Category — Climate debate issues

[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 →]

[Editor note: This is Part V of a series of posts on the political activism of climate scientists at Texas A&M.]

“I really enjoyed the ‘fact’ that I saved you from being a ‘climate alarmist’. Frankly, your descriptions of my colleague Andrew Dessler are outrageous. You seem to forget that he spent several hours tutoring you and your student from [Kinkaid] on climate change during a university holiday. As I said to Steve McIntyre after spending hours trying to help him, then being mocked in his blog, ‘No good deed goes unpunished’. I am afraid to say anything more to you via email.”

- Gerald North to Rob Bradley, April 17, 2010 (cc Eric Berger, William Dawson, Andrew Dessler)

Dear Jerry:

I asked for substantive feedback from you to my post(s) and instead got a sarcastic, emotional response. You are clearly annoyed, but open debate about contentious public public policy issues should not be compromised by personal relationships or ‘favors’. And there is nothing wrong about a ‘challenge culture’ and mid-course corrections, either. We are talking about climate science, after all.

I am going to elaborate as best I can and bring in some more of your own quotations for the record.

[North as My Enron Consultant]

Jerry: you are a very interesting and important figure in the climate-change debate–and one whose views future historians of science should note.

Back in 1998, I picked you out of many candidates as a corporate consultant because you seemed to be more open to finding the middle than many of your colleagues. Thinking that Enron was progressive on the climate issue (and they unfortunately were–Ken Lay saw many rent-seeking opportunities with CO2 pricing), you said yes.

“In talking over consulting with ENRON with many friends, I decided to do it, only because of the open-minded position ENRON seems to be taking. I decided that I might even have an influence on what course ENRON eventually takes. I am not concerned with one ideological position or another—just the truth. If ENRON makes use of the truth to make a profit, good show. If ENRON wants to twist the truth to the detriment of everyone else, I will drop out—tarnished but wiser.”

- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), March 25, 1998

I think you provide an excellent ‘case study’ to understand:

1) how the climate alarm got out of control, and

2) how/why a good many in your profession got off scientific track (as evidenced by Climategate and the growing recognition of problems with the IPCC reports).

My Major Point: You Have ‘Gone Political’ and ‘Gone Left’ Post-Climategate Despite Your Skepticism About Climate Alarmism–and Climategate Itself

I have a treasure trove of emails from you that are fair and insightful, in retrospect. (And you have stated that you write your emails as if they would be made public–nothing to fear from your own views.) Some of them are very critical of scientists–skeptics and alarmists. Your criticisms of the skeptics are public (I can provide citations); your more ‘private’ views against alarmism should be made public too. [Read more →]

[The other parts of this series on the activism of Texas A&M climatologists are here: Part I, Part III, Part IV, and Part V]

“Texas’ challenge to the EPA’s endangerment finding on carbon dioxide contains very little science….”

- Andrew Dessler, Gerald North, et al….., “On Global Warming, the Science Is Solid,” Houston Chronicle, March 7, 2010. [Also see yesterday's Part I post on Dessler/North.]

Last month, the State of Texas filed a petition for reconsideration in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (summary here) against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The Petition lays out why the EPA’s reliance on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to provide an assessment of climate change science was a very bad idea.

After documenting flaws in the scientific literature, flaws in scientific behavior, flaws in the IPCC process, and flaws in the IPCC’s conclusions, Texas asks the EPA to re-examine its conclusions regarding climate change and its potential impacts on human health and welfare, and this time, not to rest its conclusions on the biased opinion of the IPCC.

In other words, Texas asks the EPA to do the work themselves—something they are mandated to do anyway.

The complete Texas Petition is available here in a single pdf file. But for easier navigatation, we have broken the full Petition up into its individual sections, and linked them into the Table of Contents page, which is reproduced below.

Hopefully, this will enable you to read through it in a more directed fashion so that you can go straight to which ever section you may be most interested in and see how Texas lays out its case for Reconsideration. [Read more →]

According to M. Mitchell Waldrop, editorial page editor for Nature, “global-warming deniers . . . are sowing doubts about the fundamental [climate change] science.” Further, Waldrop argues in his op-ed “Climate of Fear, “scientists’ reputations have taken a hit.”

