Troy -- It was supposed to be a shining example of the green movement -- a completely independent solar-powered house with no gas or electrical hookups.
Seven months ago, officials gathered for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the $900,000 house owned by the city of Troy that was to be used as an educational tool and meeting spot.
But it never opened to the public. And it remains closed.
Frozen pipes during the winter caused $16,000 in damage to floors, and city officials aren't sure when the house at the Troy Community Center will open.
"It's not safe right now, and there's no estimated opening time because it depends on when we can get funding," said Carol Anderson, director of the city's Parks and Recreation Department.
That surprised the Oakland County Planning and Economic Development Department, which advertised tours of the house for its Tuesday Oakland County Green Summit.
"No, I didn't know anything about it," said Steve Huber, spokesman for county planning.
Bret Rasegnan, planning supervisor for the department, said the solar tours have been removed from the finalized agenda for the summit.
"It is disappointing that we can't tour, but the summit will still be of great value. I don't think it's reflective of the technology."
Lawrence Technological University, with help from DTE, mostly paid for the building. Its students built the 800-square-foot home, which was supposed to be livable year-round, free from the grid and churn out enough solar power to support a home-based business and electric vehicle.
So what caused the flood?
The city says it was a mechanical problem. University officials heard it differently.
Jeff Biegler, superintendent of parks for the city, said the flooding occurred from a glitch in the heater.
"The system was designed to kick a heater on to keep water from freezing," Biegler said. "The heater drew all reserve power out of the battery causing the system to back down and the pipes froze."
Joe Veryser, an associate dean of architecture at the university, said he heard otherwise.
"What I heard repeatedly was that somebody turned off the breaker during the winter and forgot to turn it back on, which caused the pipes to freeze and then break."
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Gee...I wonder if it has anything to do with the lack of sunshine in Michigan's winter, which would cause the batteries to deplete?
[This message has been edited by fierobear (edited 05-15-2009).]
Global cooling has arrived. Global warming is dead.
By Terri Jackson Wednesday, 13 May 2009
There is now irrefutable scientific evidence that far from global warming the earth has now entered a period of global cooling which will last at least for the next two decades.
Evidence for this comes from the NASA Microwave Sounding Unit and the Hadley Climate Research Unit while evidence that CO2 levels are continuing to increase comes from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.
Professor Don Easterbrook one of the principle speakers at the recent World Conference on climate change held in New York in March this year attended by 800 leading climatologists, has documented a consistent cycle of warm and cool periods each with a 27 year cycle. Indeed the warm period from 1976 to 1998 exactly fits the pattern of climate changes for the past several centuries long before there were any CO2 emissions. Greenland Ice core temperature measurements for the past 500 years show this 27 year cycle of alternating warm and cool periods. Recently the global temperature increased from 1918 to 1940, decreased from 1940 to 1976, increased again from 1976 to 1998 and has been decreasing ever since.
However throughout this time CO2 has been added to the atmosphere in increasing amounts. This point was brought out by at the New York conference by Vaclav Klaus the rotating President of the EU and President of the Czech Republic. If CO2 emissions cause temperature rises than why is it that every 27 years the earth climate switches to a cooling mode with decreasing temperature? Clearly there is another explanation that does not include humans. .
Nearly ten years into the 21 century it is clear that the UN IPCC computer models have gone badly astray. The IPCC models have predicted a one degree increase in global temperature by 2011 with further large temperature rises to 2100. Yet there has been no warming since 1998 with a one degree cooling this year being the largest global temperature change ever recorded. Nasa satellite imagery from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has confirmed that the Pacific Ocean has switched from the warm mode it has been in since 1977 to its cool mode, similar to that of the 1945-1977 global cooling period.
The evidence that the earth is in a cooling mode rather than a warming mode is there for all to see. the RSS(Remote Sensing System) in Santa Rosa California has recorded a temperature fall of two to three degrees in the Arctic since 2005, while US Army buoys show an increase in Arctic ice thickness to 3.5 metres. North America has had two of its worst winters for sixty years with the temperature in Yellowstone Park falling to a staggering minus 60 degrees.
About 46” of snow fell in New York in two weeks! Last February Toronto had over 70 cms of snow, more than anything since 1950! Snow has fallen in parts of China and Asia for the first time in living memory while Britain had its worst January for twenty years. Alps have best snow conditions in a generation ran a newspaper headline last December. Strange indeed that the BBC , who likes us to believe it is impartial does not mention these freezing temperatures and Arctic conditions.
Some warming in the Antarctic has only been on a small 20 mile strip of the Antarctic Peninsula as a result of the 1977- 1998 warming period. This is insignificant compared to the overall size of the huge Antarctic continent.
Studies by the WeatherAction team(weatheraction.com) led by astrophysicist Piers Corbyn and also the measurements of sun spots by the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial physics in Irkutsk in Russia show that over the last 50 years solar activity has been at its highest for the past several thousand years.
