http://ilovecarbondioxide.com/2009/03/stop-global-whining-site-promo-music.html
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
15 COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING AND CLIMATE CHANGE
http://ilovecarbondioxide.com/2009/01/top-15-climate-myths.html
15 COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING AND CLIMATE CHANGE
MYTH 1: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate.
FACT: Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures. Average ground station readings do show a mild warming of 0.6 to 0.8C over the last 100 years, which is well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium. However, the ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas ("heat islands"), which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas ("land use effects") i.e. local heat retention due to urban sprawl, not global warming…and it is these, 'false high' ground readings which are then programmed into the disreputable climate models used by your favourite enviro groups such as Greenpeace, which live up to the GIGO acronym — Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Looking at it from the long term, the planet has been gradually recovering from the Little Ice Age which ended in 1850. Our temps are in fact right where they should be. From a short term perspective, satellite measurements (which are far more accurate than land-based stations) are now showing a gradual decrease in global temperatures, and it is currently well accepted that temperatures have been slowly falling for over a decade now.
In summary, there has been no catastrophic warming recorded from either method whatsoever.
MYTH 2: It's never been warmer in the past.
FACT: We are in a relatively cool period and it used to be much warmer over countless periods in the past. Even just a few hundred years ago, the Vikings used to live in parts of Greenland without snow, and vineyards flourished in the North of London! There is nothing apocalyptic about warmer temperatures, in fact it's quite the opposite. In the UK, every mild winter saves 20,000 cold-related deaths, and scaled up over northern Europe mild winters save hundreds of thousands of lives each year. ALSO, data from ice core samples shows that in the past, temperatures have risen by ten times the current rise, and fallen again, in the space of a human lifetime. Nothing is happening "faster than normal" with today's weather/climate change/temperature variations, etc.
MYTH 3: The "hockey stick" graph proves that the earth has experienced a steady, very gradual temperature decrease for 1000 years, then recently began a sudden increase.
FACT: The hockey stick graph seen in An Inconvenient Truth and elsewhere has been completely debunked and proven fraudulent. It has airbrushed out the significant changes in climate which have continually occurred throughout geologic time. For instance, the Medieval Warm Period, from around 1000 to1200 AD (when the Vikings farmed on Greenland) was followed by a period known as the Little Ice Age. Since the end of the 17th Century the "average global temperature" has been rising at the low steady rate mentioned above; although from 1940 – 1970 temperatures actually dropped, leading to a Global Cooling scare. And now the temperatures are dropping once again, in fact they've been dropping since 1998.
The "hockey stick", a former poster boy of both the UN's IPCC and Canada's Environment Department, ignores historical recorded climatic swings, and is proven to be flawed and statistically unreliable as well. It has now been quietly removed from the IPCC reports and thoroughly discredited throughout the scientific world and is well regarded as one of the biggest scientific hoaxes of our time, yet you can still find it being used today by organizations such as the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, etc. The chart is a computer construct and a very faulty one at that. But what else would you expect, seeing as it was created only to help perpetrate the climate change lie.
Speaking of computer generated scams, let's not forget the drowning polar bears in Gore's movie and the fraudulent claim that the bears are disappearing. In fact they are actually thriving. Polar bear populations are 500% larger than they were 50 years ago. Shame on you, Al Gore, for playing on people's emotions to drive support for your enormous $45 trillion carbon tax hoax.
MYTH 4: Human produced carbon dioxide has increased over the last 100 years, adding to the Greenhouse effect, thus warming the earth.
FACT: Carbon dioxide levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout geologic time. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased. The RATE of growth during this period has also increased from about 0.2% per year to the present rate of about 0.4% per year,which growth rate has now been constant for the past 25 years. However, there is no proof that CO2 is a measurable driver of global warming, let alone the tiny amount released by humankind. As measured in ice cores dated over many thousands of years, CO2 levels move up and down AFTER the temperature has done so, and thus are the RESULT OF, NOT THE CAUSE of warming.
