Calls Mount for Obama to Fire NASA Climate Chief

Just a last thought here, maybe :). Let me get this straight. A Federal Government employee is openly advocating for illegal civil disobedience against a Federal Government facility and this is alright?

If James Hansen was calling for illegal actions against private institutions, which he has, that is bad enough and it would seem that he ought to have been at least publicly reprimanded for doing so, he wasn't. But to call for illegal actions against a Federal facility seems like it has stepped over the line. I, as a tax payer and thus one who pays his salary do not believe this is what we pay our so called public servents to be engaged in, shutting down facilities that we also pay for. Is it just me or is this whole thing a bit like something out of two bit novel?


Calls Mount for Obama to Fire NASA Climate Chief

By James M. TaylorCalls are mounting for President Barack Obama to fire James Hansen, the controversial figure in charge of climate studies at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).Hansen has a record of allegedly doctoring temperature data to hype his argument that global warming is a crisis. The new calls for his resignation or termination come following his appearance in a video calling for civil disobedience at a protest at a power plant in Washington, DC.

“It is plainly improper for someone on the U.S. government payroll to advocate civil disobedience on behalf of a non-government advocacy group,” said Dan Miller, executive vice president of The Heartland Institute and former chairman of the Illinois Commerce Commission. “As long as a public official is on the public payroll, his first loyalty is to his constituency, not to some outside pressure group calling on people to break the law,” Miller said.

Miller, in addition to serving as chairman of the Illinois Commerce Commission from 1994 to 1998, was inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame in 2005 to honor his long career as founding editor of Crain’s Chicago Business and business editor of the Chicago Sun-Times.A video featuring Hansen is prominently displayed on the Web site of a group called Capitol Climate Action. In it, Hansen says “please join us” at a protest at a power plant in Washington, DC. The facility burns coal to generate electricity.

The Web site calls on people to “surround the plant, disrupting access, and refusing to leave when asked.”Hansen has become increasingly strident in his condemnation of coal-fired plants, which he has compared to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz during World War II. Incredibly, he has even called for Nuremberg-style trials for scientists who disagree with him about the causes and possible consequences of climate change.Hansen and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) he heads have been accused on several occasions of falsifying data to make global warming appear to be a crisis.

In November 2008, Hansen claimed October 2008 was the warmest October on record. In fact, October temperatures were at the long-term average. In late 2007, GISS was caught adding 0.15 degrees Celsius to each year’s U.S. temperature readings, inflating the actual temperature record since 2000.

Hansen’s techniques were recently exposed on the Web site of meteorologist Anthony Watts (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/08/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-79-would-you-could-you-with-a-boat/) for adjusting raw temperature data to make a long-term cooling trend recorded by a climate monitoring station in New Mexico look like a warming trend.
“This example is one of many similar adjustments to the historical climate record that have been found,” Watts says.

“If I did what Jim has done while I was a NASA employee, I would have been drawn and quartered ... and then fired,” said Dr. Roy Spencer, principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville and author of Climate Confusion, published by Encounter Books in 2008.

“I have been following Jim Hansen’s travails over many years,” said Hans Labohm, a climate policy expert based in The Netherlands. “My impression is that he has been acting like a climate activist rather than a climate scientist. We in Europe tend to regard NASA as a serious scientific organisation. I have always wondered how someone like Jim Hansen could be part of it. As an expert reviewer of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, I believe I express the concerns of many people.”

“Hansen’s questionable and often outrageous use of rhetoric, ploys, and tactics should call his continued employment by the taxpayer into question,” said Chris Horner, author of Red Hot Lies, a new book on global warming from Regnery Publishing.

“It is surprising that he has been allowed to remain in such a sensitive public post,” said Terry Dunleavy, executive vice-chairman of the International Climate Science Coalition. Dunleavy, writing from New Zealand, goes on to say, “I’m not sure which is worse: Hansen’s disrespect for science or his flouting of American public service values.”

“Hansen is primarily responsible for making climate and climate change a political rather than a scientific issue, and for that alone he should be fired, especially since his position as a scientist and a bureaucrat must be apolitical,” said Dr. Timothy Ball, former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. “He has made it so that if you agree with AGW [anthropogenic global warming] you are politically left and if you disagree you are politically right and in my opinion there is no greater indictment of the politicizing of climate science,” Ball added.

Stop The CO2 Madness!

By Alan Caruba

When The New York Times publishes a story, as it did on February 19, regarding the next step in the Obama administration’s intention to destroy the U.S. economy, it’s a very good idea to pay attention.

“E.P.A. Expected to Regulate Carbon Dioxide” was the headline of John M. Broder’s article. “The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to act for the first time to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists blame for the warming of the planet, according to top Obama administration officials.”

Those “top Obama administration officials” are unnamed and so too are the “scientists” claiming that the planet is “warming.” For the record, although you will never read this in The New York Times, the planet is NOT warming. It is COOLING. It has been cooling for a decade now and it is no secret to meteorologists who track the day to day temperatures or climatologists who study long term trends.

On March 8-10, more than 500 of those scientists who dispute the vast global warming hoax will meet in New York for a second international conference on climate change sponsored by The Heartland Institute, a non-profit, free market think tank.

Joining those scientists and others will be Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic and current president of the European Union. Also participating will be American astronaut, Dr. Jack Schmitt, Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other leading scientists who have led the effort to shed the light of truth on the global warming hoax.

