Category — Climate Change

[Update 07/29/10: The EPA has announced its decision to deny all the petitions asking it to reconsider its Endangerment Finding, claiming that it could find no evidence in the Climategate emails indicating that climate change science could not be trusted. Read on to see if you think this decision is justified.]

While the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency would surely love to use the findings of the Independent Climate Change Email Inquiry (aka the Muir Russell report) to brush aside the many challenges mounted, in response to the Climategate email scandal, to the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases endanger the public’s health and welfare (a finding which enables the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions), they’ll find little in the Muir Russell report to help in their defense.

Well, I should qualify that. They’ll find little scientifically to help their defense. Politics is another matter.

Since the EPA has largely based its Endangerment Finding on an appeal to authority—the primary authority being the IPCC—rather than its own investigations, the Muir Russell report plays right into the EPA’s hands when concluding (emphasis in original):

[W]e do not find that their [influential scientists from the Climate Research Unit of the U.K.’s University of East Anglia] behaviour has prejudiced the balance of advice given to policy makers. In particular, we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments.

At face value, it seems as if the EPA could take this as the only proof needed to dismiss all of the post-Climategate calls for it to reconsider it pre-Climategate Endangerment Finding.

But, as with just about everything else about the EPA’s Endangerment Finding, such action would be a gross oversimplification, a side-step around the deeper complexities, and an incomplete address of the issues raised against it. [Read more →]

Reactions to the findings of the last of the investigations into the “meaning” of the contents of the Climategate emails—the so-called Muir Russell report—are still trickling in. And truly, there have been few surprises.

The Muir Russell panel—hired by the University of East Anglia (UEA)—concluded (some add, predictably) that the scientists from for the Climate Research Unit (CRU, which is part of the UEA) had not really done anything wrong aside from not being particularly cooperative with folks that they didn’t like.

The CRU scientists and their close colleagues who were caught up in the Climategate affair claim vindication (see RealClimate), alarmists love it (see ClimateProgress, Newsweek), those in the middle were a bit displeased (see The Atlantic, New Scientist) or wishy-washy (see DotEarth), and those feel that the Climategate emails revealed glaring problems with how climate change research is being conducted and brought to the public were crying “whitewash” (see Wall Street Journal, Watts Up with That).

It makes me wonder why Muir Russell bothered in the first place.

I find my reaction somewhere between the last two categories, which I guess would make me wishy-whitewashy. I don’t think Climategate revealed any great fractures in the general concept that human greenhouse gas emissions are leading to a warmer world, but it most definitely did confirm what I felt had been the case all along—that the Climategaters were not playing fair. And not playing fair has a lot more consequences than the Muir Russell panel cared to admit—this is where the “whitewash” comes in for me. [Read more →]

Last week, an advance copy of a paper to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) was released which reported that a collection of “experts” suggests that climate tipping points (codename for something bad but we don’t know exactly what) would be knocked over by 2200 if we stay on our current greenhouse gas emissions pathway (for about the next 200 years). Underlying these views is the experts’ opinions as to what the earth’s equilibrium climate sensitivity—the rise in global temperatures resulting from a doubling of the earth carbon dioxide concentration—likely is.

But do the experts opinions actually reflect the scientific knowledge on these subjects?

The answer is no.

In fact, the experts’ opinions tended towards the extreme, despite recent science which should have reeled them in. Which is a lesson in and of itself. [Read more →]

[Editor note: Part I in this series reviewed the praise for BP and Enron from the Worldwatch Institute. Part II delved into the reasons that BP tried to rebrand itself as "beyond petroleum."]

“Such [progressive] leadership [on climate change] may give BP Amoco better access to government-controlled oil deposits and more operating flexibility.”

- Kimberly O’Neill Packard and Forest Reinhardt, “What Every Executive Needs to Know About Global Warming,” Harvard Business Review, July/August 2000.

The Worldwatch Institute sang the praises of BP’s it’s-a-problem, we-can-solve-it approach to climate change. Far Left environmentalist Joe Romm featured John Browne/BP in his book Cool Companies as a leading example of corporations going green for profits and virtue.

Both Worldwatch and Romm were wrong–dead wrong–about BP, just as they were also wrong about climate-alarmist Enron and Ken Lay.

It turns out that a lot of political profit-making and greenwashing was going on at both rogue companies. Remember what Jeff Skilling told one of Enron’s coal executives who complained that the company’s greenwashing was hurting his division:

“We are a green company, but the green stands for money.” [Read more →]

A new study has concluded that shifting climate is leading to shifting vegetation patterns across the globe.

My response to this announcement was “Terrific! The biosphere was responding the way it should to changing conditions.”

To my surprise, this enthusiasm wasn’t shared by the study’s authors. In fact, lead author Patrick Gonzalez seemed downright glum:

“Globally, vegetation shifts are disrupting ecosystems, reducing habitat for endangered species, and altering the forests that supply water and other services to many people.”