Effectively, the man-made global warming theorists have put effect before cause — this completely debunks the entire global warming theory and shows that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is a futile King Canute exercise! Geological field work in recent sediments confirms this causal relationship. There is solid evidence that, as temperatures move up and down naturally and cyclically through solar radiation, orbital and galactic influences, the warming surface layers of the earth's oceans expel more CO2 as a result.
MYTH 5: CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas.
FACT: Greenhouse gases form about 3% of the atmosphere by volume. They consist of varying amounts, about 96.5% is water vapour and clouds, with the remainder being trace gases like CO2, CH4, Ozone and N2O. CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere. And then the human portion of that 0.037% is incredibly small.
But isn't CO2 the most important of the greenhouse gases? Nope. Not even close. Most of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapor, which is about 100 times as abundant in the atmosphere as CO2 and thus has a much larger effect.
In summary, water vapour is by far the most important and overwhelming greenhouse gas. Those attributing climate change to CO2 rarely mention these important facts.
What's next? A steam tax when you boil a kettle for your cup of tea?
READ MORE...
15 COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING AND CLIMATE CHANGE
MYTH 1: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate.
FACT: Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures. Average ground station readings do show a mild warming of 0.6 to 0.8C over the last 100 years, which is well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium. However, the ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas ("heat islands"), which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas ("land use effects") i.e. local heat retention due to urban sprawl, not global warming…and it is these, 'false high' ground readings which are then programmed into the disreputable climate models used by your favourite enviro groups such as Greenpeace, which live up to the GIGO acronym — Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Looking at it from the long term, the planet has been gradually recovering from the Little Ice Age which ended in 1850. Our temps are in fact right where they should be. From a short term perspective, satellite measurements (which are far more accurate than land-based stations) are now showing a gradual decrease in global temperatures, and it is currently well accepted that temperatures have been slowly falling for over a decade now.
In summary, there has been no catastrophic warming recorded from either method whatsoever.
MYTH 2: It's never been warmer in the past.
FACT: We are in a relatively cool period and it used to be much warmer over countless periods in the past. Even just a few hundred years ago, the Vikings used to live in parts of Greenland without snow, and vineyards flourished in the North of London! There is nothing apocalyptic about warmer temperatures, in fact it's quite the opposite. In the UK, every mild winter saves 20,000 cold-related deaths, and scaled up over northern Europe mild winters save hundreds of thousands of lives each year. ALSO, data from ice core samples shows that in the past, temperatures have risen by ten times the current rise, and fallen again, in the space of a human lifetime. Nothing is happening "faster than normal" with today's weather/climate change/temperature variations, etc.
MYTH 3: The "hockey stick" graph proves that the earth has experienced a steady, very gradual temperature decrease for 1000 years, then recently began a sudden increase.
FACT: The hockey stick graph seen in An Inconvenient Truth and elsewhere has been completely debunked and proven fraudulent. It has airbrushed out the significant changes in climate which have continually occurred throughout geologic time. For instance, the Medieval Warm Period, from around 1000 to1200 AD (when the Vikings farmed on Greenland) was followed by a period known as the Little Ice Age. Since the end of the 17th Century the "average global temperature" has been rising at the low steady rate mentioned above; although from 1940 – 1970 temperatures actually dropped, leading to a Global Cooling scare. And now the temperatures are dropping once again, in fact they've been dropping since 1998.
The "hockey stick", a former poster boy of both the UN's IPCC and Canada's Environment Department, ignores historical recorded climatic swings, and is proven to be flawed and statistically unreliable as well. It has now been quietly removed from the IPCC reports and thoroughly discredited throughout the scientific world and is well regarded as one of the biggest scientific hoaxes of our time, yet you can still find it being used today by organizations such as the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, etc. The chart is a computer construct and a very faulty one at that. But what else would you expect, seeing as it was created only to help perpetrate the climate change lie.
