CYCLES OF WARMING AND COOLING UNCONNECTED WITH CO2 IN RECENT HISTORY

An email from Norm Kalmanovitch [kalhnd@shaw.ca]

Regardless of whether or not changes in atmospheric CO2 have any measurable on global climate the true deceit of the IPCC is clearly shown by the statement that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels are the source of observed 20th century global warming. Twentieth century global warming did not start until 1910. By that time CO2 emissions had already risen from the expanded use of coal that had powered the industrial revolution, and emissions only increased slowly from 3.5gigatonnes in 1910 to under 4gigatonnes by the end of the Second World War.

It was the post war industrialization that caused the rapid rise in global CO2 emissions, but by 1945 when this began, the Earth was already in a cooling phase that started around 1942 and continued until 1975. With 32 years of rapidly increasing global temperatures and only a minor increase in global CO2 emissions, followed by 33years of slowly cooling global temperatures with rapid increases in global CO2 emissions, it was deceitful for the IPCC to make any claim that CO2 emissions were primarily responsible for observed 20th century global warming.

Today, two decades later, they are still making this claim with incontrovertible evidence that the Earth has been cooling since 2002 in spite of the continued rapid increase in global CO2 emissions, clearly demonstrated in the IPCC's own reports. There is absolutely no rational basis for the claim that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels are causing or have caused causing global warming, and anyone making this claim under the guise of "consensus science" is guilty of committing scientific fraud.

This fraud is not trivial. It has been perpetuated for so long that it is now accepted as fact and forms the basis for government programs worldwide, and these programs have had nothing but detrimental effects on the world population and world economy.

Polar bears, arctic ice thickness, Katrina, wildfires in California, droughts in Africa, and changes to the pH level of the oceans have absolutely nothing to do with the environmentally beneficial CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, but because of this fraud, costly emissions reduction programs are being put in place to address these issues. Before any more suffering is inflicted on the world, we have to put an end to this fraud and hold the perpetrators accountable.





Cap and trade is dead — long live cap and trade

President Obama's risky perseverance on health care is running over another of his pet government expansions—the cap-and-trade bill sent by the House on June 26 for Senate consideration. Recall that cap-and-trade is complex legislation with a very simple premise: make energy so expensive to consume that Americans use less of it, and "greenhouse gas" emissions are thereby curtailed.

But even though it's now clear the bill is not getting out of Congress, look for the Obama Administration to saddle our economy with this huge new energy tax through other means.

First, a brief flashback: The blowback against Obamunism began over global warming, not health care. By a squeaky 219-212 vote, the House rushed the 1,300-page cap-and-trade opus out the door so the members could get back to the hustings for the Fourth of July. When many freshman Democrats got home, those who voted for it experienced the first angry town halls of their careers. In our minds, it is easy to remember that the rancorous public meetings that continued in the August recess were always about health care, but they weren't.

So, given that health care is now effectively bottled up in both chambers of Congress, why isn't Obama pushing cap-and-trade in the Senate? Simple: the votes aren't there for it. Blanche Lincoln, the new head of the Agriculture Committee, calls cap-and-trade a "complete non starter" and said that it is not her "preference to move on cap and trade this year." Majority Leader Harry Reid recently signaled his agreement by stating that cap-and-trade "may" not be considered until next year.

For cap-and-trade, "next year" translates as "never." Senators know what touched off the town halls, and they know what fate awaits many of their Democratic colleagues come November 2010. Passing an unpopular health care "public option" along with cap-and-trade will easily realign the Senate into its old filibustering self. That kills cap-and-trade in the next Congress.

But do not despair, fans of economy-killing regulation. Thanks to the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency (2007), the EPA has authority to issue its own regulations on carbon dioxide. So while asking legislators to swallow hard on the bitter gristle of cap-and-trade, the president has really had the power to enact its core components on his own all along. Small wonder lawmakers of his own party are more than willing to toss the issue back onto his plate.

Now that cap-and-trade has so spectacularly failed in the legislature, it is a sure bet that Obama will direct (or has directed) EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to issue her own cap-and-trade protocols. Look for something concrete out of EPA before the U.N.'s climate change confab in Copenhagen in early December. (That "something" may even include a new fuel economy standard of 35.5 miles-per-gallon—though it would be lower, of course, for the inefficient cars produced by government-owned General Motors.)