Let’s ignore the snarky reference to “deniers” and ask: is science and are scientists under attack? The answer is Yes. But in an intellectual sense, isn’t this the essence of falsifiable, non-verifiable  physical science?

Climategate (et al.) is not simply about “deniers” and Waldrop’s complaint that skeptics are “stok[ing] the angry fires of talk radio, cable news, the blogosphere and the like.” It’s much more nuanced than that.

As a quick aside, perhaps Dr. Waldrop can be forgiven for failing to see the big picture. To critics (can he tolerate them?), he is a deer in the headlights of universal, Internet-quick scientific scrutiny. And there are a lot of smart ‘amateurs’ mixing it up with the pros (who likes competition?).  Consider the view of his colleague-in-arms Paul Ehrlich, who profoundly stated in the same March 10th editorial: “Everyone is scared shitless, but they don’t know what to do.”

Perhaps we can help them. [Read more →]

[Editor note: Mr. Lewis's musical parody, "How I Was Not Al Gored Into Submission," released three weeks ago, has exceeded 20,000 views on YouTube.]

“Polluter-funded” is the global warming movement’s favorite pejorative to discredit anyone who questions the reality of a climate crisis or opposes their policy nostrums. Google the term and you’ll find about 18,300 sites where it appears.

“Polluter-crafted” brings up about 7,500 sites. The warming lobby uses this buzzword to trash legislation they oppose, most recently Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s resolution of disapproval, pursuant to the Congressional Review Act (CRA), to stop EPA from dealing itself into a position to make climate policy – a power Congress never approved when it enacted the Clean Air Act.

Who are these “polluters” who craft and fund? Any big company that emits carbon dioxide (CO2) because it supplies, refines, or combusts carbon-based (fossil) fuels.

CO2 ‘Pollution’: A Rhetorical Trick

This is all a rhetorical trick. Yes, CO2 is a “greenhouse” (heat-absorbing) gas. However, water vapor (H2O) is also a greenhouse gas, yet nobody calls it “air pollution.” Since 1975, EPA has required automakers to install catalytic converters to clean up automobile exhaust. The core function of these devices is to turn other substances into the aforementioned greenhouse gases, H2O and CO2. It would be nutty to say that catalytic converters pollute the air.

Carbon dioxide is an odorless, colorless trace gas that is non-toxic to humans and animals at more than 30 times ambient levels. An essential plant nutrient, CO2 is the basic building block of the planetary food chain. Plants raised in CO2-enriched environments grow larger and faster, use water more efficiently, and are more resilient to environmental stresses such as drought and air pollution. Since animals directly or indirectly depend on plants for food, CO2 emissions nourish the entire planetary biosphere. Name another “pollutant” that does that!

But okay, for the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that CO2 emissions are “air pollution.”  Some of the nation’s biggest CO2-emitters support the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. Waxman-Markey supporter American Electric Power (AEP) is the nation’s top CO2-emitter, according to Benchmarking US Air Emissions (2006), a joint report by Ceres, NRDC, and PSEG. Duke Energy, which merged with Cinergy, is the nation’s third-largest CO2-emitter. CEO Jim Rogers crowed about Duke’s role in crafting Waxman-Markey shortly after the House passed it last June.

U.S. CAP–’Polluters’ Too

Waxman-Markey arguably takes the cake in the industry-scripted bill category. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership (U.S. CAP), a coalition including some of the world’s biggest corporations, outlined the bill’s main provisions months before it was introduced in A Blueprint for Legislative Action: Consensus Recommendations for U.S. Climate Legislation (January 2009).

So is Waxman-Markey a “polluter-crafted” bill? And are recipients of campaign contributions from AEP, Duke, and other U.S. CAP member companies “polluter-funded” politicians? Yes, if you apply green “logic” without fear or favor. [Read more →]

What a difference 12 months makes. Almost exactly one year ago, the popular, newly minted president, Barack Obama, was telling Congress that he wanted “legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America.”

The Democrats, fully confident of their new president and their grip on both houses of Congress, were certain that they could pass yet another big energy bill that would finally push hydrocarbons off their pedestal and replace them with wind turbines, solar panels, and every other type of alternative energy.