You can be sure of one thing. They will all continue to be attacked as crazies denying the “consensus” that Al Gore is always braying about. Science is not about “consensus”, it is about reproducible facts. All the “facts” about melting glaciers, dramatically rising sea levels, and other claims by the GW crowd have been refuted.

The claims of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the basis for the Kyoto Protocols to limit carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have been demolished repeatedly but the mainstream press refuses to report this, nor the fact that the IPCC is a political, not scientific, entity designed to advance the global warming hoax. Many of the scientists initially enticed to participate have since resigned. The vast bulk, easily 80% or more of those cited as IPCC members are not scientists who deal with issues of climate.

The IPCC’s claims have been based entirely on computer models. This in itself should have raised flags long ago. These models, as Hans Schreuder, an analytical chemist, has pointed out, “regard the earth as a flat disk bathed in a constant 24 hour haze of sunlight, without north and south poles, without clouds, and without any relationship to the real planet we live on.”

The claim that rising levels of carbon dioxide are responsible for a global warming that is not happening is entirely without scientific merit and, if for no other reason, should not be the basis for implementing EPA regulation of so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions under the Clean Air Act.

While it is true that there has been an increase in CO2 since the end of the last mini-ice age that lasted from 1500 to 1850, there is no research that demonstrates CO2 and an increase in the Earth’s temperature has any relationship. What warming occurred was entirely natural. Indeed, CO2, at less than 400 parts per million by volume, cannot influence atmospheric temperature or climate in any measurable way.

CO2 represents just 0.038% of the Earth’s atmosphere. The dominant factors in the Earth overall temperature are the Sun, the oceans, and even clouds.

If the U.S. weather service climate models are unable to predict changes in the weather by more than a week’s time, why would anyone believe that the IPCC’s models could predict it twenty, fifty or a hundred years from now?

Despite this, the EPA is tasked to impose regulations on CO2 emissions that would wreck the economy by requiring a “cap-and-trade” of “carbon credits” that would impact every single business and industrial activity. The European Union tried this and it has proved a massive failure and a huge drag on its economy.

Carbon dioxide is not a “pollutant” as the Supreme Court has ruled. How can the Earth’s second most vital gas, other than oxygen, be a pollutant? Not one single piece of vegetation on Earth could exist without CO2. Without vegetation, no animal life including our own could exist on Earth.

The notion that the EPA would regulate it is preposterous. It is absurd. It is criminal. It is immoral. It has no basis whatever in the actual science of the world’s climate. It is based on a massive, global hoax masterminded by the United Nations and carried out by charlatans such as Al Gore and NASA’s James Hansen.

It is, however, the vehicle for the political control of the world’s economy that would fulfill the United Nation’s global government schemes and, if enacted here in America, would mark the destruction of an economy that is the engine of the world’s economy, despite its current difficulties.

The Earth has existed for 4.5 billion years. The assertion that human beings and/or industrial activity have any effect on its atmosphere is an instrument of fascism.

Original Article from Warning Signs

Inquisition of Tim Patterson

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Part 2

Part 3

Dr. Tim Patterson is a Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and Director Ottawa-Carelton Geoscience Center

He was appointed an International Fellow in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology at the Queen's University of Belfast in 2006.

Tim Patterson was a founding executive editor of the electronic journal Palaeontologia Electronica. He served as associate Editor of Micropaleontology (1990-1997) and has just stepped down from serving a 14 year stint as Associate Editor of the Journal of Foraminiferal Research (1995-2008).

He is Canadian leader of the UNESCO supported International Geological Correlation Programme Project (IGCP) 495 "Quaternary Land-Ocean interactions" and was appointed chairman of the International Climate Science Coalition in 2008.

Tim Patterson has made ~200 scholarly contributions, including ~120 peer-reviewed research papers. He utilizes micropaleontological, sedimentological and geochemical techniques to:

study of paleoclimate records in Holocene lacustrine, marine, and bog environments to assess the dynamics of climate variability.

assess the impact of anthropogenic land-use change on natural lacustrine systems.

investigate the dynamics of sea-level change utilizing fossil salt marsh deposits.

For his research efforts he was awarded a 2002-2003 Carleton University Research Achievement Award for 'outstanding research'.


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Some heretical writing by this Skeptic

The Geologic Record and Climate Change

Testimony before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development

Read the sunspots

Finally, an open-minded report on climate change

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Point To Ponder

"I teach a general climate change course. To get the significance of this correlation over to the students I use the following analogy. I tell the students that based on these records if you believe that climate is being driven by CO2 then they probably would have no difficulty in accepting the idea that Winston Churchill was instrumental in the defeat of King Herold by Duke William of Orange at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. If you can believe that this historical temporal incongruity could be feasible then you can have no problem believing that CO2 is what's driving Earth's climate system".

*Starving In The Cold

Winter,
Corrado Giaquinto c. 1740/1750

Updated-Original post 2-24-2008

Recently Rosa Compagnucci along with several other Argentine scientist came out in opposition to the alarmist view of anthropological global warming as promoted by the IPCC. Who is Rosa Compagnucci and why is this important? She is the leading researcher at CONICET and a professor in the Department of Atmosphere Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, as well as a specialist on the "El Niño" phenomenon. Dr. Compagnucci was also a member and author of the IPCC Working Group II on Latin America.

