Cap and Trade; a Solution to a Non-existent Problem with Devastating Consequences

An energy policy built on the lie that human CO2 is causing global warming is likely to fail. It is a bigger lie when CO2 is incorrectly called carbon. The policy is guaranteed to fail when proposed energy alternatives cannot fulfill needs and will cause economic slowdown, decreased competitiveness and further economic decay.

On June 26, the US House of Representatives passed a Bill titled the American Clean Energy and Security Act by a scant 219 to 212 votes. The title is misleading. It appeals to patriotism, which Samuel Johnson said is the last refuge of a scoundrel. “Clean Energy” really means without producing CO2, which incorrectly assumes it is a pollutant. Security means eliminating imported energy, but the nation is less secure with a weakened economy guaranteed under provisions of the Bill. It is more commonly, but equally incorrectly, called the Carbon Cap and Trade Bill. Carbon is not CO2 but this is only one of the deceptions. Hopefully, enough Senators will understand and reject the Bill when they vote in the fall.

President Obama frantically pushed his energy policy as resistance developed. He wrapped it in promises of green jobs; profits from industry creating renewable clean energy; a stop to “bubble or bust” economic cycles; and all at no cost to the taxpayers because “polluters” pay the bill.

EUROPE'S GREEN SUICIDE: TRADE UNION WARNS OF MASSIVE JOB LOSSES

Some 800,000 jobs across Europe will be wiped out following the adoption of EU climate change legislation last year, warned Poland's Solidarność trade union.

Jaroslaw Grzesik, deputy head of energy at Solidarność, said Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic would suffer most because of their reliance on coal for electricity production.

"We're going to lose jobs in states where coal is used," Grzesik told a conference organised by Confrontations Europe, a think-tank, citing EU countries located on the bloc's eastern border. "But Germany, the UK and Scandinavia will also suffer," he told the conference, held on 23 June in Brussels.

Poland relies on coal for 58% of its overall energy needs (the figure jumps to 95% for electricity) compared with 26.2% for Denmark and 23.6% for Germany, according to 2006 statistics from the European Commission. Estonia (56%) and the Czech Republic (45%) are also heavy coal users.

HOW THE UK MET OFFICE IS UNDERMINING ITS CREDIBILITY

As CA readers know, Phil Jones keeps his CRU data secret. Embarrassingly, the UK Met Office relies on this secret data and says that it is unable to provide this supporting data for the most relied upon temperature data set in the world. Their statements in response to FOI requests as to what they actually hold seem contradictory, but most recently they state that they do not hold original data, but only the "value added version" provided to them by Phil Jones. Whether they are entitled to keep the "value added version" secret is something that their FOI officer is presently considering.

Recently, Anthony Watts discovered that the Honolulu Observatory data, which NOAA and NASA lost track of in the 1980s, continued to the present day.

Anthony observed the substantial difference between trends at Honolulu airport and at more rural sites.

When I've done previous benchmarking of GISS data, I've usually tried to use relatively isolated stations so that the effect of data inclusions and exclusions could be simplified. Since Hawaii is relatively isolated, it seemed like it would be an interesting exercise to look at the Hawaiian gridcell, to get a preview of whether the "discovery" of a long data set might have an impact at the gridded level.

As so often, when one goes down a climate science rabbit hole, wonderland awaits.

£5,000 POWER BILLS SHOCK

will hit a shocking £5,000 a year to strike a blow to millions of struggling families, experts warned last night.

Consumer champions said the massive sum was a “wake-up call”, marking the end of cheap electricity and gas.

Bills will rise by up to 42 per cent ayear over the next decade - with the biggest single increase an eye-watering £1,280.

Security trumps environment as Obama gives green light to US consumption of Alberta’s oil.

President Obama, in close discussions with Energy Secretary Stephen Chu and Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach is to give the green light for US consumption of oil sand oil, or rather the import of fuels considered among the “dirtiest” in the fuel market. In a meeting last week, President Obama decided that the Canada’s oil sands represented an important part of national security supplies for petroleum in America’s near future.

In the House, It's Peterson vs. Climate Bill

The resistance to the climate bill from Mr. Peterson and other farm-state Democrats has exposed divisions within the majority party over whether Congress should attempt such far-reaching and potentially costly environmental legislation at the same time it is trying to overhaul the U.S. health-care system.

Mr. Peterson, who was first elected to Congress in 1990, wants the party's leaders to soften the climate bill's impact on coal-burning power plants, scale back existing regulation of ethanol, and make other changes that, if adopted, could steer huge sums of money to farmers who engage in environmentally friendly practices.

