The Problem With Cap and Trade

FROM- The American Spectator

By C. Boyden Gray

The pending climate legislation that has spent so many months languishing in Congress was stripped of its initial momentum by the deep worldwide recession, the administration's failure in Copenhagen to get commitments from China sufficient to allay concerns about continued job migration from the U.S., the scandal over some of the science, and the struggle over health care reform. But the principal reasons for the demise -- the huge tax and trading boon to the banking industry in Wall Street and London -- deserve some further scrutiny.

The sponsors of so-called cap and trade legislation claimed that it was based on the hugely successful acid rain cap and trade program put into effect by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA). As will be discussed more fully below, this characterization is highly inaccurate, because the Waxman-Markey bill and Senate counterparts created a $3 trillion tax and commodities market where the CAAA had done nothing of the sort. This feature of the climate legislation hurt its electoral chances by allowing Republicans accurately to portray the bills as a huge tax while scaring off at least half a dozen centrist Democratic senators worried about having to contain another Wall Street derivatives meltdown because of the proposed pollutive materials commodities market.

As criticism of the tax intensified over the course of the last year, climate bill sponsors responded by promising the return of the allowance revenues to taxpayers and by erecting a whole set of new financial protections parallel to the current financial reform effort. This triggered understandable skepticism -- since if the money were truly to be returned to its source there would be no point in collecting it in the first place. Moreover, there would also be no need for financial protections, unless there were something else going on. It's the "something else" that is really at the heart of the problem and that deserves further examination.

That "something else" has to do with the only true short-term beneficiaries of the whole exercise -- namely the bankers and traders of London and Wall Street who were ready to collect huge profits from trading carbon under the proposed legislation. The junior senator from New York put it best in an October 21, 2009, op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, where she said that as a result of the legislation, the "financial market [was] poised to deliver significant growth." She explained that the "carbon permits [under the climate bills] could quickly become the world's largest commodities market, growing to as much as $3 trillion by 2020," and that "New York's financial talent, expertise and institutions are uniquely suited" to run this new market.

Acknowledging the need to address the regulatory aspects of a new set of derivative trading, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand observed that "Congress should integrate carbon trading into comprehensive financial reform," but she cautioned that the derivatives contracts should be allowed to be customized and not forced to be standardized and thus made fully transparent in any new regulatory structure. Finally, she noted that it was essential to the "ultimate benefit for New York that the market for carbon-emission permits is internationally integrated."

London was equally enthusiastic. Carbon could become "one of the fastest-growing markets ever, with volumes comparable to credit derivatives inside of a decade," said the head of emissions trading at Merrill Lynch's offices in London. According to another promotional article, London already "trades more carbon than any other city in the world," thanks to the European Emissions Trading System (ETS) set up by the EU after the Kyoto Treaty. As a result of carbon trading requirements, said the article, "carbon emissions are bound to become the world's biggest market....this is a bull market and great to invest in."

The Times of London further quoted a leading London trader as saying that "Europe will be the centre of the global market as a result of taking the lead....London is the leading centre and will remain so for years to come. The preparation has taken place here, and other financial centres are not so advanced...."

It is entirely true that climate leadership originated in Europe, especially in the UK, where much of the scandal over possibly manipulated science has also been centered. Given this background, it is hard to believe that ordinary greed did not trigger the rush to create an unnecessary windfall for traders. But the resulting backlash against bankers who stood to profit from cap and trade could have been easily avoided by actually following the model the measure's advocates said they were copying.

As noted, the White House and the sponsors of the Waxman-Markey legislation passed last year prominently asserted that their proposals were based on the successful acid rain cap and trade program by the CAAA in 1990. But the acid rain reduction and other successes based on it did not involve the impossibly complicated $1 trillion auction/tax/allowance reallocation scheme that Waxman-Markey features, as a result of the political logrolling necessary to secure the close 219-212 House vote.

To the contrary, all previous cap and trade programs have been based on an annual reduction of allowances initially allocated on the basis of an average of previous emissions that were well documented -- a simple formula that has been totally abandoned by Waxman-Markey.

Moreover, no one ever accused the acid rain program (or any of the others) of giving away "free" allowances, despite the lack of an initial auction for the permits. There was in fact nothing "free" about any of it, because utilities had to start reducing their acid rain emissions from day one, ultimately having to spend billions ($6 billion in the case of Duke Energy alone) to meet the requirements. But without a huge float of auctioned allowances, there were no financial machinations, and with no revenues collected, no political fights over revenue distribution that have so poisoned the current climate debate.

The acid rain program was itself based in part on a similarly successful -- and auction -- free-trading system established in 1982 to accelerate the phase-out of lead in gasoline. The next pro-posal after the 1990 CAAA was RECLAIM, which was established in 1994 by California and which successfully initiated nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide trading within the state -- again without an auction.

Subsequently, the EPA established successful trading programs for nitrogen oxide in the eastern U.S. and later, during the George W. Bush administration, for sulfur oxide in the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) intended to achieve a further 70 percent reduction beyond the original 50 percent cut in the 1990 CAAA. There were no auctions for these successful programs. (The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit subsequently questioned the legality of the CAIR trading system, which is now being revised.)