The fact that Dr Compagnucci now disagrees with the IPCC’s conclusions is not unique, a number of scientist involved with the IPCC have been critical of the agency. What caught my attention was a statement she made while explaining her reasons.

With all the emphasis on preparing for global warming, she warned, this could leave man unprepared to deal with the possibility of a new ice age. She noted that South America's Southern Cone just went through a brutal, record-breaking winter, which could be repeated in North America. These concerns were expressed this past December 2nd, prior to the onset of this current brutal winter in much of the Northern Hemisphere.

It is interesting to note that a climate scientist unfettered by the need to defend a political position can make such a prophetic observation based solely on her judgment and intuition of current conditions. As regards to a coming ice age she did explain that this could be hundreds of years in the future, but she did expect a downward temperature swing by 2012.

She is not alone in this concern however, several scientist particularly astrophysicists and astronomers such as Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory have been warning that solar irradiance has begun to fall, which will cause a protracted cooling period beginning in 2012 to 2015. The decline in solar irradiance he projects will last well into mid century and beyond putting Earth into an ever increasing deep freeze into the next century.

Since I originally wrote this many more scientist have expressed concerns about a cooling world. Dr. Pal Brekke a senior advisor to the Norwegian Space Centre in Oslo put it this way

"We could be in for a surprise," he cautions. "It's possible that the sun
plays an even more central role in global warming than we have suspected. Anyone who claims that the debate is over and the conclusions are firm has a
fundamentally unscientific approach to one of the most momentous issues of our
time."

and he added:

There is much evidence that the sun's high-activity cycle is levelling off or abating. If it is true that the sun's activity is of great significance in determining the earth's climate, this reduced solar activity could work in the opposite direction to climate change caused by humans. In that case," contends Dr Brekke, "we could find the temperature levelling off or actually falling in the course of a 50-year period" - an assertion that provokes many climate researchers

.
Obviously if this is true and there really is a danger of man made global warming then the sun's reduced activity counteracting it should be welcomed. But as you can tell from the article any mention of the sun having an impact on the climate is frowned upon by the so called mainstream climate community. This is because they do not recognize the sun having anything but a marginal impact on our climate variations. Anything that does not point to greenhouse gasses as the primary driver of the climate is considered sacrilegious. I'll let the reader decide if given millions of years of Earth's existence this makes sense, considering the short history of the automobile industry.

You might also consider that according to these same mainstream climate gurus the warmest year in the industrial age was 1998, and 2008 is the coolest year since then despite atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increasing at an "alarming rate". So why has it cooled? "There is much evidence that the sun's high-activity cycle is levelling off or abating."

In addition to the sun, as if that wasn't big enough, in April it was announced that we transitioned from a warm PDO phase to a cold phase. What does that mean? Well according to Professor Don Easterbrook of Western Washington University :

The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling, perhaps much deeper than the global cooling from about 1945 to 1977. Just how much cooler the global climate will be during this cool cycle is uncertain. Recent solar changes suggest that it could be fairly severe, perhaps more like the 1880 to 1915 cool cycle than the more moderate 1945-1977 cool cycle. A more drastic cooling, similar to that during the Dalton and Maunder minimums, could plunge the Earth into another Little Ice Age, but only time will tell if that is likely.

I could point to quite a few scientist in several fields who are either predicting or speculating that this will happen, even scientist who agree with the AGW theory. Since I originally wrote this (prior to the PDO shift) more and more scientist are expressing concern and weighing in on the subject. However that is not the main point I wish to make here.

So often in the Global Warming discussion you hear comments like “What difference does it make if the scientist are wrong, it will be good for the world to cut back on CO2 emissions.”

Believe me when I say I’m all for cutting our dependence on and use of fossil fuels for many reasons, but scientist being wrong about man made global warming is not one of them. Let’s look at just one reason why we should not be in favor of taking actions based on possible faulty conclusions.

First, let us suppose that Dr. Abdussamatov is correct and we begin a prolonged period of global cooling sometime next decade. In point of fact we may have already started, since the globe has shown no warming since 1998, let me say that again in case you did not know. 1998 was the warmest year in the past decade, that means there has been no warming since then, 2008 in case you haven’t noticed doesn’t look like it’s going to threaten the trend, but we will see.

Back to Dr. A, if he is correct, how are you going to feel about climate scientist come the end of next decade? The winters will get worse, food prices will rise even more because growing seasons will shorten rather than lengthen as would happen with global warming. Energy prices will skyrocket even more than now because it cost more to heat than to cool. There will be more deaths because cold related deaths exceed heat related. Believe me when I say everyone will be wishing the scientist were right about global warming because global cooling will be far worse for our world.

But it’s worse than just being upset at the scientist and them loosing credibility. Speaking of which my twenty-two year old daughter has lived her entire life under this ever increasing alarm and threat from global warming. What is it going to do to her generations trust in science if we begin… excuse me continue to cool? But as I said it’s worse than that.

Have you ever been on a trip and gotten on a highway going in the opposite direction than you intended. Suddenly you realize it twenty miles down the road. The worst part is not just the miles you went, it’s also the gas you used and the time you lost and that’s still not all. You have to spend just as much time, go just as many miles and use just as much gas again to get back to where you started. In affect you have lost the equivalent of not the twenty miles but sixty, the twenty gone wrong the twenty return and the twenty more you should have been and you can never get the time and gas back, they are lost.