With Republicans expected to oppose the measure en masse, the votes of Farm Belt Democrats are critical to the House climate bill's future. But some of the changes Mr. Peterson wants could make it less palatable to Democrats who are more liberal.

Lugar, Others Raise Climate Change Questions

As House Democrats struggle to come up with enough votes to pass their climate change bill that so far lacks changes demanded by farm state members, Lugar alludes to problems in the senate. “To say the least, the data, the metrics of the Chinese measurement of what is occurring with regard to CO2 in the atmosphere, are not necessarily suspect, it’s just simply, the basis for what’s called a ‘baseline’ by one of our witnesses, don’t exist.”

EU leaders postpone decision on climate change aid

EU leaders on Thursday postponed a decision on climate change aid for the poorest nations, a move slammed by environmentalists.

"The main principles of contribution should be the ability to pay and the responsibility for emissions," the European leaders said in a statement issued during a summit in Brussels

"All countries, except the least developed, should contribute to the financing of the fight against climate change in developing countries," the text added.

But there were no concrete commitment or firm figures.

The EU "recognises the scale of the effort required" and would therefore contribute "a fair share of international public support for action for mitigation and adaptation, in particular for the least developed coutries," the 27 heads of state and government said in their statement.

Russia offers climate goal with no real bite

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia plans to release 30 percent more greenhouse gases by 2020 under an emissions target scheme announced on Friday by President Dmitry Medvedev. The plan would reduce emissions by 10-15 percent from Russia's emissions in 1990 when it was part of the Soviet Union and its emissions were far higher than they are today.

Gross Misuse of Science to Achieve a Political End

How can they list naturally occurring gases as pollutants? Because they claim they are causing global warming and climate change, but those are natural processes. There is no evidence that they are due to greenhouse gases at all except in the completely contrived computer models and broadcast in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). CO2 is essential to life and not causing warming or climate change. In every record for any time period and any duration temperatures change before CO2 not as assumed in the theory that human CO2 is the cause. Methane is only 0.00017 percent of all atmospheric gases and 0.36 percent of greenhouse gases so of little or no consequence. More important, the atmospheric levels have dropped for 14 of the last 15 years.

The Nobel prize doesn't always go to the most deserving!

The Nobel prize doesn't always go to the most deserving!!!!!!! See below and you will see why:* Irena Sendler There recently was a death of a 98 year-old lady named Irena. During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in theWarsawGhetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an 'ulterior motive'... She KNEW what the Nazi's plans were for the Jews, (being German.) Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack, (for larger kids.) She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises. During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi's broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely. Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it and reunited the family. Most of course had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted. Last year Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize ... She was not selected. *Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming. GOD BLESS HER May she rest in Peace

Nansen Corrects Sea Ice Data – Sea Ice Extent Now Greater, Near Normal for Most of April/May

Interest in sea ice extent continues to run high, but there remains differences between different groups such as NSIDC and Cryosphere Today, which have both been plagued with SSMI sensor problems from the DMSP F13 satellite. NANSEN may have had the same issues with SSMI/F13, and if they did, they seem to have gotten them under control, possibly by switching to SSSMI/F17 as NSIDC did.

For example here is a page that NANSEN maintains that shows the differences between the newer AMSRE (that JAXA uses) and the SSMI. One of the images is an AMSR minus SSMI, and it looks like the two different satellites/sensors are in pretty good agreement, with areas along the ice edge (where ice/water boundaries are rapidly changing) showing noise differences where you would expect them to.

A New Metric for Amplification

BSTRACT: A new method is proposed for exploring the amplification of the atmosphere with respect to the surface. The method, which I call "temporal evolution", is shown to reveal the change in amplification with time. In addition, the method shows which of the atmospheric datasets are similar and which are dissimilar. The method is used to highlight the differences between the HadAT2 balloon, UAH MSU satellite, RSS MSU satellite, and CGCM3.1 model datasets.

Lawrence Solomon: Enron's other secret

Almost two decades before President Barack Obama made “cap-and-trade” for carbon dioxide emissions a household term, an obscure company called Enron — a natural-gas pipeline company that had become a big-time trader in energy commodities — had figured out how to make millions in a cap-and-trade program for sulphur dioxide emissions, thanks to changes in the U.S. government’s Clean Air Act. To the delight of shareholders, Enron’s stock price rose rapidly as it became the major trader in the U.S. government’s $20-billion a year emissions commodity market.

Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, keen to engineer an encore, saw his opportunity when Bill Clinton and Al Gore were inaugurated as president and vice-president in 1993. To capitalize on Al Gore’s interest in global warming, Enron immediately embarked on a massive lobbying effort to develop a trading system for carbon dioxide, working both the Clinton administration and Congress. Political contributions and Enron-funded analyses flowed freely, all geared to demonstrating a looming global catastrophe if carbon dioxide emissions weren’t curbed. An Enron-funded study that dismissed the notion that calamity could come of global warming, meanwhile, was quietly buried.