The Russian physicists have analysed sun spot activity from 1882 to 2000 and have noted that the minimum of the cycle of solar activity will occur around 2021 to 2026 and that we will be facing not global warming but global cooling leading to a deep freeze around 2050.
The UN IPCC graphics have left out the medieval warming period (950-1300AD) and the Little Ice Age (1350- 1850). This alters the picture entirely
and does not then portray the alternating warm cool warm cool cycle of recorded world temperatures. Also statements put out by the UN IPCC are unrepresentative of many of its members. I do not recall any votes being taken of the opinion of members.
At the New York climate change conference in March as well as Vaclav Klaus delegates also heard Dr Richard Linzen from MIT probably the leading climatologist in the world today, as well as Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, former director of the International Arctic Research Center, Dr Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for astrophysics and Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute who all demolished the global alarmists case piece by piece.
In his speech the EU President Vaclav Klaus had these controversial words for the environmentalist lobby.
“Environmentalists-even mainstream environmentalists are less concerned about any crisis posed by global warming than they are eager to command human behaviour and restrict economic activity” He also said “their true plans and ambitions: to stop economic development and return mankind centuries back.
They are interested in their businesses and their profits made with the help of politicians”
He got a standing ovation from the assembled audience.
His assertion about the involvement of politicians is not surprising. This whole movement is in many parts a political movement with nearly all the recognised climatologists throughout the world dissenting from the man made global warming theory.
This can be seen on the US Senate Environment committee web site with over 700 leading climatologists from 24 different countries including Nobel Prize laureates all dissenting from the man made global warming theory. It has been well reported that at least one of the architects of Koyoto has strong links with the New Age Movement which is not a movement that would promote economic growth.
We have all recently noticed the escalating price of food. The reason for this is because American grain, the breadbasket of the world, is increasingly being turned into ethanol which has led to a three fold increase of maize prices worldwide. This has the potential to cause worldwide starvation!
Terri Jackson is a Queens graduate physicist, climatologist and formerly founder of the Energy Group at the Institute of Physics, London.
I wonder how long it will be until enviro nutjobs stop trekking to the arctic to prove warming (that isn't happening) is causing all the ice to melt (which also isn't happening)?
The global warmists have yet another embarrassment on their hands.
The Catlin Arctic Survey was the brainchild of British explorer Pen Hadow who organized an expedition to trek to the North Pole to highlight how global warming was melting the Arctic ice cap. But his quest was thwarted when Mother Nature responded with fierce winds, bitter cold temperatures, and just plain lousy weather which destroyed ice measuring equipment and hampered resupply efforts, which at one point, left the team close to starvation.
While the Hadow team was struggling on the ground, a German expedition was measuring thicker than expected second year ice from the comfort of an aircraft with advanced monitoring equipment. They reported that this second year ice was up to four meters thick, rather than the two meters they expected.
Meanwhile, a Russian expedition simply drove to the North Pole in trucks which might be described as HumVees on sterioids, with none of the discomforts the Catlin team experienced. But the Russians were more interested in oil than ice thickness. The Russians want to stake a claim to the oil rights in the Arctic Ocean while the Catlin team wants to save us from oil.
The problems for the Catlin team began shortly after they were airlifted to a point on the ice north of Canada about 942 kilometers from the North Pole. A fierce storm arrived with high winds and cold temperatures of -40 deg C which took a toll on equipment and the team. The high tech ice measuring equipment broke down along with the data communications equipment. The three person team also suffered from the brutal conditions and one of the team members had frostbite. As a result the team only covered a total of 434 km, which is less than half way to the pole.
Instead of measuring ice electronically, team leader Hadow had to drill holes in the ice and measure thickness with a measuring tape the old fashioned way. And instead of a large number of ice thickness measurements, the team could only drill so many holes each day.
The loss of the ice measuring equipment meant that the team could not transmit ice thickness data back to headquarters continuously as planned. But this loss also meant that another part of the program had to be scuttled as well. The CAS team had planned to place the ice thickness data on their website and then have school children around the world plot the data during the journey north. As the team ventured north and the additional sunlight melted more ice as temperatures rose, they expected there would be ever decreasing ice thickness and the school children would no doubt be convinced of the need to do something to save earth from the ravages of global warming.
Arctic weather also adversely affected resupply efforts by air, and twice the team had to subsist on emergency rations while waiting. The latest resupply aircraft arrived ten days late when the team was subsisting on near starvation rations of 1,000 Calories per day and had only one meal left. The team normally consumed 6,000 Calories a day while trekking north.
There were barrels of jet fuel left on the ice during this resupply effort. The resupply aircraft had positioned a cache of fuel on the ice so they could then refuel at this halfway point on the next trip. But bad weather prevented the plane from landing there and instead the aircraft had to load additional fuel tanks on the plane to make this resupply before the team ran out of food. There is no word on what happened to these barrels after the team left.