Speaking of computer generated scams, let's not forget the drowning polar bears in Gore's movie and the fraudulent claim that the bears are disappearing. In fact they are actually thriving. Polar bear populations are 500% larger than they were 50 years ago. Shame on you, Al Gore, for playing on people's emotions to drive support for your enormous $45 trillion carbon tax hoax.
MYTH 4: Human produced carbon dioxide has increased over the last 100 years, adding to the Greenhouse effect, thus warming the earth.
FACT: Carbon dioxide levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout geologic time. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased. The RATE of growth during this period has also increased from about 0.2% per year to the present rate of about 0.4% per year,which growth rate has now been constant for the past 25 years. However, there is no proof that CO2 is a measurable driver of global warming, let alone the tiny amount released by humankind. As measured in ice cores dated over many thousands of years, CO2 levels move up and down AFTER the temperature has done so, and thus are the RESULT OF, NOT THE CAUSE of warming.
Effectively, the man-made global warming theorists have put effect before cause — this completely debunks the entire global warming theory and shows that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is a futile King Canute exercise! Geological field work in recent sediments confirms this causal relationship. There is solid evidence that, as temperatures move up and down naturally and cyclically through solar radiation, orbital and galactic influences, the warming surface layers of the earth's oceans expel more CO2 as a result.
MYTH 5: CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas.
FACT: Greenhouse gases form about 3% of the atmosphere by volume. They consist of varying amounts, about 96.5% is water vapour and clouds, with the remainder being trace gases like CO2, CH4, Ozone and N2O. CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere. And then the human portion of that 0.037% is incredibly small.
But isn't CO2 the most important of the greenhouse gases? Nope. Not even close. Most of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapor, which is about 100 times as abundant in the atmosphere as CO2 and thus has a much larger effect.
In summary, water vapour is by far the most important and overwhelming greenhouse gas. Those attributing climate change to CO2 rarely mention these important facts.
What's next? A steam tax when you boil a kettle for your cup of tea?
READ MORE...
Monday, March 23, 2009
Levels of the greenhouse gas methane begin to increase again
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/methane-tt1029.html
Levels of the greenhouse gas methane begin to increase again
New surge ends a decade of stability; cause still unknown
David Chandler, MIT News Office
October 29, 2008
The amount of methane in Earth's atmosphere shot up in 2007, bringing to an end a period of about a decade in which atmospheric levels of the potent greenhouse gas were essentially stable, according to a team led by MIT researchers.
Methane levels in the atmosphere have more than tripled since pre-industrial times, accounting for around one-fifth of the human contribution to greenhouse gas-driven global warming. Until recently, the leveling off of methane levels had suggested that the rate of its emission from the Earth's surface was approximately balanced by the rate of its destruction in the atmosphere.
However, since early 2007 the balance has been upset, according to a paper on the new findings being published this week in Geophysical Review Letters. The paper's lead authors, postdoctoral researcher Matthew Rigby and Ronald Prinn, the TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science, say this imbalance has resulted in several million metric tons of additional methane in the atmosphere. Methane is produced by wetlands, rice paddies, cattle, and the gas and coal industries, and is destroyed by reaction with the hydroxyl free radical (OH), often referred to as the atmosphere's "cleanser."
One surprising feature of this recent growth is that it occurred almost simultaneously at all measurement locations across the globe. However, the majority of methane emissions are in the Northern Hemisphere, and it takes more than one year for gases to be mixed from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern Hemisphere. Hence, theoretical analysis of the measurements shows that if an increase in emissions is solely responsible, these emissions must have risen by a similar amount in both hemispheres at the same time.
A rise in Northern Hemispheric emissions may be due to the very warm conditions that were observed over Siberia throughout 2007, potentially leading to increased bacterial emissions from wetland areas. However, a potential cause for an increase in Southern Hemispheric emissions is less clear.