Supporters of the carbon dioxide auction have frequently cited the European ETS as the real reason auctions are necessary. The first phase of the ETS did not use an auction and over-allocated the allowances, producing utility windfalls and carbon dioxide prices so low as to be meaningless. But the proximate reason for the problem was that there was no reliable baseline emissions data, as we have had for decades in the case of utilities here in the U.S.

The European Commission has corrected this mistake for the second (and successful) phase that is now in effect -- but without an auction, it must be quickly noted. There are proposals to launch a 60 percent auction for the third phase, but that auction would probably be discretionary with the member states, which may not impose them for many of the same reasons militating against an auction in the U.S.

To be sure, the Waxman-Markey legislation tries to avoid the trillion-dollar tax implications of a 100 percent auction by temporarily seeking to provide "free" allowances to coal and natural gas customers. But these allowances will have to be auctioned to the emitters anyway, and there is no guarantee that the proceeds will actually get into the hands of those who have to pay the tax.

Over time, in any event, the system would revert to a 100 percent auction to provide trillions of dollars in revenues for unrelated budget proposals (and triggering protectionist import tariffs to curb trade with nations that have not imposed the same tax). One can understand the desire for deficit-reduction revenues. But they should not come out of a climate change program, which will be costly even without auctions and the success of which depends on the cap reduction level, not on the revenues collected. (Indeed, one group that has pushed for an auction, U.S. Climate Action Partnership, stresses that emission reductions under cap and trade are the same whether an auction is used or not.)

The superior efficiency of emission trading markets has been demonstrated over and over again. But the efficient reduction of carbon emissions need not depend on the levy of a huge tax or the establishment of the biggest commodities market ever created, and benefits of the trading should go to the public, not Wall Street or London.





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How to Expose a Warmist: Andrew Bolt Interviews Australia's Al Gore

FROM-RCP

By Tom Minchin


Introduced by Tom Minchin


The global warming movement is in heavy retreat in every Western country. But, as we have learned from the rise of leftist leaders like President Obama and Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, modern collectivists are resilient. If they can recover from the collapse of Communism, they can certainly rebuild the environmental movement. Now is not the time to celebrate, but to press home the exposure of their bogus claims and hidden interests.


TIA Daily readers will therefore appreciate the uncompromising interview style of Australian journalist Andrew Bolt as he eviscerates one of the world's leading warming alarmists, Tim Flannery-a man in the mold of Al Gore. The interview took place on radio in Melbourne, Australia on June 9.



Andrew Bolt has given TIA Daily permission to reproduce the interview in full.

The debate begins with Bolt asking Flannery about his disillusionment with the Australian government over its ditching of Cap and Trade:

Flannery: I'm unlikely to vote for him [Rudd] because my trust has been eroded away.... He promised to deliver an emissions trading scheme and he's then withdrawn that with very little justification....


Bolt: He said he wouldn't move now until the rest of the world did something which is a direct repudiation of what he said before. But, Tim, part of the reason, of course, that he's backed down is that there's been a great swing in sentiment against this kind of thing, there's a rising tide of skepticism. How much are you to blame for some of that?


Flannery : There is some swing in sentiment. And I think it's very hard to maintain any issue with that sort of very high level of support for a long time. So there's some, but what is happening around the world should give us all heart. We've seen China now pledged to reduce is emissions intensity by over 40 per cent.


Bolt: It's still going to build a coal-fired power station every week or so.


Flannery: And what that is going to do if that's achieved by 2020 is put us on track to avoid dangerous climate change. But for us to do that, places like Australia and the US, the wooden spooners in this debate, actually have to do their part.


Bolt: But, Tim, I'm just wondering, there has been a rise in skepticism. That's precisely why the Liberals [the Australian Liberal party is closer to the classical pro-free market 19th-century meaning of that term rather than its modern sense], for example, have switched from supporting an ETS to opposing it...and they dumped their leader over it. Now I'm wondering to what extent are you to blame for rising skepticism about some of the more alarming claims about global warming.


Flannery : Well, many of the things that scientists highlight may happen are very alarming. They're not alarmist but they are worrisome. Rises in sea-levels, for instance, are a significant issue.


Bolt: Well, let's go through some of your own claims. You said, for example, that Adelaide may run out of water by early 2009. Their reservoirs are half full now. You said Brisbane would probably run out of water by 2009. They are now 97 per cent full. And Sydney could be dry as early as 2007. Their reservoirs are also more than half full. How can you get away with all these claims?


Flannery: And thankfully, Andrew, governments have taken that to heart and been building some desalination capacity such as in Perth.


Bolt: Only in Perth.


Flannery: No, there's plans in every capital city.


Bolt: No, no, no, you said Brisbane would run out of water possibly by as early as 2009. There's no desalination plant, there's no dam.


Flannery: What I have said is that there is a water problem. They may run out of water. And ...


Bolt: 100 per cent full, nearly! 100 percent full.


Flannery: That's a lie, Andrew. I didn't say it would run out of water. I don't have a crystal ball in front of me. I said Brisbane has a water problem.


