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Newsletter (June 25, 2010)
Above the FoldInhofe EPW Press Blog, June 23, 2010
"After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that everything in the universe is merely ideal. I observed that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it - ‘I refute it thus.'" Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell
Dr. Johnson's famous refutation of Bishop Berkeley came to mind as we pondered the claim, tirelessly recited by advocates, that cap-and-trade will end, or materially reduce, America's dependence on oil. Yet just as Dr. Johnson struck the stone, we point to EPA's recent analysis of the Kerry-Lieberman bill, specifically the chart on page 31, which starkly refutes the notion that cap-and-trade would make even a dent in domestic oil consumption.
As the chart clearly shows, by 2050, in a Kerry-Lieberman world, consumers continue to use oil in volumes only slightly lower than would otherwise be the case. One could reasonably speculate that American drivers might be willing to pay a premium to end dependence on foreign oil, but according to EPA, Kerry-Lieberman would raise gas prices to $5.00 a gallon, and yet all they would get is a budget-breaking gasoline tax.
EPA came to much the same conclusion with last year's Waxman-Markey bill.
In that analysis, the agency found that cap-and-trade would not "substantially change consumer behavior in their vehicle miles traveled or vehicle purchases at the prices at which low GHG emitting automotive technologies can be produced;" and that it "creates little incentive for the introduction of low-GHG automotive technology."
Denny Ellerman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology agrees. "The link between the oil spill and the climate bill in my view is very weak," Ellerman, an economist and part-time professor at MIT, recently told Greenwire. "People are kidding themselves," he said, if they believe penalizing "carbon pollution" will significantly shrink oil imports or the need for more offshore drilling.
In addition to MIT and EPA, there's the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). An EIA analysis of the Waxman-Markey bill found that its cap-and-trade system would shrink petroleum use 5 percent by 2030, compared to the level expected in that year without the bill. That's about 1 million barrels of oil a day. Right now, Americans consume about 19.5 million barrels a day. According to Ellerman, that meager 5 percent drop could drop further in the wake of rapid economic growth.
Maybe President Obama didn't have time to read EPA's or EIA's analysis. He recently praised the Kerry-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill because it "will strengthen our national security by beginning to break our dependence on foreign oil." If by "beginning to break our dependence" he means a slight reduction in oil use in 2050, we stand corrected.
Read the rest.In This Issue
Featured- Climategate: The Dust from the Exposure of Post-Normal Science at Work Just Won't Settle, No Matter How Much True Believers Wish it Would
- Evangelicals and Global Warming
- Heartland Conference Establishes Post-Climategate Consensus
Science & Ecology- Global Average Sea Surface Temperatures Continue Their Plunge
- Trying to Hit a Mosquito with a Sledgehammer
- The Persistence of Species
Economics & Energy- Obama's Energy Pipe Dreams
- Crude Politics
Politics & Debate- Clouding the Truth: A Critique of 'Merchants of Doubt'
- Miracle at the New York Times, Trouble for America
Briefly Noted
Meet the Critics: David H. Douglass, Ph.D.
Landmark Documents from the Cornwall Alliance
Featuredby E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
June 22, 2010
People right at the top of the pecking order of alarmist climate-change “scientists” know exactly what they’re doing—post-normal science, not real science.
Consider Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre and Professor of Climate Change (note that title—not of climate, but of climate change) at the University of East Anglia, home of the Climatic Research Unit, of Climategate infamy. . . .
Lately Hulme and his student Martin Mahoney wrote a review article (PDF) for the journal Progress in Physical Geography that conceded more than Hulme seems to have wanted to concede. . . .
. . . Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous. . . . Lawrence Solomon, author of The Deniers, Fully Revised: The World-Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution and Fraud, picked up on the paper and blogged about it, saying:
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states . . . Hulme took umbrage and thought to correct Solomon . . .
Hulme's attempt to correct and clarify Solomon fails, for reasons Solomon makes obvious. The difference between what Hulme and his student wrote ("Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous. That particular consensus judgement, as are many others in the IPCC reports . . ." [emphasis added]) and what Hulme claims is their "clarification" ("I did not say the ‘IPCC misleads’ anyone – it is claims that are made by other commentators, such as the caricatured claim I offer in the paper, that have the potential to mislead" [emphasis added].) is so obvious as to rise to the level of outright contradiction.