An alternative explanation for the rise may lie, at least in part, with a drop in the concentrations of the methane-destroying OH. Theoretical studies show that if this has happened, the required global methane emissions rise would have been smaller, and more strongly biased to the Northern Hemisphere. At present, however, it is uncertain whether such a drop in hydroxyl free radical concentrations did occur because of the inherent uncertainty in the current method for estimating global OH levels.
To help pin down the cause of the methane increase, Prinn said, "the next step will be to study this using a very high-resolution atmospheric circulation model and additional measurements from other networks." But doing that could take another year, he said, and because the detection of increased methane has important consequences for global warming the team wanted to get these initial results out as quickly as possible.
"The key thing is to better determine the relative roles of increased methane emission versus an idecrease in the rate of removal," Prinn said. "Apparently we have a mix of the two, but we want to know how much of each" is responsible for the overall increase.
It is too early to tell whether this increase represents a return to sustained methane growth, or the beginning of a relatively short-lived anomaly, according to Rigby and Prinn. Given that, pound for pound, methane is 25 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, the situation will require careful monitoring in the near future.
In addition to Rigby and Prinn, the study was carried out by researchers at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Bristol and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. These methane measurements come from the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE) that is supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Australian CSIRO network.
Levels of the greenhouse gas methane begin to increase again
New surge ends a decade of stability; cause still unknown
David Chandler, MIT News Office
October 29, 2008
The amount of methane in Earth's atmosphere shot up in 2007, bringing to an end a period of about a decade in which atmospheric levels of the potent greenhouse gas were essentially stable, according to a team led by MIT researchers.
Methane levels in the atmosphere have more than tripled since pre-industrial times, accounting for around one-fifth of the human contribution to greenhouse gas-driven global warming. Until recently, the leveling off of methane levels had suggested that the rate of its emission from the Earth's surface was approximately balanced by the rate of its destruction in the atmosphere.
However, since early 2007 the balance has been upset, according to a paper on the new findings being published this week in Geophysical Review Letters. The paper's lead authors, postdoctoral researcher Matthew Rigby and Ronald Prinn, the TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science, say this imbalance has resulted in several million metric tons of additional methane in the atmosphere. Methane is produced by wetlands, rice paddies, cattle, and the gas and coal industries, and is destroyed by reaction with the hydroxyl free radical (OH), often referred to as the atmosphere's "cleanser."
One surprising feature of this recent growth is that it occurred almost simultaneously at all measurement locations across the globe. However, the majority of methane emissions are in the Northern Hemisphere, and it takes more than one year for gases to be mixed from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern Hemisphere. Hence, theoretical analysis of the measurements shows that if an increase in emissions is solely responsible, these emissions must have risen by a similar amount in both hemispheres at the same time.
A rise in Northern Hemispheric emissions may be due to the very warm conditions that were observed over Siberia throughout 2007, potentially leading to increased bacterial emissions from wetland areas. However, a potential cause for an increase in Southern Hemispheric emissions is less clear.
An alternative explanation for the rise may lie, at least in part, with a drop in the concentrations of the methane-destroying OH. Theoretical studies show that if this has happened, the required global methane emissions rise would have been smaller, and more strongly biased to the Northern Hemisphere. At present, however, it is uncertain whether such a drop in hydroxyl free radical concentrations did occur because of the inherent uncertainty in the current method for estimating global OH levels.
To help pin down the cause of the methane increase, Prinn said, "the next step will be to study this using a very high-resolution atmospheric circulation model and additional measurements from other networks." But doing that could take another year, he said, and because the detection of increased methane has important consequences for global warming the team wanted to get these initial results out as quickly as possible.
"The key thing is to better determine the relative roles of increased methane emission versus an idecrease in the rate of removal," Prinn said. "Apparently we have a mix of the two, but we want to know how much of each" is responsible for the overall increase.