Bolt: I'll quote your own words: "Water supplies are so low they need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months." That was, on the timeline you gave, by the beginning of 2009. Their reservoirs are now 97 per cent full.


Flannery: Yeah, sure. There's variability in rainfall. They still need a desal plant.


Bolt: You also warned that Perth would be the 21 century's first ghost metropolis.


Flannery: I said it was...may.


Bolt: It's all "may." Right?


Flannery: Because at that stage there had been no flows into that water catchment for a year and the water engineers were terrified.


Bolt: Have you seen the water catchment levels here, see, they're tracking above the five year level. I'm showing you now.


Flannery: You know what I came in here to talk about, Andrew, here? It's our farm day we're doing with our Deakin lecture series in Bendigo, at the Bendigo town hall today. And it's a really exciting event...

Andrew: All that's lovely, Tim. But I think you need to be held to account for the alarmism that is in part your stock in trade, your shtick, and is responsible for what you now see-the retreat from global warming policies.


Flannery: You want to paint me as an alarmist.


Bolt: You are an alarmist.


Flannery: I'm a very practical person.


Bolt: I'm asking you to defend these quotes.


Flannery: Well, I've done that already

Bolt: You said the Arctic could be ice free two years ago. [Actually, last year.]


Flannery: No I didn't...


[The show host, Steve Price interrupts, and they argue over the questioning.]

Bolt: I'm asking Tim whether he repents from all these allegations about cities running out of water, cities turning into ghost cities, sea level rises up to an eight-story-high building. Don't you think that is in part why people have got more skeptical?


Flannery: I don't, actually, because some of those things are possibilities in the future if we continue polluting as we do. And we've already seen impacts in southern Australia on all of those cities. Everyone remembers the water restrictions and so forth. Just because we get a good, wet year doesn't mean we should forget about the problem. We actually have to deal with this long term drying trend and that means securing our water supply.


Bolt: You warn about sea level rises up to an eight-story building. How soon will that happen?

Flannery: Asking that question is it's a bit like asking a stock analyst when the next stock market crash is going to happen and how big it's going to be. No one can. We can all see the underlying weakness in the market in the months before the crash.

Bolt: Thousands of years?


Flannery: Could be thousands of years.


Bolt: Tens of thousands of years?


Flannery: Could be hundreds of years.


Bolt: Hundreds of years?


Flannery: It could be hundreds of years. The thermo- dynamics of ice sheets are very, very difficult to predict, but what we do know when we look back is the fossil record is that when the world is a degree or two warmer than it is now seal levels rise very significantly-between four and 14 meters above where they are. We can't say how long it takes for that rise to happen because the fossil record just isn't good enough, it isn't accurate enough...


Bolt: Should we also have nuclear power plants?

Flannery: In Australia I don't think so. We've got such a great load of assets in the renewable area that I don't think there's an argument here that they are ever going to be economic.


Bolt: Four years ago you did. What changed your mind?


Flannery: No, I never did. I've always had the same argument.

Bolt: No, no, no. Here's your quote: "Over the next two decades Australians could use nuclear power to replace all our coal-fired power plants. We would then have a power infrastructure like France and in doing so we would have done something great for the world." That was your quote.


Flannery: I don't recall saying that at all.

Bolt: You wrote it. You wrote it in The Age. There it is, highlighted.


Flannery: Well ,very good.


Bolt: That's the point, you know, you make these claims and when people confront you, you walk away from them.


Flannery: But that was about "may." No, no, you said "may." And Australia may be able to do that. It's not what I recommend and I never have recommended it. But what I do say...


Bolt: "We would have done something great for the world."


Flannery: But what I do say, nuclear power, right, getting away from coal would be great for the world. Why should we take the most expensive option in this country, which has always been recognized as having the most expensive and difficult option. We are going to see a whole lot of other technologies and innovations which are now well under way which we could use instead of nuclear power.


Bolt: Such as?


Flannery: Such as concentrated PV technology, geothermal technology, wave power, wind power...

Bolt: You're an investor in geothermal technology , aren't you? [Flannery's investment in geo-thermal technology received a $90 million grant from the Australian government last year.]


Flannery: Yeah, I am. Indeed.

Bolt: How come you don't declare that.


Flannery: Well, I've just done it.


Bolt: You just did because I told you. You said that geothermal, which you are an investor of, you've got a plant, you've invested in a plant in Innamincka and you said the technology was really easy. How come that plant...

Flannery: Not really that easy.

Bolt: Well, yes. It's actually had technological difficulties and it's been delayed two years because it's not that easy, after all, is it?

Flannery: Well, any new technology is going to be difficult to bring to fruition. It's a bit like generation for nuclear. There's challenges all the way. But in terms of geothermal there are many places in the world where you can actually drill down and get into a hot rock body such as...

Price: Andrew, we're going to have to go.

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Oil: The Real Green Fuel

FROM-NRO

Jnah Goldberg

It’s counterintuitive, but oil is greener than “green” fuels, and the oil spill doesn’t change that fact.

A rolling “dead zone” off the Gulf of Mexico is killing sea life and destroying livelihoods. Recent estimates put the blob at nearly the size of New Jersey.