What Solomon has not pointed out is the philosophical--specifically the epistemological--underpinning of Hulme's (and many other climate alarmists') whole approach to climate change debate: post-normal science, the postmodernist, deconstructionist impostor masquerading as science. . . .
Climategate is really the exposure of post-normal science at work. The most perceptive analyses of it published to date are Steven Mosher and Thomas Fuller's Climategate: The CRUtape Letters and A. W. Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science. Those who want a thorough understanding of how "climate science" got so corrupted cannot afford to miss those books.
Read the rest.
Related item:
Climategate and the EPA Endangerment Finding
by Steve McIntyre
Author, Climate Audit
June 21, 2010Back to top by Benjamin B. Phillips
Assistant Professor, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary; Research Fellow, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
Acton Institute, June 23, 2010
. . . Unfortunately, the public-policy response to global warming proposed by some evangelicals makes actually helping the global poor more difficult. The resources of the developed world are vast, but they are still limited. Addressing global warming through capping carbon dioxide emissions at 20 percent of current levels by 2050 will be hugely expensive. Directing a large portion of our resources at this problem will mean that other problems cannot be met. We may be able to meet some needs, but we cannot meet them all. Furthermore, if global warming prevention strategies have a negative impact on the economies of developed countries (as seems likely), this will further shrink the pool of available resources for addressing the pressing needs of the global poor.
If helping the poor in developing nations is made more difficult by the public policy proposals of evangelical environmentalists, then these policies would also undercut the traditional evangelical strategy of using social ministry to win a favorable hearing for the gospel. Drastic reductions of carbon dioxide emissions call for sacrifice on the part of both rich and poor nations. The rich however, are better able to absorb these changes with only marginal adjustments to their lifestyle. The global poor face the more difficult choice. To poor nations, the choice between electricity from expensive and/or unreliable carbon neutral sources and inexpensive, reliable fossil fuel burning sources is no choice at all. If required to build only carbon neutral power plants, which they cannot afford, they will not have power at all. The result will be continued exposure to a wide range of environmental hazards that lead to disease, malnutrition, and early death.
To hear a Western (i.e., rich!) evangelical environmentalist tell the poor that they must sacrifice the technologies that would improve the length and quality of life for them and their families in order to achieve a merely speculative benefit they will never see can only make the poor less likely to listen to the gospel that the evangelical brings. Such disillusionment will only deepen when it is realized that those evangelicals continue to enjoy the same lifesaving technologies they are effectively asking the poor to forego.
Read the rest.Back to top by Marc Sheppard
American Thinker, June 20, 2010
. . . The Oklahoma Republican [Senator James Inhofe], who had assured attendees of last year’s ICCC on Capitol Hill that no cap-and-tax bill would ever pass the Senate, now stood before C-SPAN’s cameras doing what only one major news organization – Fox -- had done before him: acknowledging the existence and significance of the 700-plus scientists, economists, policymakers, and concerned citizens gathering some 600 miles away in Chicago. And their collective objective to “build public awareness of the global warming ‘realism’ movement,” so that “sound science and economics, rather than exaggeration and hype” might “determine what actions, if any, are taken to address the problem of climate change.”
Had the mainstream media acted responsibly, then every word spoken at the first major post-Climategate climate colloquium would have indeed built public awareness of the implausibility of manmade global warming and, consequently, any job-killing legislation, treaties or regulations designed to “control” it. But ours is an agenda-driven MSM – brazenly toting water for a president and Hill Democrats shamelessly rolling out the Gulf-coast disaster crash-cart to reanimate their flat-lined “climate” bill.
Mine is the task of summarizing – to the best of my ability -- the current state of climate reality, as espoused before me one month ago by no less than the greatest minds analyzing the subject today. And yours is the opportunity to quickly absorb the collective wisdom of over 75 experts speaking at 5 plenary and 20 breakout sessions, and countless marvelous conversations, all spread over 3 days. And to discover or affirm the myriad inconvenient truths behind the “global warming” hype.
Let’s begin with arguably the most significant but unquestionably the most conference-ubiquitous. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Science & Ecologyby Roy W. Spencer
Principal Research Scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville; Author, DrRoySpencer.com; Author, Climate Confusion and The Great Global Warming Blunder
June 18, 2010
Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) measured by the AMSR-E instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite continue their plunge as a predicted La Nina approaches. The following plot, updated through yesterday (June 17, 2010) shows that the cooling in the Nino34 region in the tropical east Pacific is well ahead of the cooling in the global average SST, something we did not see during the 2007-08 La Nina event (click on it for the large, undistorted version): . . .