Let’s look at another way in which this whole global warming hysteria has us going in a direction that could be very painful to return from. First, many countries, the United States now included, are mandating that a percentage of there energy use be replaced by bio-fuels. This is already having a dramatic affect on world food prices and stockpiles. So in the coming years we will be increasingly burning our food supply. As the world population and the demand for agricultural products grow we will be using those needed commodities for fuel instead of for sustenance. If we continue this policy which calls for ever increasing ethanol production it will only exacerbate the problem considerably in a colder world with shorter growing seasons.

It is easy to say that we would just switch back to using the crops for food but the real world does not work that way. Despite the fact that global temperatures have leveled over the past decade, the constant drum beat of climate change has been unrelenting causing world wide changes in energy policies, scientific research, economic planning and priorities.

Do you really believe that the scientist, environmental groups and politicians that have invested so much of their credibility on this theory are suddenly going to say “Oh Gee, we got it wrong, never mind” ? Not to mention that tremendous amounts of capital is being invested in research, development and infrastructures to accommodate this growing industry. I would assume that bio-fuel plants are not cheap. There is also the economic, availability and psychological affect if we are suddenly faced with switching back to using more fossil fuel in order to keep the world from starving. Think about that one for a while.

Like going the wrong way and having to turn around on a trip, tremendous resources are being expended in the wrong direction. Will we really give a hoot about wind farms if we are suffering through -50 degF winters as they just did in Maine, a new record low for all of New England.

While new coal plants are being taken off the table and drilling for oil and natural gas has become anathema to the power elite that control our country, how foolish will we look when we are burning forest and buildings for heat?

If some scientists say that the world is going to heat up and others say it is going to cool down what do you do? Perhaps the best course is to watch and see instead of running in the opposite direction from where you need to go. Making policies and taking steps that will only exacerbate future conditions seems to be a bit extreme. Personally I hope the AGW proponents are correct, the benefits of a warmer world out weigh the negatives, though you seldom hear this side of the discussion.


Dr. Habibullo I. Abdussamatov: Russian Academy of Scientists.Comment: RIA Novosti, August 25, 2006:

“Khabibullo Abdusamatov said he and his colleagues had concluded that a period of global cooling similar to one seen in the late 17th century – when canals froze in the Netherlands and people had to leave their dwellings in Greenland – could start in 2012-2015 and reach its peak in 2055-2060….He said he believed the future climate change would have very serious consequences and that authorities should start preparing for them today….

January 16,2009

And he is getting more and more support for his view because it would be a real shame if we left our children and grandchildren starving in the cold.

By Jer

Skeptics From Around the Globe - United States

Dr. Joanne Simpson:Atmospheric Scientist, Former Chief Scientist Emeritus for Meteorology, Earth Sun Exploration Division NASA, first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called "among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years."


"Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical...The main basis of the claim that man’s release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely upon climate models. We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface system."

That's Climate Change For You

That's global warm....uh climate change for you, just never know where it is going to hit, nobody is safe.

GUINEA: Record cold snap destroys crops, kills hundreds of animals
DAKAR, 20 February 2009 (IRIN) - Near-freezing temperatures in north-central Guinea in January destroyed crops and livestock on which thousands of people depend for food as well as cash.
Elderly locals told IRIN they had never seen cold this intense in Mali, a town in Guinea’s Labé region.
“The vegetation looks as if it was burned in a fire,” Hannibal Barry of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) told IRIN from Mali on 19 February during a joint evaluation by UN agencies, local authorities and NGOs.
Temperatures dropped to 1.4 degrees Celsius from 17 to 26 January, according to a preliminary report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP).
The cold wiped out crops – mainly potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, onions and bananas – across five districts in Mali. It is not yet known how many hectares were destroyed, Mamadou Saliou III Diallo, head of agricultural operations at the Mali prefecture, told IRIN after visiting the affected areas.
In one district, the cold destroyed 15 hectares, he said, adding that UN and local officials continued to survey the area. Rural development officials said that in normal conditions production per hectare in the area was 12-15T of potatoes; 8-10T of tomatoes; 4-5T of aubergine; and 3-4T of peppers. Animals killed The cold also provoked at least 1,115 spontaneous abortions in goats and sheep, Diallo said. Souleymane Diaby Barry, a livestock technician in Mali, told IRIN the affected animals were in an advanced stage of gestation and that stress can cause spontaneous abortion during this period. “This is the first time I have seen abortions caused by cold,” he said. Some goats and sheep were also killed, as were at least 700 chicks, Diallo said. Mamadou Cellou Diallo, who grows vegetables in Mali, told IRIN that during the dry season, from November to April, families subsisted on these crops, which they cultivated near streams.
“These are poor farmers, and they do this gardening during the dry season to get by,” he said, adding that families consumed some of the produce and sold the rest. WFP said some of the affected crops were to be used for school meals. Many people had borrowed money for crops from a rural credit bank, said Diallo, who lost his potato and tomato harvest. “Now people here are asking themselves how they will be able to pay their debts and at the same time feed their families.” FAO is initially appealing for US$500,000 to help families affected by the cold, Mariatou Coulibaly, FAO emergency coordinator in Guinea, told IRIN from the capital Conakry. “People in this area count on earnings from their vegetables to cover healthcare and school fees,” she said. FAO already provides seeds and tools to families in the region, with funding from the Italian government. Communities in the area – which is rocky and mountainous with limited cultivable land – survive essentially on agriculture, according to OCHA.Temperatures are relatively low in Mali during this period. But the lows are generally around 12 degrees, a local resident said.