Why I am a Climate Realist

In 1996 the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Second Assessment Report was released, and I was listed as one of approximately 3000 “scientists” who agreed that there was a discernable human influence on climate.

I was an invited reviewer for a chapter dealing with the economic impact of sea level rise on small island nations. In keeping with IPCC procedures, the chapter was written and reviewed in isolation from the rest of the report, and I had no input into the process after my review of the chapter draft. I was not asked if I supported the view expressed in my name, and my understanding at the time was that no evidence of a discernable human influence on global climate existed.

Global warming advocates shifting goalposts

For an Italian documentary on climate I was asked, “Why do you think we don’t all share the same theory about global warming, particularly so far as concerns its causes?”

The simple answer is because there is no general climate theory.

As usual the proper answer is complicated. It is a very good question because it speaks directly to a major issue in the public and scientific debate about climate. It was the subject of my recent speech for the Friends of Science in Calgary. The topic was “Recent Theoretical and Observational Evidence for a Cooling Atmosphere.” This was not my choice because it is too esoteric for a general audience. I spoke to the issue, but in the much broader context of the significance of the new evidence and current cooling. It helps understand how proponents of global warming due to human CO2 hypothesis are able to move the goalposts so easily from global warming to climate change to climate chaos and climate catastrophe.

History records Alexander von Humboldt as the last ‘universal’ person. Significantly, he died in 1859, the same year Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was published. A renaissance person is one with extensive knowledge in many areas – a diverse scholar. A universal person is one who knows essentially everything there is to know. Von Humboldt knew all the physics, chemistry, biology and other disciplines of his time. He traveled to and was knowledgeable about all the continents except Antarctica.

Is man-made global warming real? 23/05/09 12:41 PM

Is man-made global warming real? 23/05/09 12:41 PM

BY NIGEL HANNAFORD, CALGARY HERALD MAY 23, 2009

After the Narnian winter we've just had, a reasonable person could easily agree with controversial
Friends of Science spokesman Dr. Tim Ball on this much: Global warming is just another unfulfilled
government promise.So, why are we still preparing to spend money on it? Good question.

Ball is controversial because the retired science professor bucks the prevailing wisdom on global
warming, calls the science behind it wrong, and questions the good faith of the governmental
agencies promoting it. He gets flak. He also gives it, as he did Thursday to a crowd of 400 at
Calgary's Metropolitan Centre, in an event sponsored by a reinvigorated Friends of Science, and the
Frontier Centre for Public Policy. For instance, the idea that carbon dioxide generated by human
activity is unnaturally warming the atmosphere through some supposed greenhouse effect is not (and
never was) supported by facts that were reasonably easy to obtain. Want to know where the problem
is? It's cycles related to solar activity.

Obama administration trying to make unequal things equal

The worst form of inequality is to make unequal things equal. Aristotle.

Human production of CO2 causing global warming or climate change is the biggest deception in history. Previously this statement met with incredulity. How could the entire world or a majority of scientists be fooled? Now after the almost complete collapse of the global financial system people understand. The Obama government is fooled because it doesn’t want to understand and it suits their political agenda. They ignore facts and abandon logic to produce policies guaranteed to continue US economic decline.

Conveyor Belt Model Broken

News has come that the famed ocean conveyor belt, subject of countless TV documentaries and science lessons, is not as simple as scientists believed. The 50 year old model of global ocean circulation that predicts a deep Atlantic counter current below the Gulf Stream has been called into question by an armada of drifting subsurface sensors. As shocking as this news is to oceanographers it is even worse for climate modelers—it means that all the current climate prediction models are significantly wrong.Triggered by a bunch of drifting ocean monitoring instruments, this new revelation represents a major paradigm shift in ocean circulation theory. Even more dramatic is the impact on current ocean circulation models, major components of the general circulation models (GCM) used to predict climate change. To understand how global climate changes in response to natural and human generated changes, it is essential to determine how quickly and by what pathways climate change signals are transported throughout the global ocean. Ocean currents not only redistribute surface warmth, the oceans themselves are a vast reservoir for heat and carbon dioxide, affecting both short term and long term climate change.

All life on planet depends on CO2

A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses: it is an idea that possesses the mind. Robert Bolton

The Possessive Belief
CO2 (CARBON) IS NOT CAUSING GLOBAL WARMING OR CLIMATE CHANGE. I can’t say it more boldly but it doesn’t seem to matter; the belief persists that CO2 is the cause and therefore a problem. The belief is enhanced by government policies and plans, which spawn businesses to exploit the opportunities they create.