Read the rest.Back to top World Climate Report, June 8, 2010
. . . in a recent paper in Nature, Oxford University’s Peter Gething and colleagues from Oxford and the University of Florida took a careful look at global malaria data to see if the predicted trend was correct. They uncovered data from around the year 1900 showing where malaria was observed. . . .
It’s fair to say that everyone who works on this issue is pleased that malaria is less of a problem now. This speaks to the importance of intervention and awareness programs in fighting transmission. . . .
In other words, if we are really interested in stopping the spread of malaria, there are more effective ways of dealing with it than undertaking draconian global legislative efforts to reduce greenhouse gas levels—the equivalent of pummeling a mosquito with a sledgehammer.
Read the rest.Back to top by Sherwood, Craig, and Keith Idso
President, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change; Former USDA Research Physicist; Fromer Adjunct Professor of Geology, Botany, and Microbiology, Arizona State University; Author, Carbon Dioxide and Global Change (Sherwood); Chairman, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change; Co-author, NIPCC's Climate Change Reconsidered (Craig); Vice President, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change (Keith)
SPPI Blog
In his 26 April 2007 testimony before the Select Committee of Energy Independence and Global Warming of the U.S. House of Representatives entitled “Dangerous Human-Made Interference with Climate,” NASA’s James Hansen stated that life in alpine regions is “in danger of being pushed off the planet” in response to continued greenhouse-gas-induced global warming. Why? Because that’s what all the species distribution models of the day predicted at that time. Now, however, a set of new-and-improved models is raising some serious questions about Hansen’s overly zealous contention, as described in a “perspective” published in Science by Willis and Bhagwat (2009).
The two researchers – Kathy Willis from the UK’s Long-Term Ecology Laboratory of Oxford University’s Centre for the Environment, and Shonil Bhagwat from Norway’s University of Bergen – raise a warning flag about the older models, stating “their coarse spatial scales fail to capture topography or ‘microclimatic buffering’ and they often do not consider the full acclimation capacity of plants and animals,” citing the analysis of Botkin et al. (2007) in this regard. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Economics & Energyby Robert J. Samuelson
Columnist, Washington Post
June 21, 2010
. . . [President Obama's] speech the other night was about political damage control -- his own. It was full of misinformation and mythology. Obama held out a gleaming vision of an America that would convert to the "clean" energy of, presumably, wind, solar and biomass. It isn't going to happen for many, many decades, if ever.
For starters, we won't soon end our "addiction to fossil fuels." Oil, coal and natural gas supply about 85 percent of America's energy needs. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects energy consumption to grow only an average of 0.5 percent annually from 2008 to 2035, but that's still a 14 percent cumulative increase. Fossil fuel usage would increase slightly in 2035 and its share would still account for 78 percent of the total.
Unless we shut down the economy, we need fossil fuels. More efficient light bulbs, energy-saving appliances, cars with higher gas mileage may all dampen energy use. But offsetting these savings will be more people (391 million vs. 305 million), more households (147 million vs. 113 million), more vehicles (297 million vs. 231 million) and a bigger economy (almost double in size). Although wind, solar and biomass are assumed to grow as much as 10 times faster than overall energy use, they provide only 11 percent of supply in 2035, up from 5 percent in 2008.
There are physical limits on new energy sources, as Robert Bryce shows in his book Power Hungry: The Myths of 'Green' Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2010
Before the Obama Administration sweeps under the carpet the controversy over the drilling experts it falsely used to justify its moratorium, the incident bears another look. Not least because it underlines the purely political nature of a drilling ban that now threatens the Gulf Coast economy and drilling safety.
When President Obama last month announced his six-month deepwater moratorium, he pointed to an Interior Department report of new "safety" recommendations. That report prominently noted that the recommendations it contained—including the six-month drilling ban—had been "peer-reviewed" by "experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering." It also boasted that Interior "consulted with a wide range" of other experts. The clear implication was that the nation's drilling brain trust agreed a moratorium was necessary.
As these columns reported last week, the opposite is true. In a scathing document, eight of the "experts" the Administration listed in its report said their names had been "used" to "justify" a "political decision." The draft they reviewed had not included a six-month drilling moratorium. The Administration added that provision only after it had secured sign-off. In their document, the eight forcefully rejected a moratorium, which they argued could prove more economically devastating than the oil spill itself and "counterproductive" to "safety." . . .