Alas, I’m not talking about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. As terrible as that catastrophe is, such accidents have occurred in U.S. waters only about once every 40 years (and globally about once every 20 years). I’m talking about the dead zone largely caused by fertilizer runoff from American farms along the Mississippi and Atchafalaya river basins. Such pollutants cause huge algae plumes that result in oxygen starvation in the Gulf’s richest waters, near the delta.
Because the dead zone is an annual occurrence, there’s no media feeding frenzy over it, even though the average annual size of these hypoxic zones has been about 6,600 square miles over the last five years, and they are driven by bipartisan federal agriculture, trade, and energy policies.

Indeed, as Steven Hayward notes in the current Weekly Standard, if policymakers continue to pursue biofuels in response to the current anti-fossil-fuel craze, these dead zones will get a lot bigger every year. A 2008 study by the National Academy of Sciences found that adhering to corn-based ethanol targets will increase the size of the dead zone by as much as 34 percent.

Of course, that’s just one of the headaches “independence” from oil and coal would bring. If we stop drilling offshore, we could lose up to $1 trillion in economic benefits, according to economist Peter Passell. And, absent the utopian dream of oil-free living, every barrel we don’t produce at home, we buy overseas. That sends dollars to bad regimes (though more to Canada and Mexico). It may also increase the chances of disaster, because tanker accidents are more common than rig accidents.


But wait a minute — isn’t that precisely why we’re investing in “renewables,” to free ourselves from this vicious petro-cycle? Don’t the Billy Sundays of the Church of Green promise that they are the path to salvation?

This is infuriating and dangerous nonsense, as Matt Ridley demonstrates in his mesmerizing new book, The Rational Optimist. Let’s start with biofuels. Ethanol production steals precious land to produce inefficient fuel inefficiently (making food more scarce and expensive for the poor). If all of our transport fuel came from biofuel, we would need 30 percent more land than all of the existing food-growing farmland we have today.

In Brazil and Malaysia, biofuels are more economically viable (thanks in part to really cheap labor), but at the insane price of losing rainforest while failing to reduce the CO2 emissions that allegedly justify ethanol in the first place. According to Ridley, the Nature Conservancy’s Joseph Fargione estimates rainforest clear-cutting for biofuels releases 17 to 420 times more CO2 than it offsets by displacing petroleum or coal.

As for wind and solar, even if such technologies were wildly more successful than they have been, so what? You could quintuple and then quintuple again the output of wind and solar and it wouldn’t reduce our dependence on oil. Why? Because we use oil for transportation, not for electricity. We would offset coal, but again at an enormous price. If we tried to meet the average amount of energy typically used in America, we would need wind farms the size of Kazakhstan or solar panels the size of Spain.

If you remove the argument over climate change from the equation (as even European governments are starting to do), one thing becomes incandescently clear: Fossil fuels have been one of the great boons both to humanity and the environment, allowing forests to regrow (now that we don’t use wood for heating fuel or grow fuel for horses anymore) and liberating billions from backbreaking toil. The great and permanent shortage is usable surface land and fresh water. The more land we use to produce energy, the less we have for vulnerable species, watersheds, agriculture, recreation, etc.

“If you like wilderness, as I do,” Ridley writes, “the last thing you want is to go back to the medieval habit of using the landscape surrounding us to make power.”

The calamity in the Gulf is heartrending and tragic. A thorough review of government oversight and industry safety procedures is more than warranted. But as counterintuitive as it may be to say so, oil is a green fuel, while “green” fuels aren’t. And this spill doesn’t change that fact.


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"Notable Quotes"

“As things now stand, the advocates representing the establishment climate science story broadcast (usually with color diagrams) the predictions of climate models as if they were the results of experiments - actual evidence. Alongside these multi-colored multi-century model-simulated time series come stories, anecdotes, and photos - such as the iconic stranded polar bear - dramatically illustrating climate change today. On this rhetorical strategy, the models are to be taken on faith, and the stories and photos as evidence of the models’ truth. Policy carrying potential costs in the trillions of dollars ought not to be based on stories and photos confirming faith in models, but rather on precise and replicable testing of the models’ predictions against solid observational data.”

Jason Scott Johnson

Editorial: Climate splitting Democrats

FROM- OC Register

Senate Republicans fell short Thursday, 47-53, of overturning the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to regulate greenhouse gases, but exposed a significant split among Democrats that may bode ill for passage this year of comprehensive energy and climate-change legislation.


As the Washington Post reported, the contentious vote "suggested the Senate is far from decided on whether to put a price on the industrial emissions that stem from everyday activities such as lighting a home or driving a car."

A bill by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, sought to overturn the EPA's administrative finding last year that declared greenhouse gases dangerous and assumed authority to regulate them.


We, like Ms. Murkowski, regard the EPA's administrative intrusion of applying the Clean Air Act to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to be a monumental over-reach. The law never was intended to regulate CO2. The EPA's power grab circumvents legislature authority, while centralizing economic decisions affecting a wide spectrum of industries under the administration's control.