The timing of the Copenhagen conference is really what has been driving Obama's support for cap-and-trade all along. It would be an embarrassment for a left-hewing "green" president to show up empty-handed at such an event—and it will greatly diminish Obama's ability to wag his finger at other industrialized countries. For sure, the world's largest emitter of CO2—China—isn't going to agree to any mandatory emissions reductions unless the U.S. has something very serious in hand. And if China does nothing, there's simply not going to be a major slowdown in the growth of atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Not that it really matters. The rather large elephants crowding cap-and-trade out of the Senate is the earth's reluctance to warm in the last decade along with new projections saying that we could go another ten years without much warming.

The current hiatus in warming portends a reduction in potential heating for the entire century. Most computer models produce significant warming as a result of an increase in atmospheric water vapor (a "greenhouse" gas), which comes from an ocean initially warmed by carbon dioxide. When the ocean doesn't warm much, this "feedback" effect is delayed. Or so goes the myth.

The lack of warming is an embarrassment to any elected official who has been hiding behind "the science is settled" fig leaf in order to promote cap-and-trade. While every scientist will tell you that indeed the surface temperature of the planet is warmer than it was a century ago (that's the "settled" part of global warming science), very few scientists anticipated as long a period without warming as we are in. In other words, the real science of future warming is completely unsettled.

The bottom line is that Senate Democrats are perfectly happy to kick cap-and-trade under the bus. They're going to have a hard enough time recovering from the upcoming health care wreck. But the economy, meanwhile, will have an equally hard time recovering from what President Obama is going to do instead.

SOURCE






Plan for solar power plant in Mojave desert scrapped due to GREENIE opposition

There's no such thing as a happy Greenie

Oakland's BrightSource Energy Inc. said this week that it has scrapped a controversial plan to build a major solar thermal power plant in eastern Mojave Desert wilderness that Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein wants to transform into a national monument.

The announcement ended a long-running dispute between backers of renewable energy and environmentalists strongly opposed to the idea of creating an industrial zone within 600,000 acres of former railroad lands that had been donated to the Department of Interior for conservation.

The acrimony even triggered a nasty public squabble between Robert Kennedy Jr., a senior adviser at VantagePoint Venture Partners, which raised $160 million for BrightSource, and David Myers, executive director of the Wildlands Conservancy, which raised $40 million to buy the railroad lands and protect them from development.

Of particular concern was BrightSource's application to develop a solar power plant on a portion of the donated lands known as Broadwell Dry Lake, which lies within Sleeping Beauty Valley. The scenic, near pristine region is home to Big Horn Mountain Sheep and a variety of plants and reptiles found nowhere else.

"We have ceased all activity at the Broadwell site," BrightSource spokesman Keely Wachs said Thursday. "We will not build inside of a national monument." "Our core mission is to protect the environment and reduce carbon emissions," he added. "We share Sen. Feinstein's values on this matter."

News of the company's announcement came as a welcomed surprise to environmentalists. "BrightSource should be saluted for their corporate responsibility," Myers said. "A major conflict between renewable energy and environmentalists has just evaporated." Elden Hughes, former chairman of the Sierra Club's California-Nevada Desert Committee, called the company's announcement "fantastic news." "Broadwell is one of the most beautiful vistas in the desert," he said. "I've seen it covered with yellow flowers to the horizon in all directions."

The BrightSource application was one of 19 under review by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Wachs said the company had ceased activity at the Broadwell site a few months ago. Around the same time, the company began seeking alternative sites for that project "in and outside of the state," he said.

SOURCE





BRITAIN'S GREENEST MAJOR NEWSPAPER LIKELY TO CLOSE BY DECEMBER

Independent News & Media (INME.I) is likely to close its flagship London title The Independent by Christmas, the publishing group's second biggest shareholder Denis O'Brien said on Friday. "There's no point in us as a company subsidising a newspaper that really nobody wants to read in the United Kingdom," O'Brien told Bloomberg TV in an interview on the sidelines of the Global Irish Economic Forum.

"It's not a relevant newspaper anymore and this newspaper's going to be closed by Christmas,"said O'Brien, who has been at odds with the company's board over plans to refinance a 200-million-euro debt issue that was meant to be paid in May...

"This is not a personal thing," O'Brien said. "I've made a substantial investment in the company and I have said ... we need to reduce our costs, get out of loss-making business and restructure."