Read the rest.
Related items:
Capitalizing on the Latest Crisis
by Harry R. Jackson, Jr.
Chairman, High Impact Leadership Coalition
Townhall.com, June 20, 2010
Morning Bell: An Offer BP Couldn't Refuse
by Conn Carroll
Assistant Director of Strategic Communications, Heritage Foundation; Editor, Foundry
June 17, 2010Back to top Politics & Debateby William O'Keefe and Jeff Kueter
CEO (O'Keefe) and President (Kueter), George C. Marshall Institute
June, 2010
The book Merchants of Doubt, written by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, ostensibly provides insight and understanding about the challenge to the climate science orthodoxy. Although cloaked in the appearance of scholarly work, the book constitutes an effort to discredit and undermine the reputations of three deceased scientists who contributed greatly to our nation. These men were accomplished scientists, leaders of universities and major research organizations, advisers to government, and the founders of the George C. Marshall Institute. This book questions their integrity, impugns their character, and questions their judgment on the basis of little more than faulty logic and preconceived opinion. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Rob Schwarzwalder
Senior Vice President, Family Research Council
June 18, 2010
. . . The Times cites the President’s successful effort to get BP to commit to a $20 billion compensation fund as a “display of raw armtwisting” through which Mr. Obama “has reinvigorated a debate about the renewed reach of government power, or, alternatively, the power of government overreach.” The article concludes with this: “(Mr. Obama should) avoid painting with such a broad brush that foreign and domestic investors come to view the United States as a too risky place to do business, a country where big mistakes can lead to vilification and, perhaps, bankruptcy.”
This is only the latest episode in which the President has used the pretext of a crisis to seize power. No one excuses whatever legal or ethical lapses BP committed in the Gulf. Eleven men are dead, and countless gallons of crude oil continue to spew into the water around the Gulf Coast.
Yet what would Mr. Obama have done if BP had declined setting up such a massive fund and, instead, stuck to the $75 million mandated by law? Outlawed the firm’s presence on our shores? Filed a massive, punitive, bankrupting lawsuit? . . .
When America’s liberal paper of record wonders about Mr. Obama’s overreach, it’s clear something is registering with even the elites: This is a different kind of presidency, a giant step down the road to serfdom described in the 1940s by Friederich Hayek.
In 1781, Thomas Jefferson – as much a prophet as a future President – wrote in his Notes on Virginia, “Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” From entitlements to stimulus packages to assorted federal power-grabs, we are at grave risk of becoming a subservient people, intellectually anesthetized by the superficial veneer of government-induced prosperity and security at the cost of our liberty, prosperity, self-reliance and, most essentially, virtue. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Briefly NotedContoski: The IPCC-Led Global Warming Hoax Implodes
John Browne's 1997 Stanford University Speech: The 'Beyond Petroleum' Beginning
Bill Gates: Energy Visionary?
Monckton: Response to John Abraham
German Clean-Power Boom Breaks System Ex-Lobbyist Tells Handelsblatt
£360 Million Green Energy Plant Is a Joke
Solar Power Is Unaffordable
Firms Paid to Shut Down Wind Farms When the Wind Is Blowing
Lawrence Solomon: Nightfall on the Solar Industry
Move Over, Global Warming, BP Disaster Is Here - The Latest Excuse to Resume Leftist AgendaBack to top Meet the CriticsMeet the Critics gives you basic information on 64 of the leading critics of dangerous manmade global warming. Today's critic:
David H. Douglass, Ph.D.
Recipient of several Alfred P. Sloan Awards, David H. Douglass is a physics professor at the University of Rochester and a fellow of the American Physical Society. Mentioned on page 221 of the Senate report, Douglass explained that "The observed pattern of warming, comparing surface and atmospheric temperature trends does not show the characteristic fingerprint associated with greenhouse warming. The inescapable conclusion is that the human contribution is not significant and that observed increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases make only a negligible contribution to climate warming." Professor Douglass was the lead author of A Comparison of Tropical Temperature Trends with Model Predictions, a key publication in the battle against alarmism. Other pieces by Douglass include Limits on CO2 Climate Forcing from Recent Temperature Data of Earth and Altitude Dependence of Atmospheric Temperature Trends: Climate Models Versus Observation.
Back to top Landmark Documents from the Cornwall Alliance
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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