CO2-Capture Coal Plants: A Ban by Another Name

How much has Al Gore made in the last 8 years peddling global warming, oh I mean climate change? $100,000,000.00 is the figure given, just think how much more he can make if he can really scare your kids and grand kids into fear based destruction of their way of life. GO AL GO! Turn off the economic engine of the world!!!



from Master Source

The top agenda item for many climate activists (James Hansen, for example) is stopping the construction of new coal-fired power plants. Coal is the most carbon-intensive fuel, and the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from new coal plants at various planning stages could swamp by as much as 5 to 1 all the emissions reductions the European Union, Russia, and Japan might achieve under the Kyoto Protocol. Either climate activists kill coal, or coal will bury Kyoto.

Al Gore and his comrades at “We Can Solve It” go even further. They urge policymakers to “re-power” America with zero-carbon, emission-free electricity by 2018. In 2007, the favored renewables—wind, solar, geothermal, municipal waste, and biomass—produced 72.4 gigawatts of electricity in the U.S. power sector (see Table A16 of EIA’s 2009 Annual Energy Outlook Summary Reference Case Tables). In contrast, total power-sector generation in 2007 was 3,827 gigawatts. So the “We Can Solve It” crowd wants energy sources that supply less than 2% of U.S. electric generation today to supplant the coal- and gas-fired power plants that provide almost 70% of current generation–all in 10 years.

If seriously pursued, this agenda would lead to hyperinflation of electricity prices (because demand for renewable electricity, ramped up by mandates, would vastly exceed supply), turn out the lights (a transition that big and that fast would not be smooth), and crash the economy. It would also set a world record for government waste, because hundreds of coal and natural gas power plants would be de-commissioned long before the end of their useful lives.
The proposal is so cockamamie I would feel silly blogging about it were it not the brainchild of a former Vice President, Nobel Prize Winner, New York Times best-seller-list author, and Academy Award film star.

The more urbane climate activists don’t talk about tearing down coal plants or even banning them. Instead, they call for a “moratorium” on new coal plants until such time as the technology and infrastructure are deployed to capture and store the CO2 emissions.

What prompts these observations is an article earlier this week in Greenwire summarizing a study by Emerging Energy Research (EER) on the pace and funding of carbon capture and storage (CCS) demonstration projects around the world. According to the study (which costs $3,750 to download in PDF, so I am relying on Greenwire’s review and a report outline posted on EER’s Web site), governments have earmarked about $20 billion for CCS projects. How much of that will actually be spent is anyone’s guess.

Neither Greenwire nor EER’s Web site provide what would seem to be the most relevant datum for potential investors, policymakers, and consumers—namely, how much it costs per ton for a coal-fired power plant to capture and store CO2.

According to the Department of Energy, carbon capture of CO2 from coal electric generating units costs about $150 per ton. That is more than twice the EIA-estimated cost of carbon permits in 2030 under the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (S. 2191), a bill the U.S. Senate did not see fit to pass.

In 2007, EIA analyzed the National Commission on Energy Policy’s cap-and-trade proposal featuring a “safety valve” price initially set at $7.00 per ton CO2-equivalent and increasing by 5% annually above inflation. EIA concluded that the proposed carbon penalty was not steep enough to make CCS economical (see p. 16 of the EIA report). That’s hardly surprising, if CCS costs $150 per ton. So all we need to do is increase the carbon penalty, and then we’ll get lots of investment in CCS, right?

Well, maybe not. In the same EIA report (p. 11), coal generation in the reference case (no cap-and-trade) increases from 2,505 billion kWh in 2006 to 3,381 billion kWh in 2030—a 34% increase. In contrast, under the NCEP cap-and-trade program with a gradually increasing safety valve price initially set at $7.00 per ton, coal generation increases from 2,505 billion kWh in 2006 to only 2,530 billion kWh in 2030—a 0.9% increase. That’s if auctioning of carbon permits is phased in. If all permits are auctioned from the get-go, coal generation actually declines slightly—from 2,505 billion kWh in 2006 to 2,500 billion kWh in 2030.

If a relatively small carbon penalty can essentially block new coal generation, a large carbon penalty might just as well lead to capital flight from coal rather than to a surge of investment in CCS.

A recent news item may be relevant to this discussion. Just two days after EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said she would consider interpreting the Clean Air Act to require coal power plants applying for Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) pre-construction permits to install best available control technology (BACT) for CO2, “AES Corporation, one of the world’s largest power companies with almost $14 billion in revenues in 2007, announced it would withdraw an application to build a new coal-fired power plant in Oklahoma,” the Huffington Post reports.
BACT for CO2 from coal power plants would most likely take the form of process efficiency upgrades, not anything nearly as costly or experimental as CCS. Yet, apparently, the risk of potential BACT regulation of CO2 was enough to deter AES from investing in a new coal power plant.