It is too early to tell whether this increase represents a return to sustained methane growth, or the beginning of a relatively short-lived anomaly, according to Rigby and Prinn. Given that, pound for pound, methane is 25 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, the situation will require careful monitoring in the near future.
In addition to Rigby and Prinn, the study was carried out by researchers at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Bristol and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. These methane measurements come from the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE) that is supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Australian CSIRO network.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Melting Antarctic Ice Part of Natural Cycle
http://www.icecap.us/
Mar 19, 2009
Melting Antarctic Ice Part of Natural Cycle
By Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth
Historical records for the western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) show that it is particularly prone to rapid climate change-change that occurs in cycles of ~200 years and ~2500 years. By studying major transitions in plankton productivity in the western Antarctic, scientists have shown that “spectacular” ice-cover losses have happened many times in the past. In other words, the “unprecedented rapid loss of ice” from parts of Antarctica that global warming alarmists make so much of are a normal part of nature’s cycles.
According to the latest report in the journal Science, this is how it works: Less ice in the northern zone causes more cloud cover, reducing the amount of light reaching the plankton. A loss of light, together with less ice-melt freshwater and stronger winds means fewer large plankton blooms. By contrast, in the south, the skies stay cloudless for longer and the Antarctic current increases its flow rate, pulling up more nutrients. Both factors contribute to greater primary productivity. These physical changes explain the striking shifts recently observed in krill and the vertebrate communities of the western Antarctic.
In a paper titled “Productivity cycles of 200�300 years in the Antarctic Peninsula region: Understanding linkages among the sun, atmosphere, oceans, sea ice, and biota,” Leventer and colleagues report the results of a multiproxy record from a sediment core retrieved from a deep basin on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula. The report reveals “a dramatic perspective on paleoclimatic changes over the past 3700 yr. Analyses completed include measurement of magnetic susceptibility and granulometry, bed thickness, particle size, percent organic carbon, bulk density, and microscopic evaluation of diatom and benthic foraminiferal assemblages and abundances.” Their conclusion was that “variability of these parameters demonstrates the significance of both short-term cycles, which recur approximately every 200 yr, and longer term events (~2500 yr cycles) that are most likely related to global climatic fluctuations.”
In other words, ice in the Antarctic region undergoes periodic episodes of rapid melting - and it is all entirely natural, not because of human activity. The new paper echos these findings: “Paleo-records show that analogous climate variations have occurred in the past 200 to 300 years, and over longer 2500-year cycles, with rapid (decadal) transitions between warm and cool phases in the WAP. In this study (~30 years), the Chl a trend evidenced in the southern subregion of the WAP presented similar characteristics to those trends detected during typical interneoglacial periods (~200 to 300 years) (i.e., high phytoplankton biomass, and presumably productivity, due to less area covered by permanent sea ice).”
Science is marvelous, it never rests and never accepts any simple answer at face value. Here we see confirmation of an alternate explanation for rapid ice melting in Antarctica. The latest paper cites thirty supporting references and cross referencing the older paper provides links to eighteen others - this paper’s conclusions are not from a single group of “fringe” scientists. Yet have you heard this well documented explanation for rapid ice melting from any media outlet reporting on global warming? Of Course not! What is reported is “more unprecedented melting!”
To have reported that the melting ice could be explained more accurately by a scientific theory other than anthropogenic global warming would muddy the water, not to mention confuse the news anchor doing the reporting. This is what makes other scientists, myself included, so angry about the climate change clique - their lack of open mindedness, their willful disregard for any facts counter to their preconceived ideas, their out right lies. When the dust finally settles on the great global warming debate there will be a number of climate scientist with much to account for. Meanwhile, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. Read more here.