An Unstimulated Economy

But a lot has happened since Obama delivered his first State of the Union address. The global economy has continued to show lackluster growth. And perhaps most important: unemployment rates in the U.S. remain stubbornly high and are expected to stay high for at least the next two years. The massive stimulus, in short, has been expensive and unstimulating.

On Sunday, the New York Times reported that “roughly 2.7 million jobless people will lose their unemployment check before the end of April unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the payments.” The same story, written by Peter S. Goodman, also contained this astonishing fact: Some 6.3 million Americans have “been unemployed for six months or longer, the largest number since the government began keeping track in 1948. That is more than double the toll in the next-worst period, in the early 1980s.”

Real estate foreclosures in the U.S. are soaring, with up to 3.5 million homeowners facing the threat of foreclosure this year. And of course, there’s the changing balance of power in Congress. The Democrats’ brief stint with a super majority has ended in the Senate, where a Republican, Scott Brown, now sits in the chair held by the late Ted Kennedy.

Other Problems for Climate Alarmism

Meanwhile, sloppy work has tarnished the reputation of the UN-sanctioned Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), perhaps irretrievably so. [Read more →]

On Wednesday evening January 27th a discussion of the latest developments in climate change science will be held on the campus of Rice University (directions below for those nearby). This discussion/debate is cosponsored by the Shell Center for Sustainability and the Center for the Study of Environment and Society at Rice. Here is the flyer:

Defending the IPCC consensus regarding natural-versus-anthropogenic climate change is Gerald R. North, Distinguished Professor of the Physical Section, Department of Atmospheric Sciences and the Department of Oceanography at Texas A&M University.

Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts of Technology, will challenge the IPCC consensus, arguing that real-world climate sensitivity lies below the iconic range of 2c–4.5C. Questions about ‘Climategate’ and the newly emerged  ‘Himalayangate’ (the latter exposed by Dr. North’s Texas A&M colleague, John Nielsen-Gammon) are expected to be covered in the question/answer period after the scientists’ formal 30-minute presentations.

[DIRECTIONS McMurtry Auditorium is located in Duncan Hall. Visitor parking is available to anyone with a credit card.  Visitor Parking “L” and Founder’s Court Visitor are the closest to Duncan Hall, in particular using the Rice main entrance on South Main Street at Sunset Blvd. Another parking lot is the North Lot, 5-8 min walk to Duncan Hall, on Rice blvd using entrance # 21 or 20.

Rice campus map: http://www.rice.edu/maps/maps.html]

Having this climate debate is very good news. The last climate science debate at Rice University was in the summer of 2000 at the James A. Baker Institute. Therein lies a story…. [Read more →]

Editor Note: In our ‘best of MasterResource’ weekend series, we are pleased to reprint the September 30th post by Ken Green in light of the stalemate of U.S. climate legislation for 2009. Obviously, the onset of Climategate will only reinforce a worst-case scenario for climate alarmism politics.

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

James Hansen, for instance, said three years ago in the New York Review of Books: “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.” That was also Al Gore’s estimate in “An Inconvenient Truth.” But the time has been ticking away, and it’s increasingly obvious that the Gore/Hansen “wrenching transformation” of the U.S. energy system is simply not going to happen.

Perhaps Copenhagen will make it official.

U.S. cap-and-trade has become a big political liability, in particular, as polls show voters are relatively unconcerned about climate change, and are deeply averse to higher energy prices. That has led Senator John Kerry, for example, to try to hide the ball by changing the name of scheme to “pollution reduction” in order to obscure the reality that it’s basically a massive energy tax. Other Left-leaning politicians (the latest being Houston Mayor Bill White, who is running for the U.S. Senate) are announcing their opposition to cap-and-trade. (1)

Renewable energy is also getting more scrutiny than ever before, awakening not only cost-conscious middle America but grass-roots environmentalists concerned about negative local impacts and big-business intrusion.

Anti-Alarmist Momentum

Here is the death spiral that I believe the the Climate Crisis Industry fears (and is probably right to fear) consciously or subconsciously:

1. U.S. rejects cap-and-trade in 2009, leaving a climate bill in serious trouble for election-year 2010 and beyond.

2. Copenhagen flounders without any U.S. commitment and from developing country opposition, among other things. The failed Kyoto Protocol creeps toward its 2012 expiration date with an all pain, no gain tag.