Experts I have spoken with say it could take a decade of research just to determine whether CCS would be economical under a range of carbon penalties, another decade to build the infrastructure of pipelines and storage facilities at an industrial scale (the CO2 pipeline network would rival the U.S. natural gas and petroleum pipeline networks in size; see p. ix of MIT’s CCS study), years to work out the regulatory and liability issues, and years to overcome NIMBY opposition.

So the so-called moratorium on new coal plants lacking CCS is just a ban by another name. What are the risks?

U.S. electricity demand is growing (or at least was growing before the recession), and coal is the fuel of choice in many markets. EIA projects that between 2006 and 2030, coal will provide 42% of all new electric power-sector generation in the United States, with new coal power plants providing 8% all U.S. power-sector generation by 2030. Banning that much new coal generation would, at a minimum, drive up electricity and natural gas prices. The effectual ban could also create significant imbalances between supply and demand, increasing the risk of local or regional energy crises.

Sea Level Response to Global Warming

from CO2 Science

In an intriguing study recently published in Ocean Dynamics, von Storch et al. (2008) write that Rahmstorf (2007) recently proposed "a linear relationship between the rate of global mean sea-level rise and the global mean near-surface air temperature deviations," which "is calibrated with observed data, thus incorporating in a somewhat realistic and condensed manner all known and unknown mechanisms modulating the global sea-level height," which concept sounds quite reasonable. But does it work?
One way of addressing this question -- and which they proceed to employ -- is, in their words, "to test the statistical methods in the virtual reality produced in simulations with state-of-the-art climate models." Following this strategy, they thus examined "several hypotheses concerning the relationship between global mean sea level and other thermal surface variables in a long climate simulation of the past millennium with the climate model ECHO-G driven by estimations of past greenhouse gas, volcanic and solar forcing." So what did they find?

The three researchers report that the linear link between global mean temperature and the rate of change of global mean sea level "turned out to be not reliable over the full time period," noting that "instead, for some periods, even inverse relationships [our italics] were found to describe the simulated data best." Likewise, they say that the second predictor -- the rate of change of temperature -- "did not show markedly better results." And for both predictors, they report "there exist periods in the simulation where the prediction errors are very large."

In discussing their findings, von Storch et al. acknowledge that the type of test they performed in the "virtual reality" produced by climate models "cannot prove whether a certain hypothesis, in this case the different statistical relationships, will hold in the real world." However, as they continue, "they can be used to falsify a particular hypothesis," noting that "if it is not fulfilled in a simple virtual reality, it will probably also fail in a more complex real world."

Al Gore and James Hansen, take note. There is currently no known way to predict -- with any reasonable and demonstrable degree of confidence -- what mean global sea level will do over the 21st century, even if mean global air temperature begins to rise once again (after having remained rather stable for the past decade).

Skeptics From Around the Globe - Japan

JAPAN

Dr. Kiminori Itoh,Yokohama National University award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.


Warming fears are the "worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists."

Skeptics From Around the Globe - Slovakia

Jan VeizerPh.D.-Distinguished University Professor Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa



"Empirical observations on all time scales point to celestial phenomena as the principal driver of climate, with greenhouse gases acting only as potential amplifiers."

Dr. S Fred Singer-Inquisition

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Part 2

Dr S Fred Singer-Now President of The Science & Environmental Policy Project, a non-profit policy research group he founded in 1990, Singer is also distinguished professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia. His previous government and academic positions include Chief Scientist, U.S. Department of Transportation (1987- 89); Deputy Assistant Administrator for Policy, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (1970-71); Deputy Assistant Secretary for Water Quality and Research, U.S. Department of the Interior (1967- 70); founding Dean of the School of Environmental and Planetary Sciences, University of Miami (1964-67); first Director of the National Weather Satellite Service (1962-64); and Director of the Center for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Maryland (1953-62).


U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Federal Service. Singer received the award for the development and management of the U.S. weather satellite program, after being the first Director of the National Weather Bureau's Satellite Service Center (1962-64)

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Some heretical writing by this Skeptic

Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate

Testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation

Books by S. Fred Singer

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Point To Ponder

"Current GH models don't account for NH/SH differences, for Antarctic cooling, and why Arctic temperatures were highest in the 1930s".

Skeptics From Around the Globe - Israel

(Israel) Dr. Nir Shaviv -The Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Toronto

"Al Gore uses pyrotechnics to lead his audience to the wrong conclusion. If CO2 affects the temperature, as this graph supposedly demonstrates, then the 20th century CO2 rise should cause a temperature rise larger than the rise seen from the last ice-age to today's interglacial. This is of course wrong."