The division in Democratic ranks was epitomized by liberal senator and global warming true-believer Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, who agreed with Republican Murkowski. "I have long maintained that the Congress – not the unelected EPA – must decide major economic and energy policy," Mr. Rockefeller said. "EPA regulation will have an enormous impact on the economic security of West Virginia and our energy future."

Senators' votes could have far-reaching political significance in this election year, putting lawmakers on the record in the climate-change debate. President Barack Obama had threatened a veto. Nevertheless, forcing the issue "exposed frays among Democrats," reports ABC News.

"To a certain extent, the vote on the Murkowski resolution is something of a preliminary test of how a climate bill will fare in the Senate, but the message is murky," ABC News quoted Michael B. Gerrard, director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.

Those opposing EPA regulatory power over ubiquitous greenhouse gases properly argue that controlling those emissions effectively creates a new energy tax and kills jobs.

The debate featured its share of cheap, election-year theatrics. California's Sen. Barbara Boxer, facing a serious challenge in November from Republican nominee Carly Fiorina, brought props to make her case for EPA control, including large photos of oil-soaked birds in the Gulf of Mexico, which she contended are a consequence of reliance on carbon-emitting fuels.

Of course, that's like pointing to a traffic accident and demanding the banishment of cars and trucks.

The ranking environmental committee Republican, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., was closer to the truth when he argued "global warming is the greatest hoax perpetrated on the American people. ... [T]here's no relationship between this [EPA disapproval resolution] and the oil spill."



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At Last, the Climate Extremists Try To Debate Us!

A desperate warmist movement tries vainly to debunk a Monckton lecture, but they're messin' with the wrong Viscount. "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you ... "

FROM-Pajamas Media

by Christopher Monckton

One of the numerous Goebbelian propaganda artifices deployed by the now-retreating climate extremist movement has been the careful avoidance of any debate with anyone on the skeptical side of the case who happens to know anything about climate science or economics.

As the extremists lose the argument and become more desperate, that is changing.

John Abraham, a lecturer in fluid mechanics at a Bible college in Minnesota, has recently issued — and widely disseminated — a hilariously mendacious 83-minute attempted rebuttal of a speech I delivered about the climate last October in St. Paul, Minnesota.

So unusual is this attempt actually to meet us in argument, and so venomously ad hominem are Abraham’s artful puerilities, delivered in a nasal and irritatingly matey tone (at least we are spared his face — he looks like an overcooked prawn), that climate-extremist bloggers everywhere have circulated them and praised them to the warming skies.

As usual though, none of these silly bloggers make any attempt actually to verify whether what poor Abraham is saying actually has the slightest contact with reality.

One such is George Monbiot, a scribbler for the the Guardian, the British Marxist daily propaganda sheet. What is Monbiot’s qualification to write about climate science? Well, like Abraham, he’s a “scientist.” Trouble is, he’s a fourteenth-rate zoologist, so his specialty has even less to do with climate science than that of Abraham, who nevertheless presents himself as having scientific knowledge relevant “in the area.”

Here’s the thing. All of the sciences are becoming increasingly specialized. So most scientists — the snake-like Abraham and, a fortiori, the accident-prone Monbiot among them — have no more expertise in predicting or even understanding the strange behavior of the complex, non-linear, chaotic object that is the Earth’s climate than the man on the Clapham omnibus.

They pretend otherwise, of course. Almost four years ago, when I wrote a 2500-word article in the Sunday Telegraph pointing out that the notion of a very large climate warming attributable to future increases in CO2 concentration was scientifically ill-founded, Monbiot wrote a scathing 1800-word response in the Daily Kommissar, in which he made a dozen laughably elementary scientific errors.

Monbiot made the mistake of pretending that he understood the fundamental equation of radiative transfer, of which he had plainly not previously heard.

Here it was I who had the advantage: before writing the article in the Telegraph I had spent three months tracking the equation down, because — though it converts changes in the flow of radiation at a planetary surface to changes in temperature, and is therefore essential to discovering how much warming a given increase in CO2 concentration will deliver — the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 climate assessment reports do not mention it once.

And why not? Well, put simply, the equation shows that at the temperatures prevailing on Earth you need a very large increase in radiative flux to achieve a pathetically small increase in temperature. That’s not the sort of thing the climate extremists want known, so they carefully don’t mention it, which is one reason why puir wee Moonbat hadn’t heard of it.

Ever since I compelled the Daily Apparatchik to publish a letter from me correcting Monbiot’s invincible ignorance of elementary planetary physics and undergrad math, Monbiot has seized every chance to have a go at me whenever one of his climate extremist comrades asserted that I’d gotten something wrong.

And how he crows at the news of Abraham’s “evisceration” of my Minnesota speech.

Abraham’s approach is novel. He’s saying not that I got one thing wrong, but that I got just about everything wrong. A couple of pointers: first, it’s now June 2010, and I spoke in October 2009, almost eight months ago. I’ve made a lot of speeches since. Why has it taken Abraham so long to cobble together his ramblings?