A majority of the mainstream media pushes the belief because of political bias rather than understanding of the science. Evidence continues to show what is wrong with the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but it is complex and so most don’t understand. The fact they hold definitive positions without understanding is disturbing. However, ignoring the fact that IPCC predictions are always wrong doesn’t require understanding of the science is completely unacceptable and proof of the political bias.

Contradictory Evidence

The 2007 IPCC Report claimed with over 90% certainty that human produced CO2 is almost the sole cause of global warming. But the evidence shows this can’t be true; temperature changes before CO2 in every record of any duration for any time period; CO2 variability does not correlate with temperature at any point in the last 600 million years; atmospheric CO2 levels are currently at the lowest level in that period; in the 20th century most warming occurred before 1940 when human production of CO2 was very small; human production of CO2 increased the most after 1940 but global temperatures declined to 1985; from 2000 global temperatures declined while CO2 levels increased; and any reduction in CO2 threatens plant life, oxygen production and therefore all life on the planet.

Dr Ferenc Miskolczi provided the most recent scientific argument against CO2 as the cause of temperature change. Here is an explanation by Dr Miklos Zagoni.

It illustrates why the scientific arguments that CO2 is not the problem are not making much headway – they’re very complicated. Basically, Miskolczi is saying that the Greenhouse Effect is present but essentially constant over time, therefore temperature variations are due to some other cause. He is extending the idea of saturation, already known about CO2, to all greenhouse gases. I refer to this as the black paint condition. If you want to block light coming through a window a single coat of black paint will stop almost all of it. Second and third coats reduce the light but by decreasing fractions. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is like the first coat of paint – doubling and tripling the amount reduces heat going to space by decreasing fractions. The IPCC got around this problem by incorrectly claiming a positive feedback. This says increased CO2 raises global temperature that increases evaporation of water vapor to the atmosphere. This supposedly enhances the warming due to increased CO2, but the idea is now discredited. Miskkolczi’s argument means any variations in global temperature are almost all due to changes in solar and geothermal energy. Inclusion of geothermal is unusual. This energy from within the earth, especially into the oceans is essentially and as I have long argued, incorrectly ignored.

Failed Predictions

The IPCC claim they do not make predictions but produce what they call scenarios. This is a deception: they are predictions and understood as such by the public. More important IPCC urge politicians to use them as the basis for policy through The Summary for Policymakers (SPM). The scenarios are a range of possible future global temperatures determined from a combination of climate and economic conditions. Ian Castles and David Henderson have roundly criticized them. MIT professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen referred to them as children’s exercises.

The 2007 IPCC report says,

For the next two decades a warming of about 0.2°C per decade is projected for a range of SRES emissions scenarios. Even if the concentrations of all GHGs and aerosols had been kept constant at year 2000 levels, a further warming of about 0.1°C per decade would be expected. (SRES is Special Report on Emissions Scenario)

That simply hasn’t happened. What is happening cannot happen according to the IPCC. Their 2007 Report painted them into a corner. It claimed with over 90% certainty that CO2 was increasing because of human economic activities and was almost the sole cause of temperature increase. Notice the quote says temperature will rise even if greenhouse gases don’t increase. The problem is CO2 has increased yet the temperature has declined.

Equally important the recent economic downturn was not anticipated, which is a measure of the failure of the entire IPCC approach. They claim that economic activity is the key to human production of CO2, which causes warming. Over the last 18 months the dramatic increase in gasoline prices and then the serious recession should have caused a measurable drop in CO2 levels. It didn’t! There is no evidence of a decline as the NOAA graph illustrates.

Ignoring the Obvious

At what point does misrepresentation of facts become lies? A general definition of the word lie is “an intentionally false statement”, but this applies to a single statement and the key word is “intentional”. A single misunderstanding or a misstatement can occur, but what if there are a series of misstatements from an individual or group? What happens when many statements are proved incorrect, but they continue to repeat them or fail to acknowledge they were false?

There is a long and growing list of statements by promoters of human CO2 induced global warming that have proven incorrect. Yet they continue to push their claim by ignoring the evidence and diverting attention with new specious and spurious claims. Most politicians and mainstream media continue to believe because they don’t understand or don’t want to understand for political reasons. However, even they must understand when the predictions are consistently wrong. Science is simply defined as the ability to predict, so the failure invalidates the science even if you don’t understand the science. People who persist only have a blind belief and as the adage says, there are none so blind as those who will not see. What a terrifying basis for devastating and totally unnecessary energy and economic policies.