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Newsletter (November 9, 2009)
In this issue
Featured- Green World Government
- Gore's Dual Role: Advocate and Investor
- You Have Been Deceived About Global Warming
Debate- Senate Panel's Climate Markup in Holding Pattern
- Physicists Send Letter to Senate Rebutting Idea of Consensus
Science- The Ocean Is Heated From Below
- Regression Abuse
- South Pacific Sea Level: A Reassessment
Economics- What's the Real Cost of Global Warming?
- Cap-and-Trade's Hidden Gas Tax
Meet the Critics: Piers R. Corbyn & Garth W. Paltridge
Briefly Noted
Featuredby Washington Times Editorial Board
October 27, 2009
Environmental alarmism is being exploited to chip away at national sovereignty. The latest threat to American liberties may be found in the innocuous sounding Copenhagen Climate Treaty, which will be discussed at the United Nations climate-change conference in mid-December. The alert was sounded on the treaty in a talk given by British commentator Lord Christopher Monckton at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minn., on Oct. 14. Video of the talk has become an Internet sensation.
The treaty's text is not yet finalized but its principles are aimed at regulating all economic activity in the name of climate security, with a side effect that billions of dollars would be transferred from productive countries to the unproductive.
The control lever is the regulation of carbon emissions, which some purport are causing global warming. The treaty would establish a Carbon Market Regulatory Agency and "global carbon budget" for each country.
In effect, this would allow the treaty's governing bodies to limit manufacturing, transportation, travel, agriculture, mining, energy production and anything else that emits carbon - like breathing. . . .
Read the rest.
Related items:
Video: Monckton Warns of Copenhagen Treaty's World Government
Has Anyone Read the Copenhagen Agreement?
by Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist, Australian
Wall Street Journal, October 28, 2009
Obama's New World Order
by Jeffrey T. Kuhner
President, Edmund Burke Institute; Columnist, Washington Times
October 25, 2009
A U.N. Boondoggle on Ice
by William R. Hawkins
International Economics and National Security Consultant
Washington Times, October 30, 2009Back to top by John M. Broder
Reporter, New York Times
November 2, 2009
Former Vice President Al Gore thought he had spotted a winner last year when a small California firm sought financing for an energy-saving technology from the venture capital firm where Mr. Gore is a partner.
The company, Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient. It came to Mr. Gore’s firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital providers, looking for $75 million to expand its partnerships with utilities seeking to install millions of so-called smart meters in homes and businesses.
Mr. Gore and his partners decided to back the company, and in gratitude Silver Spring retained him and John Doerr, another Kleiner Perkins partner, as unpaid corporate advisers.
The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants. Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts. Kleiner Perkins and its partners, including Mr. Gore, could recoup their investment many times over in coming years.
Silver Spring Networks is a foot soldier in the global green energy revolution Mr. Gore hopes to lead. Few people have been as vocal about the urgency of global warming and the need to reinvent the way the world produces and consumes energy. And few have put as much money behind their advocacy as Mr. Gore and are as well positioned to profit from this green transformation, if and when it comes.
Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming skeptics, say Mr. Gore is poised to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire,” profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in. . . .
Read the rest.
Related item:
Al Gore Going Green to Make Green
by Nicolas Loris
Research Assistant, Heritage Foundation
November 3, 2009Back to top by James Dale Davidson
Crisis Strategy Alert and Strategic Investment Editor, Contrarian Research
October, 2009
As a U.S. Senator, then as Vice President of the United States, Al Gore helped funnel billions of tax dollars into research supporting his pet project for combating “global warming.“ . . .
With $5 billion of private capital in hand, and billions more in taxpayer funds being dispensed to support Climate Change “alarmism” every year, the groundwork was in place for what will one day be seen as the biggest ‘rip off” in history. . . .
Once the money was raised, Al went to Hollywood with an idea for a movie. . . .
He pushed hard the idea that an “end of the world/the sky is falling” type scenario will occur if governments didn’t act immediately to drastically curtail carbon emissions. . . .
But he said nothing about how he and his business partners were set to profit handsomely off his global warming scam. . . .
His film won two Oscars. And he was given the Nobel Prize for his scare tactics. . . .
Rather than debate global warming, the mainstream media parroted every word out of Al’s mouth and completely ignored his conflicts of interest. And that wasn’t all they ignored.