Mar 19, 2009
Melting Antarctic Ice Part of Natural Cycle
By Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth
Historical records for the western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) show that it is particularly prone to rapid climate change-change that occurs in cycles of ~200 years and ~2500 years. By studying major transitions in plankton productivity in the western Antarctic, scientists have shown that “spectacular” ice-cover losses have happened many times in the past. In other words, the “unprecedented rapid loss of ice” from parts of Antarctica that global warming alarmists make so much of are a normal part of nature’s cycles.
According to the latest report in the journal Science, this is how it works: Less ice in the northern zone causes more cloud cover, reducing the amount of light reaching the plankton. A loss of light, together with less ice-melt freshwater and stronger winds means fewer large plankton blooms. By contrast, in the south, the skies stay cloudless for longer and the Antarctic current increases its flow rate, pulling up more nutrients. Both factors contribute to greater primary productivity. These physical changes explain the striking shifts recently observed in krill and the vertebrate communities of the western Antarctic.
In a paper titled “Productivity cycles of 200�300 years in the Antarctic Peninsula region: Understanding linkages among the sun, atmosphere, oceans, sea ice, and biota,” Leventer and colleagues report the results of a multiproxy record from a sediment core retrieved from a deep basin on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula. The report reveals “a dramatic perspective on paleoclimatic changes over the past 3700 yr. Analyses completed include measurement of magnetic susceptibility and granulometry, bed thickness, particle size, percent organic carbon, bulk density, and microscopic evaluation of diatom and benthic foraminiferal assemblages and abundances.” Their conclusion was that “variability of these parameters demonstrates the significance of both short-term cycles, which recur approximately every 200 yr, and longer term events (~2500 yr cycles) that are most likely related to global climatic fluctuations.”
In other words, ice in the Antarctic region undergoes periodic episodes of rapid melting - and it is all entirely natural, not because of human activity. The new paper echos these findings: “Paleo-records show that analogous climate variations have occurred in the past 200 to 300 years, and over longer 2500-year cycles, with rapid (decadal) transitions between warm and cool phases in the WAP. In this study (~30 years), the Chl a trend evidenced in the southern subregion of the WAP presented similar characteristics to those trends detected during typical interneoglacial periods (~200 to 300 years) (i.e., high phytoplankton biomass, and presumably productivity, due to less area covered by permanent sea ice).”
Science is marvelous, it never rests and never accepts any simple answer at face value. Here we see confirmation of an alternate explanation for rapid ice melting in Antarctica. The latest paper cites thirty supporting references and cross referencing the older paper provides links to eighteen others - this paper’s conclusions are not from a single group of “fringe” scientists. Yet have you heard this well documented explanation for rapid ice melting from any media outlet reporting on global warming? Of Course not! What is reported is “more unprecedented melting!”
To have reported that the melting ice could be explained more accurately by a scientific theory other than anthropogenic global warming would muddy the water, not to mention confuse the news anchor doing the reporting. This is what makes other scientists, myself included, so angry about the climate change clique - their lack of open mindedness, their willful disregard for any facts counter to their preconceived ideas, their out right lies. When the dust finally settles on the great global warming debate there will be a number of climate scientist with much to account for. Meanwhile, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. Read more here.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
‘Cap-and-trade: Obama’s ‘economic dagger’
http://icecap.us/
Mar 15, 2009
‘Cap-and-trade: Obama’s ‘economic dagger’
By Examiner Editorial
Prospects for passage of President Barack Obama’s cap-and-trade solution for global warming have become decidedly chillier since the idea was first proposed in 2002. Obama wants to cut CO2 emissions 80 percent by 2050.
He’s got his work cut out for him. Not only are hundreds of credible climate scientists now publicly debunking former vice-president Al Gore’s claims of apocalyptic environmental disaster, a new Gallup poll reveals that 41 percent of Americans believe such alarms are “exaggerated.” Most significantly, more than 650 prominent international scientists now oppose the findings of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC), which are the basis of the Obama proposal.