The answer — and, as I shall show, it is the right one — is that his deliberately dishonest personal attack on my integrity and reputation is an ingenious fiction. He knows it, and he has therefore had to go to some elaborate and time-consuming lengths to do his inept and socially inadequate best to conceal the steps he has taken to hide the truth and make his nonsense look plausible.

Secondly, during the eight months of “investigation” (Abraham’s word) that he carried out, at no single point did he ever contact me to ask me to clarify one of the numerous references which, he said over and over again, were not clear in my slides. More...

That failure on his part to check with me when he could not find the sources of my data was clearly deliberate. He didn’t want to give me any advance notice that he was planning to launch a widely disseminated attack on me, because otherwise I might have pointed out his errors to him in advance, and that would have made it a great deal more difficult for him to get away with publishing them.

In a short space I won’t have time to cover more than a representative selection of Abraham’s errors (but a comprehensive rebuttal will be coming, I assure you). Let’s begin, though, with the question of sources.

“Monckton’s data don’t even agree with themselves”

Abraham says I displayed two graphs, both citing NOAA as the source, showing the downward global mean surface temperature trend since 2001, but — by an elaborate point-by-point comparison — he shows that the two graphs are slightly different from one another. Why, he asks, can’t I even make sure that my own data agree with themselves? His implication is that presenting temperature data is something that laymen really can’t be expected to get right.

What Abraham has done, here as elsewhere, is to wrench my data deliberately out of the context in which I actually (and accurately) presented then, and then to lie about it.

The truth is that the first graph, plainly labeled “scienceandpublicpolicy.org”, is the SPPI’s well-known global temperature index, compiled monthly from four separate global temperature datasets, as Abraham well knew because I explained in my talk. It was not a NOAA graph, and was not labeled as such. Naturally, therefore, it differed at some points from the NOAA graph.

Abraham went on and on about how a graph shouldn’t have been labeled with the name of an institution such as “scienceandpublicpolicy.org” unless it was that institution that had compiled the graph. That, of course, as he could have discovered if he had bothered — or rather, dared — to check, was indeed the institution that had compiled the graph, taking the arithmetic mean of the global temperature anomalies from the HadCRUt, NCDC, RSS, and UAH datasets.

But — and this was the point I made, though Abraham was remarkably careful not to say so — I had showed the SPPI’s four sources graph in testimony before Congress, to show that there had been global cooling for seven or eight years. Tom Karl, the director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, who had been present, had failed to admit after questioning from a leading congressman that global temperatures had indeed been falling for the best part of a decade. He had wriggled and waffled.

So the congressman had asked me to write proving my result, and I had done so by intentionally preparing the second graph from Tom Karl’s own NCDC — as he was the subject of the questioning. The graph was labeled as such, and also showed a pronounced downtrend in global temperatures.

Abraham knew this, because I had said so in my talk.

But he also knew that practically no one watching his 83-minute presentation would go to the lengths of looking up what I had actually said. He knew he could get away with a flagrant and deliberate misrepresentation — provided that at all points he was careful never to consult me while planning and circulating his attack.

“Monckton’s data are not properly sourced”

Even when the source is in fact plainly stated on my slides, Abraham is prone to say I have not provided the source. I had shown a graph, which I had said was compiled by satellite, of temperatures at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, where there has been no warming for 30 years.

The graph was plainly labeled “UAH”.

Which, as a mere Bible college lecturer in fluid mechanics might not know, but anyone with any real knowledge of climate science would of course know — is the University of Alabama at Huntsville, one of only two organizations producing regularly published satellite-based global temperature records.

Another instance: Abraham said I had done a search because I was bored, and had found that between the beginning of 2004 and the beginning of 2007 just 539 papers containing the search phrase “global climate change” had been published, and that not one of them had provided any evidence for any catastrophic consequence of any anthropogenic warming anywhere. However, he had searched Google Scholar and had found 628,000 references, a few of which, he said, showed catastrophic consequences of “global warming.”

The truth is entirely different. First, I am never bored when I am present. What I actually said in my talk — and Abraham knows this, because he spent eight months trying to take it apart — was that “I’m boring that way — I check things.” And I had checked the climate extremists’ claims of catastrophe by consulting a paper by Klaus-Martin Schulte, published in 2008. The extract from the paper was labeled “Schulte, 2008” on my slide — in quite large letters.

It was not I, but Schulte, who had done the search, as I had said in my talk.

It was not Google Scholar (most of whose sources are not peer-reviewed papers), but the ISI Web of Science database of peer-reviewed, learned journals that Schulte searched, as I had said in my talk.

It was not the “containing all of the words” search option that Schulte had used — though that is the option Abraham used! — but the “exact phrase” option, which returned only 539 papers.

If Abraham had had the courtesy to check with me or to look up Mr. Schulte’s paper on the Web of Science database — to which his Bible college subscribes — he would have found that Mr. Schulte used this phrase because Naomi Oreskes, a science historian, had previously used the same phrase in researching climate papers up to the end of 2003. Schulte had carried her research forward to mid-February 2007, and his paper had been published in 2008.

Abraham then trots out various papers he found in his Google Scholar search, one of which says that the world is warming because of human activities: but that was not the point made in my slide.