They totally dismissed the arguments of scientists and other critics who disputed the contention that higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon were necessarily the cause of marginally warmer temperatures experienced in the last quarter of the 20th century. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Debateby Darren Samuelsohn and Ben Geman
Reporters, Greenwire
New York Times, November 3, 2009
A partisan standoff over Senate global warming legislation clouded the start of the Environment and Public Works Committee's markup of the sweeping proposal today with just one Republican in attendance.
Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and several other Democrats began the markup with opening statements begging Republicans to participate and questioning the sincerity of their boycott. . . .
Read the rest.
Related items:
US Puts Climate Debate on Hold for Five Weeks Despite Plea by Merkel
by Suzanne Goldenberg and Damian Carrington
Writers, The Guardian
November 3, 2009
Report: Climate Confidence Falls Worldwide
by Anthony Watts
Author, Watts Up With That?
November 3, 2009
Back to top Signed by physicists Hal Lewis, Fred Singer, Will Happer, Larry Gould, and Roger Cohen
Watts Up With That?, November 2, 2009
You have recently received a letter from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), purporting to convey a “consensus” of the scientific community that immediate and drastic action is needed to avert a climatic catastrophe.
We do not seek to make the scientific arguments here (we did that in an earlier letter, sent a couple of months ago), but simply to note that the claim of consensus is fake, designed to stampede you into actions that will cripple our economy, and which you will regret for many years. There is no consensus, and even if there were, consensus is not the test of scientific validity. Theories that disagree with the facts are wrong, consensus or no.
We know of no evidence that any of the “leaders” of the scientific community who signed the letter to you ever asked their memberships for their opinions, before claiming to represent them on this important matter.
We also note that the American Physical Society (APS, and we are physicists) did not sign the letter, though the scientific issues at stake are fundamentally matters of applied physics. You can do physics without climatology, but you can’t do climatology without physics.
The APS is at this moment reviewing its stance on so-called global warming, having received a petition from its membership to do so. That petition was signed by 160 distinguished members and fellows of the Society, including one Nobelist and 12 members of the National Academies. Indeed a score of the signers are Members and Fellows of the AAAS, none of whom were consulted before the AAAS letter to you. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Scienceby Vincent R. Gray
Founder, New Zealand Climate Science Coalition; Author, The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of 'Climate Change 2001'
October 23, 2009
The "globe" is cooling. The sea level is not rising. The ice is advancing. What is left? The ocean is heating.
The last two IPCC Reports made a big thing of ocean heating. The methods used showed considerable variability. The average showed periodicity, with troughs in 1965 and 1986 and peaks in 1980 and 2005, but the temperature increase from the 1965 trough to the later peak of 2005 was confidently attributed to "global warming" caused by carbon dioxide emissions.
At least, that was the story in the first two drafts of the 2007 Report. Then the people measuring temperature provided the disturbing news that the 2005 figure actually showed a fall in temperature, and they had to put that into their final Report.
Then there was overwhelming pressure on the scientists to backtrack on such a disturbing observation, and, loyally, they discovered a "rogue" unreliable sensor which restored the IPCC "confidence" that the ocean temperature is rising.
So they increased their coverage with a new sophisticated system called ARGO which has 3,000 probes. The results are disastrous, and they have yet to admit it. . . .
To start with, the average temperature is falling. But what is worse, the variability is so great that it could not possibly be heated from the atmosphere. So it must be heated from below, from all the underwater volcanoes and plate movements that have so far been neglected. . . .
Read the full report (which includes a reference to an attached graph that may be found here).Back to top by Warren Meyer
Author, Climate Skeptic and Coyote Blog
October 29, 2009
Regression is absolutely blind to the real world — it only knows numbers. What do I mean by this? Take the famous example of Washington Redskins football and presidential elections:
For nearly three quarters of a century, the Redskins have successfully predicted the outcome of each and every presidential election. It all began in 1933 when the Boston Braves changed their name to the Redskins, and since that time, the result of the team’s final home game before the election has always correctly picked who will lead the nation for the next four years. . . . Plug all of this into a regression and it would show a direct, predictive correlation between Redskins football and Presidential winners, with a high degree of certainty. But we denizens of the real world would know that this is insane. A meaningless coincidence with absolutely no predictive power.
You won’t often find me whipping out nuggets from my time at the Harvard Business School, because I have not always found a lot of that program to be relevant to my day-to-day business experience. But one thing I do remember is my managerial economics teacher hammering us over and over with one caveat to regression analysis:
Don’t use regression analysis to go on fishing expeditions. Include only the variables you have real-world evidence really affect the output variable to which you are regressing. . . . Which brings us to climate (finally!) and temperature proxies. . . .
Read the rest.