An Egregious Example Of Biased News Reporting

I was quite stunned this morning to read the following news articles
“Global warming seen worse than predicted” by Julie Steenhuysen of Reuters
”Scientists: Pace of Climate Change Exceeds Estimates”By Kari Lydersen of the Washington Post.
These news is also reported at 431 other sites according to a search on google.
These articles are based on statements by Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University. I have a lot of respect for Dr. Field as an expert on the carbon cycle [I also have worked with him in the past].
However, while he is credentialed in climate science and certainly can have his own opinion, the selection of his statements to highlight in prominent news articles, without presenting counter perspectives by other climate scientists, is a clear example of media bias.
Dr. Fields is reported to have said
“We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations”.
This claim, though, conflicts with real world observations!
For example, Climate Science has recently weblogged on the issue of global warming; see
Update On A Comparison Of Upper Ocean Heat Content Changes With The GISS Model Predictions.
Since mid-2003, there has been no upper ocean global average warming; an observation which is not consistent with the GISS model predictions over this time period.
The recent and current tropospheric temperature data (e.g. see Figure 7 in this RSS MSU data), also show that the global lower tropospheric temperatures today are no warmer than they were in 2002.
The recent global warming is less than the IPCC models predict, and, even more so, in disagreement with the news articles.
Since papers and weblogs have documented that the warming is being over-estimated in recent years, and, thus, these sources of information are readily available to the reporters, there is, therefore, no other alternative than these reporters are deliberately selecting a biased perspective to promote a particular viewpoint on climate. The reporting of this news without presenting counter viewpoints is clearly an example of yellow journalism;
“Journalism that exploits, distorts, or exaggerates the news to create sensations and attract readers.”
When will the news media and others realize that by presenting such biased reports, which are easily refuted by real world data, they are losing their credibility among many in the scientific community as well as with the public.

Original Article

"Skeptics From Around the Globe" - New Zealand

NEW ZEALAND



Dr Chris de Freitas

Associate Professor, Deputy Director of School, Associate Director (Postgraduate Affairs) Environmental climatology-University of Auckland (New Zealand)



"Climate is not responding to greenhouse gases in the way we thought it might. If increasing carbon dioxide is in fact increasing climate change, its impact is smaller than natural variation. People are being misled by people making money out of this."

De-Programming Students

By Thomas Sowell



...Elementary as it may seem that we should hear both sides of an issue before making up our minds, that is seldom what happens on politically correct issues today in our schools and colleges. The biggest argument of the left is that there is no argument— whether the issue is global warming, "open space" laws or whatever.

Some students may even imagine that they have already heard the other side because their teachers may have given them their version of other people's arguments or motives.


But a jury would never be impressed by having the prosecution tell them what the defendant's defense is. They would want to hear the defense attorney present that case.


Yet most students who have read and heard repeatedly about the catastrophes awaiting us unless we try to stop "global warming" have never read a book, an article or even a single word by any of the hundreds of climate scientists, in countries around the world, who have expressed opposition to that view....

Dark Green Doomsayers

By George F. Will


A corollary of Murphy's Law ("If something can go wrong, it will") is: "Things are worse than they can possibly be." Energy Secretary Steven Chu, an atomic physicist, seems to embrace that corollary but ignores Gregg Easterbrook's "Law of Doomsaying": Predict catastrophe no sooner than five years hence but no later than 10 years away, soon enough to terrify but distant enough that people will forget if you are wrong.
Chu recently told the Los Angeles Times that global warming might melt 90 percent of California's snowpack, which stores much of the water needed for agriculture. This, Chu said, would mean "no more agriculture in California," the nation's leading food producer. Chu added: "I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going."
No more lettuce for Los Angeles? Chu likes predictions, so here is another: Nine decades hence, our great-great-grandchildren will add the disappearance of California artichokes to the list of predicted planetary calamities that did not happen. Global cooling recently joined that lengthening list.
In the 1970s, "a major cooling of the planet" was "widely considered inevitable" because it was "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950" (New York Times, May 21, 1975). Although some disputed that the "cooling trend" could result in "a return to another ice age" (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), others anticipated "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" involving "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation" (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively). The "continued rapid cooling of the Earth" (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that "a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery" (International Wildlife, July 1975). "The world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age" (Science Digest, February 1973). Because of "ominous signs" that "the Earth's climate seems to be cooling down," meteorologists were "almost unanimous" that "the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century," perhaps triggering catastrophic famines (Newsweek cover story, "The Cooling World," April 28, 1975). Armadillos were fleeing south from Nebraska, heat-seeking snails were retreating from Central European forests, the North Atlantic was "cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool," glaciers had "begun to advance" and "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter" (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 27, 1974).


Speaking of experts, in 1980 Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford scientist and environmental Cassandra who predicted calamitous food shortages by 1990, accepted a bet with economist Julian Simon. When Ehrlich predicted the imminent exhaustion of many nonrenewable natural resources, Simon challenged him: Pick a "basket" of any five such commodities, and I will wager that in a decade the price of the basket will decline, indicating decreased scarcity. Ehrlich picked five metals -- chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten -- that he predicted would become more expensive. Not only did the price of the basket decline, the price of all five declined.
An expert Ehrlich consulted in picking the five was John Holdren, who today is President Obama's science adviser. Credentialed intellectuals, too -- actually, especially -- illustrate Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know."
As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.
An unstated premise of eco-pessimism is that environmental conditions are, or recently were, optimal. The proclaimed faith of eco-pessimists is weirdly optimistic: These optimal conditions must and can be preserved or restored if government will make us minimize our carbon footprints and if government will "remake" the economy.
Because of today's economy, another law -- call it the Law of Clarifying Calamities -- is being (redundantly) confirmed. On graphs tracking public opinion, two lines are moving in tandem and inversely: The sharply rising line charts public concern about the economy, the plunging line follows concern about the environment. A recent Pew Research Center poll asked which of 20 issues should be the government's top priorities. Climate change ranked 20th.
Real calamities take our minds off hypothetical ones. Besides, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one-third of the span since the global cooling scare.