My point was that not a single one of the 539 papers searched by Schulte had provided evidence for catastrophe.

Abraham also mentions a paper he found that talks about extinctions that are predicted as a result of “global warming.” But — though he may perhaps not have understood this, for many of his political stamp do not — prediction is not the same thing as evidence. The fact is that most of the predictions of the climate extremists and their overworked X-Box 360s and Playstation Vs have proven to be spectacular exaggerations.

“Gore was right and Monckton wrong about sea level”

The first slide of mine that Abraham criticizes is one in which I show the table of contributions to observed sea level rise from various sources as published in the IPCC’s 2007 report, and draw from it the conclusion that the measured contribution of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to “global warming” is 6 cm/century, while Al Gore’s mawkish sci-fi comedy horror movie predicts 610 cm (20 feet) of imminent sea-level rise.

Abraham again artfully distorts or carefully omits what I actually said.

First, he says that the IPCC predicts 20-50 cm of sea level rise this century, not 6 cm. Well, yes it does, but the reason for the difference is that the IPCC’s figure (which still amounts to below 2 feet, not 20, and it’s actually rising at just 1 ft/century at present, if that) is for sea level rise from all sources, chiefly thermosteric expansion, not just from ice melt.

But Gore’s prediction of a 20 ft sea level rise is, as his movie makes quite clear, based on ice melt alone.

Abraham says Gore was right to worry about a very large rise in sea level because the IPCC specifically excludes ice melt from its calculations, saying it cannot yet be quantified.

No.

The IPCC specifically includes ice melt in its calculations, as the table on my slide showed, but it does add that “dynamic” effects of unpredictable but theoretically possible large-scale failure on the ice sheets are not taken into account.

Abraham says that if either Greenland or the West Antartic ice sheet were to melt, sea level would indeed rise by around 20 feet, and that, he says, is where Gore got his figure.

Just two problems with that.

First, the IPCC also says, on the very page quoted by Abraham, that even if there were a major collapse of the ice the Greenland ice sheet would not entirely disintegrate for millennia, a phrase that was also used in the IPCC’s 2001 report, where it was made plain that surface temperatures at least 2 Celsius degrees higher than today’s would have to persist for several millennia before either the Greenland or the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could melt away.

True, the British Antarctic Survey disagrees with the IPCC and maintains that the WAIS is in imminent danger of collapse, but so far even the IPCC has not bought that alarmist story.

Secondly — as I said in my talk, but as Abraham very carefully failed to point out in his — both sides of this particular argument have been carefully heard in the impartial forum of the British High Court. The British government, unsuccessfully attempting to defend Gore on this point, had eventually been compelled — when confronted with what the IPCC actually says about several millennia — to concede that Gore’s 20 feet of sea level rise was a flagrant exaggeration.

And the judge’s finding could not have been blunter:

The Armageddon scenario that he [Gore] depicts is not based on any scientific view.

And that quotation, too, was on one of my slides, but Abraham carefully failed to mention it, or to check with me to find out how it was that the judge had come to that conclusion.

Nor, of course, did Abraham mention the slide in which I showed a picture of the St. Regis Tower, San Francisco, with a map showing it to be just feet from the allegedly rising ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf, and a statement that in 2005, the very year in which Gore was making up his alarmist movie, he had spent $4 million buying a condo there. Would he have bought that condo if he had seriously thought sea level would imminently rise by 20 feet? That, as my Latin grammar would put it, is a question expecting the answer “No.”

Well, I could go on. And on and on. And on and on and on. Just about every one of the 115 slides presented by Abraham in his shoddy little piece of lavishly funded venom contains serious, serial, material errors, exaggerations, or downright lies.

All I have been able to do here is to give you some flavor of how unscientific, inaccurate, and deliberately mendacious Abraham is. He is not only an ignoramus, but a cheat and a liar.

And he has spent a lot of someone’s money preparing and peddling his lies.

I have already initiated the process of having Abraham hauled up before whatever academic panel his Bible college can muster, to answer disciplinary charges of willful academic dishonesty amounting to gross professional misconduct unbecoming a member of his profession.

Keep an eye out at www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org. There, in due course, will appear the letter I am now drafting to Abraham, asking him several hundred pertinent questions designed to make him and anyone who may think of relying upon him understand that academic dishonesty and deliberate lying on this scale and with this amount of public circulation is just not acceptable and will not be tolerated.

Abe, baby, if you present yourself as “a scientist” — as you do throughout your talk — then it is as a scientist that you will be judged, found lamentably wanting, and dismissed. You may like to get your apology and retraction in early: for I am a Christian too, and will respond kindly to timely repentance.

Sinking 'Climate Change'

FROM-Townhall
Cal Thomas

Three modern myths have been sold to the American people: the promise of a transparent administration (President Obama); the promise of a more ethical Congress (Speaker Pelosi); and the myth of "global warming," or climate change.

The first two are daily proving suspect and now the third is sinking with greater force than melting icebergs, if they were melting, which many believe they are not.

After spending years promoting "global warming," the media are beginning to turn in the face of growing evidence that they have been wrong. The London Times recently reported: "Britain's premier scientific institution is being forced to review its statements on climate change after a rebellion by members who question mankind's contribution to rising temperatures."