A very negative spin on what should be cause for celebration.

Despite how much we, humans, have sliced and diced the landscape, natural systems are still doing their best to respond to climate changes—just like they always have.

The only way to see this in a negative light would to hold the belief that everything that humans do to the world is bad. This seems like an odd philosophy, for more than likely the holder of such a philosophy wouldn’t exist today had it not been for everything that humans have done to make the world a better place and vastly improve our health and welfare. Just 150 years ago, as the industrial revolution was set to take off, the population of the world was about 5 times less than now and the average human lifespan was about 30 years. 

I am not saying that there aren’t some negatives for some species when the climate changes. Of course there are. But what I am saying is that there are plenty of positives as well. And it takes no more imagination to come up with positives than it does for negatives. [Read more →]

[Editor note: David (P. D.) Henderson, formerly head of the Economics and Statistics Department of the OECD, is currently Chairman of the Academic Advisory Council of the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, which is headed by Nigel (Lord) Lawson). This is his first post at MasterResource.]

Over the past 22 years, governments everywhere and a great many outside observers have put their trust in the official expert advisory process as a whole and the IPCC process in particular.

I have come to believe that this widespread trust is unwarranted. But it is not just the IPCC process that is in question here. The basic problem of unwarranted trust goes further: it extends to the chronically biased treatment of climate change issues by responsible departments and agencies which the Panel reports to, and in nationally-based organizations which they finance.

Here is what I recently submitted to the InterAcademy Council.

Background

I am Chairman of the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. On 26 May the InterAcademy Council invited the Foundation to submit written comments to the independent Review Committee. At the suggestion of the Director of the Foundation, Dr Benny Peiser, I am submitting herewith my own comments. While this submission is personal, it has been endorsed by the GWPF.

I am an economist, not a climate scientist. I became involved with climate change issues, by accident not design, towards the end of 2002. Up to that time, I had formed no considered views on the subject, and had seen no reason to question the work and role of the IPCC. I was an uninvolved spectator.

To begin with, my main involvement was limited to some economic and statistical aspects of this huge and complex array of topics. Over time, however, my interests and concerns have broadened in ways that I had neither planned nor anticipated. Increasingly, and unexpectedly, I have become critical of the way in which issues of climate change have been viewed and treated by governments across the world. [Read more →]

Ultra-clarifying moments of truth are sometimes possible when environmental groups and their so-called allies end up in “family” squabbles, disagreeing over implementation of their ill-conceived schemes. The disarray, aptly described in prior posts at MasterResource by economist Robert Murphy and others as a civil war on the Left,” has become commonplace with respect to cap-and-trade proposals. And this is part of what Ken Green calls the death spiral of climate alarmism.

Just maybe the Coercion Crowd should throw up their hands and just say: give peace a chance!

Gaming the Carbon Market – Say It Isn’t So!

Yet another example of this discord, reported in a recent issue of E&E News PM, Climate: Enviro group outlines 10 schemes for gaming carbon markets — 05/18/2010 — www.eenews.net (access with free trial subscr.) involves Friends of the Earth (FOE), which recently released a strongly worded critique of the Kerry-Lieberman climate bill. In its guide, FOE inconveniently details how “carbon offsets are especially prone to corruption and fraud” and directly questions whether carbon markets are an appropriate mechanism to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs).

The guide derisively attacks cap-and-trade schemes detailing the ten ways carbon markets can be scammed “at the expense of both our economy and our climate.” The scams enumerated carry such unflattering headings as, “Ponzi carbon,” “Carbon bribery,” and “Sell fake carbon offset credits,” among other derogatory descriptions. Ouch! [Read more →]

“We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.”

- James Hansen, “The Threat to the Planet,” New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006.

“Desperation is setting in among climate alarmists who by their own math can see that the window is rapidly closing on ’saving the planet’.”

- Kenneth Green, ”A Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism, Redux?” MasterResource, September 30, 2009.

On the political front:

The IPCC’s reputation as a serious scientific institution continues to hemorrhage as a nearly endless string of errors and/or bad practices relating to the Fourth Assessment Report come to light.

As Newsweek put it recently,

Some of the IPCC’s most-quoted data and recommendations were taken straight out of unchecked activist brochures, newspaper articles, and corporate reports—including claims of plummeting crop yields in Africa and the rising costs of warming-related natural disasters, both of which have been refuted by academic studies.

Further, Newsweek opines, the case for policy-development based on climate alarmism is also off the rails,

There are excellent reasons to limit emissions and switch to cleaner fuels—including an estimated 750,000 annual pollution deaths in China, the potential to create jobs at home instead of enriching nasty regimes sitting on oil wells, the need to provide cheap sources of power to the world’s poorest regions, and the still-probable threat that global warming is underway. At the moment, however, certainty about how fast—and how much—global warming changes the earth’s climate does not appear to be one of those reasons.

