Waxman-Markey last week plainly don’t believe the matter is settled. They’re right.
Read the rest.
Related items:
The Climate Change Climate Change
by Kimberley A. Strassel
Columnist and Editorial Board Member, Wall Street Journal
Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2009
76% of African-Americans Want Delay on Climate Legislation Until Economy Recovers
by Amy Ridenour
President, National Center for Public Policy Research
Amy Ridenour's National Center Blog, June 26, 2009Back to top Scienceby David R. Legates
Director, Delaware Environmental Observing System, University of Deleware; Senior Scientist, Marshall Institute; Fellow, Independent Institute; Scholar, Competitive Enterprise Institute
Special to the Cornwall Alliance, July 8, 2009
Just before the House of Representatives voted on a massive climate bill, the government released a report on climate change. It reiterated the Oscar-winning theme from An Inconvenient Truth – impacts from human-induced climate change are already occurring and that they are going to get worse. Much worse.
But the report is so extreme that it would make Al Gore blush. The authors appear to have learned much from the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate – be extreme and loose with the facts. Oh, and that timing is everything, especially when it comes to congressional legislation.
The report is so extreme that I’m not sure where to start. Fortunately, Bradford Plumer, writing in the New Republic, has highlighted what he sees as its scariest scenarios. I’ll start there.
Plumer first notes that the report claims the mainland United States is likely to warm from 7°F to 11.5°F by 2090 – 1°F per decade. The report states temperature rose more than 2°F over the last 50 years but fails to mention that it fell more than 2°F in the 25 years before that. So from 1934 to 2008 (75 years), the net effect has been no change in air temperature over the United States! Thus, the rise in CO2 over the past 75 years – a period accounting for most of the industrial emissions – has had no effect whatsoever on air temperature. The extreme figures cited by the report come from climate models, which always have strongly linked air temperature to rising CO2 and provide the basis for the ‘scary’ scenarios that Steve Schneider of Stanford University has argued scientists are pressured to offer up to get the public’s attention…and provide them with financial support.
Plumer’s eyebrows are raised again by a slide showing that by 2080, Washington DC will experience 90 to 100 days each year – more than three full months – with air temperatures above 90°F. And places in the Deep South will experience more than half the year with temperatures above 90°F! But these are the same models that for years have been criticized for producing physically impossible high maximum air temperatures. Why? Because they fail to take into account the fact that Washington DC, for example, is surrounded by water. In swampy environments, about nine times more energy is used to evaporate water than to raise air temperature. The only way these ridiculous scenarios are likely to play out is if the Chesapeake Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, and all their tributaries dry up. Not very likely! . . .
. . . No respectable alarmist publication would be complete, however, without the requisite scare of sea-level rise. Historically, sea level has risen only about 7 inches over the past century and that rise has remained surprisingly constant. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, indicated that sea level rise by 2100 would be between 6 inches and, in their worst case scenario, 17 inches. But in keeping with the alarmist fantasy of this report, Plumer notes that sea levels are to rise 3 to 4 feet by century’s end. That’s an overstatement of the IPCC’s worst case scenario by at least a factor of two! How can this report ignore the ‘scientific consensus’ that is the IPCC? When you need to offer up scary scenarios, it seems acceptable to deviate from the IPCC ‘party line’, although I doubt anyone will criticize the authors of this report for it.
The full report offers up such a scary, extreme view of climate change that it could qualify for one of Al’s movies – The Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock, that is. But unlike this report and An Inconvenient Truth, at least Hitchcock’s movies were entertaining…and believable!
Read the rest.Back to top by E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
Special to the Cornwall Alliance, July 8, 2009
In his book The Chilling Stars, Henrik Svensmark explained his theory that changes in solar magnetic wind output could control changes in cloud formation on Earth and thus control changes in Earth's surface temperature. Here's how it works: Earth is bathed in a current of cosmic rays coming from other stars in and beyond the Milky Way. When cosmic rays collide with certain molecules in our atmosphere, they break those apart and form new compounds, some of which, electrically charged, are excellent nuclei for condensation of water vapor--that is, for the formation of clouds. Clouds, in turn, have a net cooling effect on the Earth by reflecting solar energy back into space before it reaches the surface.
The cosmic ray current isn't steady. It varies. The stronger it is, the more clouds form, cooling the Earth--and vice versa. But what causes cosmic ray current to vary? Svensmark has shown very strong correlation between it and the strength of solar magnetic wind--the two vary in tandem, and the solar wind, in turn, varies in tandem with solar energy output. Many scientists, including those working with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, long thought the variation in solar energy output (about 0.1%) was simply too slight to explain late twentieth-century global warming, but they were considering only the energy flux. If Svensmark is right, then solar energy flux is magnified by solar wind flux's effect on cosmic rays and, through them, on cloud formation.
Svensmark argues that the solar wind/cosmic ray/cloud connection is sufficient to explain the vast majority of all observed global temperature change. Not all scientists accept his theory, and some have even called it discredited. But the world's largest particle physics laboratory, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), which funded Svensmark's earlier research, has now funded more comprehensive research, indicating that its leaders respect the work. It could spell the end of manmade global warming doomsaying, as suggested by the powerful correlation shown in the accompanying graph.