3. EPA action is delayed by court action and public/political opposition, negating implementation for years and effective implementation for longer. Congressional action to de-authorize EPA becomes more and more likely as businesses, and electric utilities in particular, demand certainty to meet growing U.S. electricity demand coming out of a recession. [Read more →]

My ‘Left’ friends are mad at me now that the climate debate/ discussion has shifted, at least temporarily, from Save the World to Why Did We Fail? Here is what a former Enron executive (his name will remain confidential) emailed me a few days ago:

Rob- shame on you. The [Breakthrough Institute] article [Apocalypse Fatigue: Losing the Public on Climate Change] names only 3 reasons why the U.S. will not address climate mitigation: far off threat, greed, and telling them what they don’t want to hear. It ignores the real reason: the constant effort from people like yourself to undermine the case for action with its ancillary affect of dividing the country and paralyzing the system.

Then the sarcasm comes in:

I am not being facetious: you should pat yourself on that back for helping create an atmosphere that will prevent any meaningful action on the false threat of climate change from happening in this country. It is a proud moment and credit to your hard work. I tip my hat.

Now, there are a lot of people who would love to take credit for helping to derail any piece of all pain-no gain legislation. But Waxman-Markey probably would not pass the House today if a re-vote were taken, and even some Democratic Senators know that being Democrat includes not needlessly increasing energy prices for their constituents.

Still, I took some offense at this email and wrote back in all seriousness:

I am surprised …. I thought you were having second doubts about the increasingly false alarm of high-sensitivity warming. And to me the lessons of Enron include the fake green stuff we were doing–and the fake stuff that [our old colleague Jim] Rogers [of Duke Energy] is doing at the expense of his customers and broader society.

[Texas A&M Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Sciences and Oceanography] Jerry North told me just last week that he is more convinced than ever that the warming is at the very bottom of the IPCC range, which some top climate economists say makes CO2 a positive externality, not a negative one. We have peer-reviewed articles on how feedback effects are not the big amplifiers that the models (must) assume. [Read more →]

“The [Houston Chronicle's] editorial positions have moved in a decidedly liberal and environmentalist direction since its parent, the Hearst Corporation, installed new management in 2002.”

- Bill Dawson, Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media, December 3, 2007.

“One factor [in the industry retrenchment] could be the fate of climate change legislation in Congress, which could add costs to oil and gas producers, refiners, chemical makers and other parts of the energy sector, forcing them to cut jobs. Susan Combs, Texas comptroller of public accounts said: “I think there’s a big bull’s-eye painted on Houston.”

- Brett Clanton, “Big Oil’s Lean Look Fuels Area Jobs Fear,” Houston Chronicle, November 8, 2009.

Cap-and-trade, even in a watered down beginning, isn’t good for Houston. But the Houston Chronicle has been at the forefront of advocating for such open-ended regulation–even rejecting a sober cost-benefit analysis of the issue. And even not having second thoughts about alarmist science that its own science writer Eric Berger (see below) has grown to have.

Why such a crusade at the nation’s 7th leading paper?

Looking for an answer, I stumbled upon a piece on the web by former Houston Chronicle environmental writer Bill Dawson.  Dawson now teaches at Rice University on media issues and the environment.

His post fills in some gaps about why Houston’s paper (the Houston Post folded and merged into the Chronicle in 1995) became such an organ for climate alarmism–even tramping to the Left of the New York Times at times. It also explains the large circulation declines, given that the Houston audience is more free market, conservative, libertarian, and non-alarmist than the Chronicle’s editorial writers and reporters. And the Houston energy industry, as Brett Clanton reported in a front page article in Sunday’s Chronicle, will be a big loser under cap-and-trade. 

The latest circulation news for the Houston Chronicle is rather grim–a year-to-year decline of 13%. One comment on the circulation report said much about the alienated audience:

If you would give any indication you were fair, we would start buying your paper again. I know this isn’t going to happen but I wish it would because I truly believe you folks in the media are the common man’s eye’s and ears, our checks and balances.

As of late, your profession has failed terribly.

Bill Dawson Documents the Bias

Mr. Dawson’s blog brings some very interesting things to light. [Read more →]