Internationally, things are not much better for the alarmists. The negotiations in Copenhagen were a complete shambles, resulting only in a non-binding, let’s-meet-again memorandum that the various participating countries “recognized” having seen.

Greenpeace activist, and Independent Commentator Joss Garman characterized the “Copenhagen Accord” thus:

This “deal” is beyond bad. It contains no legally binding targets and no indication of when or how they will come about. There is not even a declaration that the world will aim to keep global temperature rises below 2 C. Instead, leaders merely recognise the science behind that vital threshold, as if that were enough to prevent us crossing it.

The only part of this deal that anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it’s now apparent that even this is largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so that poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.

In the EU, the vaunted European Trading System continues to come apart at the seams. According to James Kanter at the NYT:

Carbon traders, for example, have been arrested for tax fraud; evidence has emerged of lucrative projects that may do nothing to curb climate change; and steel and cement companies have booked huge profits selling surplus permits they received for free.

And the EU is backing away from previous plans to tighten its carbon reduction targets. According to Greenwire, [Read more →]

On June 10, the U.S. Senate will debate and vote on a resolution of disapproval (S.J.Res.26), sponsored by Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, to stop the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from ‘enacting’ controversial global warming policies through the regulatory back door.

S.J.Res.26 would overturn the EPA’s endangerment finding, a December 2009 rulemaking in which the agency concluded that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. The endangerment finding is both trigger and precedent for sweeping policy changes Congress never approved. America could end up with a bundle of greenhouse gas regulations more costly and intrusive than any climate bill or treaty the Senate has declined to pass or ratify, yet without the people’s representatives ever voting on it.

At a minimum, as former Virginia Gov. George Allen and I explain elsewhere, unless stopped, the EPA will be in a position to determine the stringency of fuel economy standards for the auto industry, set climate policy for the nation, and even amend the Clean Air Act — powers never delegated to the agency by Congress.

S.J.Res.26 puts a simple question squarely before the Senate: Who shall make climate policy — lawmakers who must answer to the people at the ballot box or politically unaccountable bureaucrats, trial lawyers, and activist judges appointed for life?

Precisely because S.J.Res.26 would restore constitutional discipline to climate policymaking, regulatory zealots are mounting smear campaigns against it. Climate Progress calls it “polluter crafted” (impossible, because the language and form of the resolution are fixed by the Congressional Review Act). MoveOn.Org claims the resolution will condemn many Americans to “smoke the equivalent of a pack a day just from breathing the air” (utter nonsense – just one cigarette delivers 12-27 times the daily dose of fine particulate matter that non-smokers get in cities with the most polluted air). Environmental Defense Action Fund says the resolution will give corporate polluters a “bailout” (also impossible, because S.J.Res.26 is not a tax or spending bill). 

Train Weighs In, Ignores Obvious, Knocks Down Straw Man 

A more sophisticated attack comes from Russell Train, who served as EPA Administrator under the Nixon and Ford Administrations (1973-1977). In a May 24 letter to Senate leaders, Train warns that S.J.Res.26 would “rollback Clean Air Act protections.”

Not so! Yes, the resolution would “prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.” But from its inception in 1970 through the present day, EPA has not regulated greenhouse gas emissions, and its recently finalized motor vehicle emission standards do not take effect until 2011. Train confuses “rollback” with containment. The only thing S.J.Res.26 would roll back is EPA’s regulatory overreach. [Read more →]

[Editor note: This post from economist Robert Murphy originally appeared on 2-10-10. It is reprinted given the growing opposition to pricing carbon within the Democratic Party.]

George Carlin once asked, “Is it really possible to have a civil war?” Readers of Joe Romm’s pronouncements on greenhouse gas legislation would answer in the negative. Romm has always been a caustic critic of the “anti-science disinformers” who do not toe the line on the alleged scientific consensus, but lately he has turned his fire on former allies who dare to question the legislative developments in Washington.

An illustration of this internal squabbling is Romm’s recent post on the “cap and dividend” proposal put forth by Senators Cantwell and Collins. Here’s Romm’s take (emphasis added):

Climate politics can be very strange indeed. Because cap-and-trade bills like Waxman-Markey are seen as having no chance of passing the Senate, some enviros appear to be shifting their support to bills that are politically even less attractive and environmentally even less adequate.

The latest misguided missile is the Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal (CLEAR) Act put forward by Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) — full text and info here. Supporters call it “Cap-and-Dividend,” but right now I think the best term for it is, “Cap-and-Divide,” since it has no chance whatsoever of becoming law but is serving to undercut the tripartisan effort by Graham, Kerry, and Lieberman to develop a bill that might get 60 votes…. [Read more →]