It gets worse, or better, depending on your perspective. Newsweek magazine, which more than 30 years ago promoted global cooling and a new ice age -- and more recently has been drinking the global warming Kool-Aid -- headlined a story, "Uncertain Science: Bickering and Defensive, Climate Researchers Have Lost the Public's Trust." Newsweek does its best to cling to its increasingly discredited doctrine, but the growing body of contrary evidence only adds to the public's disbelief.

In Canada, the polar bear -- which has been used by global warming promoters to put a cuddly face on the issue -- is in danger of not being endangered any longer. CBC News reported that the polar bear's designation as a "species of special concern" has been suspended "while the government reviews the polar bear's status and decides whether to renew the classification or change it."

The New York Times recently lamented "global warmism's loss of credibility" in a story about hundreds of "environmental activists who met to ponder this question: "if the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?" The "consensus" never was a consensus. Most of us may not have gotten an "A" in science, but we can sense when we are being bamboozled.

The German online news magazine "Focus" recently carried a story, "Warm Times Will Soon Be Over!" Commenting on the "new NASA high temperature record," which may be set, the magazine blames it on El Nino. Meteorologists, like Joe D'Aleo of The Weather Channel, are publicly distancing themselves from the false doctrine of global warming. D'Aleo says, "We'll have La Nina conditions before the summer is over, and it will intensify further through the fall and winter. Thus we'll have cooler temperatures for the next couple of years."

Remember the scare ignited in 2007 by supposed melting Arctic ice caps? The Star Canada says a new analysis shows that the apparent change was the result of "shifting winds," while an expedition last year to the North Pole discovered the ice "100 percent thicker than expected."

Much of this information -- and more -- is available at the useful Website www.climatedepot.com.

It is a given that America needs new sources of energy. Environmentalists have inhibited efforts at exploration by supporting policies that have forced some domestic exploration too far offshore (thus increasing chances of an ecological disaster as is occurring in the Gulf of Mexico).

Instead of trying to sell us a dubious doctrine at an estimated cost of $100 billion a year worldwide (so far), environmentalists would have done themselves and the world more good had they chosen a different strategy, such as not sending oil money to countries that want to destroy us. This would have increased our patriotic spirit and had the additional benefit of not only diversifying our energy supply, but also depriving our enemies of money they use to underwrite terrorism.

Watch for the hardcore "global warming" cultists to continue clinging to their beliefs; but also watch increasing numbers of scientists and eventually politicians to abandon this once "certain" faith and to look for other ways to control our lives. In that pursuit, the left never quits. Rather than acknowledge their error, they will go on to make new mistakes, knowing they will never be held accountable




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Climate alarmists on the run

FROM-The Washington Times

Former Vice President Al Gore was at his peak when the film "An Inconvenient Truth" made its initial Hollywood splash. Faith in man-made global warming had never been more widespread, with liberal academics and media subjecting to ridicule any who dared question the "settled science." Only a fool could deny that elevated carbon-dioxide levels had melted ice caps and stranded polar bears on rapidly diminishing ice floes.

How the tables have turned in a short time. On May 20, Oxford Union, the prestigious 187-year-old English debating society, formally considered the question of whether it was more important to focus on growing the economy or solving global warming. Climate realism won the day, 135 to 110. It's no wonder, considering how the purportedly scientific arguments advanced in support of the scaremongering conclusions have fallen apart since the Climategate scandal invited verification of the left's previously unexamined claims.

During the debate, Lord Whitty, former environment minister under the Labor government, claimed 95 percent of scientists were in agreement that man was responsible for a coming climatic cataclysm. Lord Monckton, representing climate realists, asked him to provide a reference backing up the claim. The audience jeered Lord Whitty for having none beyond, "Everyone knows it's true."

When the best the warmists can come up with is an appeal to authority, their case is lost for good. That's why, just a few days earlier, climate realists gathered in triumph on this side of the pondat a Heartland Institute climate-change conference in Chicago. Eminent scientists presented a wealth of evidence suggesting nature is, in fact, a much more powerful factor affecting the climate than man. That realism suggests the need for moderation when it comes to political action based on climate data.

"We think we need public policy that's based in facts, rather than facts that are based on a public agenda," Colorado State University professor Scott Denning said.

Once outcasts on the fringe of the scientific community, these individuals braved the ridicule of the self-appointed "enlightened" members of society to dismantle systematically the hockey sticks and other frauds crafted by leftists over the years.

In 1895, the New York Times suggested the Earth was headed toward a "second glacial period" in which "countries now basking in the fostering warmth of the tropical sun will ultimately give way to the perennial frost and snow of the polar regions." By 1923, the Gray Lady had decided, "The Arctic seems to be warming up" as "so little ice has never before been noted." By the 1970s, schoolchildren were indoctrinated by textbooks blaming a new ice age on man's Earth abuse.

All this begs the question of how long it will take the warmist crew to readjust their scare story to win back the public. The majority firmly rejects their socialist prescription to solve an imaginary problem.


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