Related items:
'Regression Abuse' Author Warren Meyer to Speak in Phoneix November 10
Meyer's Video on Climate
Connolley Endorses Upside Down Mann
by Steve McIntyre
Author, ClimateAudit.org
October 29, 2009Back to top by Vincent R. Gray
Founder, New Zealand Climate Science Coalition; Author, The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of 'Climate Change 2001'
September 2, 2009
. . . Instead of examining climate records for evidence of the factors that influence them, there seems to be an emphasis instead on trying to discern ”trends”. There is little realization that any trend depends heavily on the starting point and finishing point. These reports have all chosen as starting points the beginnings of the installation of the SEAFRAME gauges, which were often at different times, and as a finishing point the latest year of measurement. This is supposed to help to determine “long-term” trends. It is, however, clear from the measurements so far that such a concept is disturbed by natural events such as cyclones and tsunamis. Most of the records shown here show signs that they have being disrupted by the widespread cyclones in the Pacific in 1998. Not only was the record for that year disrupted, but there is a suspicion that the leveling for the previous measurements, sometimes since 1993, may have been changed. For these reasons the best starting point for the determination of any trend should be 1999. instead of the beginning of the measurements. The “long-term” zero trends which are listed above are therefore the most reliable indication of what is happening to the sea level in Pacific Islands. There is no evidence from this work that the sea level in the 12 Pacific islands is increasing. It isto be hoped that the GSPS installation from 2007 will help to correct any future disruption by extreme events.
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This table summarizes this assessment.
Read the rest.Back to top Economicsby Dennis T. Avery
Director, Center for Global Food Issues; Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute and Heartland Institute; Scientific Advisor, American Council on Science and Health; Co-Author, Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years
PipeLineNews.org, November 2, 2009
The leftish Brookings Institution and the U. S. Chamber of Commerce basically agree that the energy taxes in the House Waxman-Markey bill could total $9 trillion over ten years. As an economist, I look at these forecasts and wonder "How can we possibly know?"
These estimates cover only the costs of the "user permits" that companies will have to buy. They don't even try to measure the massive reduction in our economic output as energy costs double and triple with scarcity. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Kay Bailey Hutchison and Christopher S. Bond
Texas Senator (Hutchison); Missouri Senator (Bond)
Washington Times, October 21, 2009
There's something the Democratic lawmakers who are pushing cap-and-trade legislation don't want the public to know. The controversial climate-change legislation winding its way through Congress will impose a massive new national gas tax on the American people. We discovered this by analyzing what the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill would do to gas prices and what Americans spend on gasoline, diesel and jet fuels. We found that cap-and-trade legislation will levy a $3.6 trillion gas-tax increase that will impact every American and important segments of our economy.
The goal of this climate-change legislation is actually to increase the price of traditional forms of carbon-based energy such as coal, gas and oil so that consumers will respond by using less of it. Some lawmakers call this "setting the price on carbon." Economists refer to this kind of policy as a price signal. But the bottom line is that the price of energy will go up. Ultimately, all Americans will pay directly or indirectly for the higher fuel prices the cap-and-trade legislation will cause. . . .
Read the rest.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:
Piers R. Corbyn
Astrophysicist Piers Corbyn is a weather forecaster, the owner of WeatherAction, and was a contributor to the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change's Climate Change Reconsidered. Corbyn denies manmade catastrophic climate change, noting that "the most significant and persistent cycle of variation in the world's temperature follows the 22-year magnetic cycle of the sun's activity." "The problem for global warmers is that there is no evidence that changing CO2 is a net driver for world climate," he continues. "Feedback processes negate its potential warming effects." A more extensive sample of Corbyn's work is What Does and Does Not Cause Climate Change, a lecture delivered at the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change.
Garth W. Paltridge, Ph.D.
Atmospheric physicist Garth Paltridge is an emeritus professor at the University of Tasmania, having taken the position of director at the University's Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies in 1990, and has been the chief research scientist for the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research and the CEO of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Center. Paltridge criticized global warming alarmists who "have been so successful with their message of greenhouse doom that, should one of them prove tomorrow that it is nonsense, the discovery would have to be suppressed for the sake of the overall reputation of science." Along with articles like The Over-Blown Science of Global Warming and A Short Primer on Climate Change and the Greenhouse Issue, Paltridge has the excellent book The Climate Caper.Back to top Briefly NotedBaden: The Federal Budget as a Common Pool
Stephens: Book: SuperFreakonomics
Kanter: E.U. Alone and Lonely on Carbon
Segalstad: Correct Timing Is Everything - Also for CO2 in the Air
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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