Original Article

"Skeptics From Around The Globe"

Norway













Ole Humlum, Professor of Physical Geography at the Institute of Geosciences, University of Oslo,

"Global climate models are often defended by stating that they are based on well established laws of physics. There is, however, much more to the models than just the laws of physics. Otherwise they would all produce the same output for the future climate, which they do not. Climate models are, in effect, nothing more than mathematical ways for experts to express their best opinion about how the real world functions."
Climate 4 You

The Other Side Of The Story

Impact Assessments Require Trust in the Climate Forecast

My specialty is in impacts assessment (oceans, coasts, fisheries, polar regions), not the science of climate change. However, to determine impacts correctly, one must understand the nature of change and its likelihood to continue. It is necessary to have trust in what the climate scientists tell you is going to happen in the future. In the IPCC structure, the science has been led by the UK and US scientists, and they have used modeling as their primary tool, with some paleoclimate analysis coming later. The Impact Assessments have been led by the Russians, who have had an intense distrust of modeling. They viewed paleoclimatology as the most valid tool: if you want to know what will happen when CO2 rises or the temperature changes, they say to look at the history of the earth. As an American, working with the Russian teams, I was often caught in the middle of both camps. I learned to listen to both views, and continue to do so. In particular, we learned to distrust any science literature or impacts assessment that did not consider all data available, whether modeling, the instrumented record back into the 1800s and/or the paleo and historical temperature reconstructions. If the data are truncated, there is likely an agenda. Many of us have learned, either formally, or informally, how to detect misrepresentation by statistical treatments and graphics.

How To Tell If an Impact Assessment Is Biased

When reviewing impact assessments, look for bias. Often the authors think only of negative changes. This is not necessarily because of personal agendas (such as to assist animals, clean the air, or reduce the birth rate), but is primarily due to human nature. To guard against having a biased report, one should look for balance. Does the material articulate that things will be different and that there are pluses and minuses? There may well be more of one than another. Sometimes balance is reflected in the amount of text, or graphics made to illustrate impacts and often it is reflected in the number of negative versus positive impacts, the latter often left out completely at the first draft stage. If missing, they tend to be only partially treated thereafter as the authors slowly yield to reviewer comments. Examples of balance:

Discussions of increased summer heat waves and deaths should also include the reductions of winter cold waves and hypothermia deaths. Far more people die of cold.

Increased costs of home air conditioning need to be discussed in the same context as reduced heating costs.

Increased mismatches between food availability in ecosystems need to also include reduced energy demands needed to maintain body temperature, such as for marine mammals.

Discussions of coral reef bleaching need to include the expansion of coral reef habitats.

Discussions of agriculture problems such as regional droughts and the need to change crops must include the expansion of production areas, general increased precipitation, and CO2 fertilization.

Discussions of poison ivy becoming more prolific should similarly treat agricultural crops and forests.

The IPCC Projections do not Comport with Reality

CO2 has usually been associated with temperature rise throughout the history of the Earth. It is indeed a greenhouse gas but it operates on a logarithmic function. The Earth's natural processes also contribute, and remove, copious amounts of CO2. Since plants first appeared on the Earth, they have converted nearly all available CO2 to oxygen, fossil fuels, and other longterm removals from the atmosphere. Today less than 4/100 of 1% (379 ppm) of our atmosphere is CO2. This pales in comparison with other periods in Earth's history. Common IPCC scenarios rely on an increasing supply of fossil fuels, yet we know that this is not possible and that production will soon peak (if not already) while prices will continue to rise. It is absolutely unrealistic to think CO2 emissions will rise for the duration of this century. Even China, with the largest coal reserves, is now importing coal, causing a doubling of the global price. This will get more coal out of the ground, quicker, but it cannot continue forever.

The projected temperature rise is unrealistic, given that the USA and global temperatures have risen by only 1 deg F (.5 C) in 100 years (revised, NOAA, 1 May 2007 ), (or 150 years using the full instrumented data set) during the height of industrial expansion. Even if all this rise is correct, and is attributable to human causes, it is a trivial amount in the natural variation of the Earth, and to suggest the rise would accelerate 5 fold (IPCC best estimate) in this century is incredible. Even after the release of the new data set and procedures by NOAA on May 1, which addressed some of the urban heat island issues and dropped the warming 44% (below IPCC 2007), significant other urban heat island issues still remain. There are also issues of calibration as measurement protocols have changed, issues about the design and placement of the temperature stations, and even the strongly held view by many skeptics that this is a natural rise as the Earth recovers from the Little Ice Age (circa 1500-1900).

Sea level rise may have increased recently, but other studies have consistently shown no increase. Even if there is an increase, it is in the order of 1 mm per year on top of the 1-2 mm per year that has been happening for the last century, this additional amount is 4 inches (10 cm) over the century. This is not trivial if you are in a low-lying region wrestling with land subsidence, but it is barely more than what would be coming anyway.

The other forecasts, such as for hurricanes, rainfall, and snow cover, are not significantly different than under natural variability, and will advance more slowly than the decadal oscillations. In particular, if ocean acidity were a problem for shell formation, it would have shown up already in areas where there are naturally high levels of CO2. It has not. Further, the lead hurricane expert for IPCC, Chris Landsea, resigned over the misrepresentation of data by IPCC .

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Dr. John T Everett