Back to top Economicsby Haley Barbour
Governor, Mississippi
Delivered to the Senate Committe on Environment and Public Works, July 7, 2009
. . . The cap and trade tax, the $81 billion of tax increases on the oil and gas industry contained in the President’s budget and the Waxman-Markey renewable energy standard would all drive up costs and drive down economic growth. Don’t take my word for it. President Obama, then a candidate, said to the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2008, “Under my cap and trade plan, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” . . . . .
. . . The gigantic effect of energy policy on American life means Congress should work particularly hard to ensure Americans know the facts about the policies Congress is considering: To the contrary, the House of Representatives added more than 300 pages of its 1200 page energy bill just a few hours before it was brought to the floor and passed. This is just the opposite of what is needed. . . .
. . . There was no question about who would bear these costs: the consumer. . . . Moreover, these increased energy costs will hit small businesses hard and will particularly hurt energy-intensive industries like manufacturing or computer processing. Some manufacturers even predicted these energy policies would cause electricity rate increases that would make their U.S. manufacturing facilities uncompetitive compared to facilities in China, India, Brazil or Russia. . . .
. . . It is hard to believe that at a time when growing our economy is our number one priority, Congress is considering a bill that would reduce economic growth. . . .
. . . A particularly scary feature of the cap and trade tax regime is that anyone can purchase emissions permits. There is nothing to stop a large government like China from investing heavily in CO2 emission permits instead of U.S. Treasuries. The effect, of course, would be that U.S.-located industries could not buy those permits or that they would have to pay much higher prices for the permits, thereby making our businesses even more uncompetitive . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
Special to the Cornwall Alliance, July 8, 2009
The Heritage Foundation released a report on June 25 that shows the costs of H.R. 2998, the so-called "American Clean Energy and Security Act," on a district-by-district basis. What will it cost people in your district? The report gives aggregate figures, but you can calculate the cost per capita easily enough.
For my district (Florida 25), Wikipedia shows population (in 2000) of about 640,000. So I can take the aggregate figures in the Heritage report and divide them by that to figure the per capita cost. Gross state product loss in 2012 of $341.45 million is about $534 per person; the average state product loss in 2012-2035 of $679.81 is about $1,062 per person. Personal income loss for the district of $532.64 in 2012 is about $832 per person, and average annual personal income loss for the district of $308.49 in 2012-2035 is about $482 per person. The average cost per household (assuming average household of four) is simply four times each of those per capita amounts: gross state product loss per household in 2012, $2,136; in 2012-2035, $4,248 per year; personal income loss per household in 2012, $3,328; in 2012-2035, $1,928 per year.
So, you can figure the per capita cost for your own district by looking up its population on Wikipedia and then dividing the aggregate figures in the Heritage report by that number.
Multiply each of those results by 4 to get average cost per household. Then, add to the personal income loss the roughly $1,200 per month in added direct energy costs (electricity, natural gas, gasoline, propane) to the average American household. For households in Florida District 25, that comes to an average net loss of $5,528 in 2012 and of $3,128 per year in 2012-2035. And that, of course, is before adding the increased costs of all goods and services because of the higher cost of the energy used to produce them.Back to top Meet the CriticsHave you ever been at a loss for words when challenged by the alarmist's claim of scientific "consensus," or that dissenting scientists are unqualified? Not only does consensus prove nothing, but the very idea of "consensus" among scientists on catastrophic manmade climate change is simply unfounded. A 2008 Senate Environment and Public Works Minority Report documents dissension around the world:More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent
Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims Two notable critics are:
Henrik Svensmark, Ph.D.
Award-winning physicist Henrik Svensmark is the director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Institute and was a lead scientist for The Cloud Mystery project. Co-author of The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change, Svensmark stated that "it was long thought that clouds were caused by climate change, but now we see that climate change is driven by clouds." Svensmark has defended his position that the earth's climate is controlled largely by drivers external to our atmosphere with extensive research and numerous papers, such as Cosmoclimatology: A New Theory Emerges, Imprint of Galactic Dynamics on Earth's Climate, and Solar Influence on Earth's Climate.
Joanne Nova
A believer in catastrophic manmade global warming from 1990 to 2007, Joanne Nova has spoken out against the religion of blind climate alarmism, notably at the Bali UNFCCC. Intending to give people the necessary "strategies and tools" to defend true science against alarmist predictions, Nova produced The Skeptics Handbook, in which she explains how "the facts have changed since 2003, to the point where there is no evidence left." Nova frequently updates her skeptical website, is a partner of Science Speak with critical scientist David Evans, and is a frequent public science communicator, having recently spoken at the 2009 ICCC--How Science Journalists Pay Homage to Non-Science and Un-Reason.Back to top Briefly NotedAmerica's First Hispanic Justice: It's Not Who You Think
Climate-Bill Breaks Bode Ill for Deficit
Common-Sense Environmentalism
Going Green Can Cost Too Much
More From Two Key Western Governors
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., National Spokesman
Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, http://www.cornwallalliance.org/
Information in this newsletter is for scholarly and educational use only and may not be copied or reproduced for any other purposes without prior permission of the copyright holders.
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