By our math, the 52 authors of the IPCC report who are climate scientists are out-numbered 12-to-1 by their scientific critics. Former Senate Environmental Committee chairman James Inhofe, R-OK, insists that the IPCC report, funded by government grants and liberal-leaning foundations, was written by “bought and paid for” scientists with a pre-determined agenda. Inhofe has opposed the cap-and-trade concept ever since the original McCain-Lieberman bill was introduced in the Republican-controlled Senate. Only two of his Senate colleagues offered to join Inhofe then. Now, more than two dozen have joined the growing ranks committed to defeating the identical Warner-Lieberman bill.
Citing a recent Pew Poll in which Americans ranked the economy at the top - and global warming at the bottom - of a market basket of political issues, Inhofe calls cap-and-trade legislation “a form of global taxation” and believes it can be defeated again, even though it has the full backing of the Obama administration. The realization is slowly but surely growing here that duplicating Europe�s failed cap-and-trade scheme would be a knock-out blow for the U.S. economy because it would dramatically increase energy costs and cripple the nation’s dwindling manufacturing base.
The Detroit News aptly called cap-and-trade “a giant economic dagger aimed at the nation’s heartland.” Even Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-ND, warned that the president’s $3.5 trillion budget “can’t pass here” if it contains cap-and-trade provisions that virtually guarantee a stratospheric rise in energy costs for families and businesses.
The Obama administration has already signaled its intention to limit the supply of energy by blocking funding for a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain and canceling existing federal oil and gas leases. Less supply inescapably means higher prices. So let us hope that Inhofe’s bold assertion that “we are winning the argument with the American people” is correct. If it is, it comes just in the nick of time. Read more here.
Mar 15, 2009
‘Cap-and-trade: Obama’s ‘economic dagger’
By Examiner Editorial
Prospects for passage of President Barack Obama’s cap-and-trade solution for global warming have become decidedly chillier since the idea was first proposed in 2002. Obama wants to cut CO2 emissions 80 percent by 2050.
He’s got his work cut out for him. Not only are hundreds of credible climate scientists now publicly debunking former vice-president Al Gore’s claims of apocalyptic environmental disaster, a new Gallup poll reveals that 41 percent of Americans believe such alarms are “exaggerated.” Most significantly, more than 650 prominent international scientists now oppose the findings of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC), which are the basis of the Obama proposal.
By our math, the 52 authors of the IPCC report who are climate scientists are out-numbered 12-to-1 by their scientific critics. Former Senate Environmental Committee chairman James Inhofe, R-OK, insists that the IPCC report, funded by government grants and liberal-leaning foundations, was written by “bought and paid for” scientists with a pre-determined agenda. Inhofe has opposed the cap-and-trade concept ever since the original McCain-Lieberman bill was introduced in the Republican-controlled Senate. Only two of his Senate colleagues offered to join Inhofe then. Now, more than two dozen have joined the growing ranks committed to defeating the identical Warner-Lieberman bill.
Citing a recent Pew Poll in which Americans ranked the economy at the top - and global warming at the bottom - of a market basket of political issues, Inhofe calls cap-and-trade legislation “a form of global taxation” and believes it can be defeated again, even though it has the full backing of the Obama administration. The realization is slowly but surely growing here that duplicating Europe�s failed cap-and-trade scheme would be a knock-out blow for the U.S. economy because it would dramatically increase energy costs and cripple the nation’s dwindling manufacturing base.
The Detroit News aptly called cap-and-trade “a giant economic dagger aimed at the nation’s heartland.” Even Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-ND, warned that the president’s $3.5 trillion budget “can’t pass here” if it contains cap-and-trade provisions that virtually guarantee a stratospheric rise in energy costs for families and businesses.
The Obama administration has already signaled its intention to limit the supply of energy by blocking funding for a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain and canceling existing federal oil and gas leases. Less supply inescapably means higher prices. So let us hope that Inhofe’s bold assertion that “we are winning the argument with the American people” is correct. If it is, it comes just in the nick of time. Read more here.
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