More HERE






A CHECK ON THE EARTH CARRYING CAPACITY FOR MAN

By C. Marchetti (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Laxenburg. Austria)

Abstract

Much has been said about the carrying capacity of the earth and with most contradictory results, as the arguments have too often been used in the service of prejudices. In this paper, we have made a cross section of a world very heavily populated by present standards; examined with a system view the level of basic necessities plus luxuries for this population; and indicated the technology to satisfy them. Where problems of a global level appeared, a geoengineering solution has been sketched. The result of this analysis is that, from a technological point of view, a trillion people can live beautifully on the earth, for an unlimited time and without exhausting any primary resource and without overloading the environment. The global view of the problems and of their solutions makes the difference and shows that most of the perceived physical limits to growth stem from an inappropriate frame of reference. Although our result should by no means be interpreted as an invitation to multiply, it does cast some doubt on the reliability of resource investigations within too narrow assumptions about the adaptability of man to changing conditions and transfers the problem of the limits to growth where it belongs: to the areas of sociology, politics, and ethics.

Energy Vol. 4. pp. 1107-1117, 1979





Australian miners warn of huge job losses under Warmist laws

THE minerals industry has demanded Kevin Rudd overhaul his proposed emissions trading system or risk smashing Australian jobs and the nation's industrial competitiveness.

As the Prime Minister lobbied global counterparts for action on climate change in New York yesterday, the Minerals Council of Australia warned that his ETS plans were far too tough compared with new European Commission ETS proposals that emerged during the weekend. If Mr Rudd's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme went ahead, the council said, it would cripple the ability of Australian companies to compete against Europeans, costing thousands of jobs and billions of dollars and having no environmental benefit.

The dire warning came as Mr Rudd continued to express pessimism about the chance of a new agreement on global emissions reductions at the UN Copenhagen climate change summit in December. While he vowed the government would press ahead with its proposed ETS regardless of the Copenhagen outcome, fresh divisions emerged in the opposition, as the Nationals hardened their opposition to backing Liberal-framed amendments to the CPRS legislation.

Mr Rudd's plan to have the Senate consider his CPRS legislation before the Copenhagen meeting has split the Coalition. Most Liberals agree that if the Prime Minister goes ahead, they will reluctantly co-operate on amendments to make the legislation more acceptable to business rather than reject the CPRS for a second time and hand Mr Rudd a trigger for a double dissolution and an early election. But the Nationals and some Liberals oppose the CPRS outright, insisting it is risky to legislate for an Australian scheme without knowing whether big emitters such as China and the US will also embrace a trading scheme.

MCA acting chief executive Brendan Pearson yesterday backed the cautious approach, seizing on weekend proposals from the European Commission to attack the CPRS as a potential job-destroyer. Under the EC proposals, Mr Pearson said, 80 per cent of minerals producers and manufacturers would receive free permits, meaning the coal, aluminium, copper and non-ferrous metals industries would faced little cost. At the same time, 90 per cent of Australia's mining exports, by value, would be produced without any compensation. "While Australia's coalmining sector pays $5 billion in carbon costs over the next five years, the EU industry will pay nothing," Mr Pearson said. "While the Australian gold sector pays $810million, the comparable industries in the EU (and US) will face no or limited permit costs."

Mr Pearson said Mr Rudd's proposals would put Australia "completely out of step" with Australian industry's competitors, noting the EC proposed giving assistance to 164 industry sectors from 2013 until 2020. "The CPRS needs substantial revision to bring it into line with the approaches being adopted by our trading partners," he said. "Failure to do so will lead to the hollowing out of Australia's regions, as export industries slowly decline under the weight of a self-imposed carbon burden estimated at approximately $130bn over the next decade."

He said the EC proposal included a single, simple, trade-exposure test on industry. If firms met the test, they would qualify for assistance, irrespective of their emissions intensity. "The CPRS should be amended to include such a test," Mr Pearson said.

The call for a fresh look at the scheme came as Mr Rudd's weekend expressions of pessimism about an outcome in Copenhagen sparked further debate within the Coalition. Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce said that if Mr Rudd believed Copenhagen would fail, he must delay a vote on the CPRS issue. Senator Joyce also said that Mr Turnbull should dump his willingness to negotiate with Labor on the issue. With Mr Turnbull overseas, acting Liberal leader Julie Bishop expressed concern that Climate Change Minister Penny Wong had proposed a Copenhagen compromise under which developing nations would not have to commit to cutting carbon emissions -- only to producing a schedule for future reductions. "This highlights the madness of Australia locking into an emissions trading scheme without knowing what the rest of the world will do," she said.

SOURCE

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