The CAS team was led by Hadow (whose full name is Rupert Nigel Pendrill Hadow). The other team members are Ann Daniels (who was the cook) and Martin Hartley, a photographer. Hadow performed the scientific studies.
HRH the Prince of Wales was the Patron for this expedition. The Prince of Wales is, of course, Prince Charles, heir to the British throne and well known environmentalist.
The team pulled sledges containing their supplies as they skied northwards. On one occasion, they had to swim 50 meters while wearing immersion suits due to an opening in the ice. The report from the ice on April 18 notes:
The emergence of open water at this stage of the survey is typical for this time of year and will become almost a daily occurrence towards the end of the expedition.
But after April 18 up to the end of the expedition, open water was not a daily occurrence and the team had to swim no more, perhaps because there was too much ice.
The team did not see any polar bears but did find bear tracks at one point. The team apparently brought a firearm along just in case, since their website refers to firearms training. Such a practice is common with Arctic explorations since polar bears are known to attack people. It was fortunate that the team did not have to shoot any polar bears they were presumably embarking on this expedition to save the bears.
The CAS made their trip at a time when the Arctic sea ice extent is recovering this year and is close to the historic averages for May. This recovery apparently reflects less melting due to cooler than average temperatures. Over the past several years, the amount of multi-year ice has been decreasing so it will be interesting to see if the summer melt will be lessened and more multi-year ice develops.
The team did release their initial "scientific data" which covers March 1 to April 14.The first samples apparently came from multi-year ice with thicknesses ranging from 5.2 meters to 2.0 meters thick. Further on, they found only first year ice about 1.8 meters thick. There is a caveat that these results are for "Measurements biased for undeformed ice." This presumably means that the team drilled only on flat ice. These thickness values seem consistent with first year ice.
Plus, the CAS team stated that they were surprised that they did not find more multi-year ice instead of the largely first year ice they encountered. But as noted in Watts Up With That, the team was in fact trekking in an area of largely first year ice so the results are not surprising. Plus, the initial measurement of 5 meters is consistent with second or multi-year ice that the German expedition found.
With all the concern about the environment, we were surprised that there was no data released by the CAS about the extent of their carbon footprint for this expedition. So we decided to do it for them.
By using fuel consumption data for the De Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otter aircraft along with cruising speed and distances, we estimate that 84,000 lbs of CO2 were released into the atmosphere by the aircraft alone. There would be additional CO2 from flights from the UK to Canada.
The Russian expedition, by comparison, was far more environmentally friendly. We estimate their trucks released about 22,000 lbs of CO2, or about one quarter the amount of the CAS.
The bottom line is that the Catlin team did little to advance the knowledge of the condition of Arctic ice. But they did show that the Arctic weather can be brutal, cold and dangerous.
but obama got 68% of the electoral vote vs bush in 2000 getting 47.9 vs gore 48.4 so in total popular votes bush got less the 48% vs obama getting 52.9
and back to GW the sun is mostly spotless thats the current driving force in heat/cold a few sun spots have just poped up but 115 spotless days in 2009 as of today so lower solar output not CO2 rates is the point
------------------ Question wonder and be wierd are you kind?
In this debate, I find the story of Chicken Little to be curiously illuminating...a shame that so many supposedly educated (warmist) people haven't noticed the parallels...
but obama got 68% of the electoral vote vs bush in 2000 getting 47.9 vs gore 48.4 so in total popular votes bush got less the 48% vs obama getting 52.9
Way to pick and choose your stats there, ray ray. That's not entirely honest of you to use numbers from the 2000 election to insinuate something about the 2004 election. The cartoon is talking about the last two elections, 2008 and 2004, and either you knew that and are deliberately trying to mislead people or you were unaware of the results of the 2004 election. I find the latter very hard to believe.
The "country divided" remark wasn't made after the 2000 election. In the 2004 election, Bush got 50.7% of the popular vote. That's what the 51% is referring to. Obama got 52.9% of the popular vote in 2008, so technically the cartoon should say 53% for Obama.
Thomas Lifson Once again, the adverse consequences of poorly-conceived environmental policies dawns on mush-headed greenies. Germany's Spiegel posts an article puzzling over the consequences of that nation's sweeping carbon emissions legislation, conceding that it has not reduced carbon emissions one gram. To Spiegel and the warmists, this is somehow a "paradox"
The EU-wide emissions trading system determines the total amount of CO2 that can be emitted by power companies and industries. And this amount doesn't change -- no matter how many wind turbines are erected.
Experts have known about this situation for some time, but it still isn't widely known to the public. Even Germany's government officials mention it only under their breath. No one wants to discuss the political ramifications.
They are correct to be worried. Never mind the flaws in warmist consensus-based "science" targeting CO2, part of the life cycle, as a pollutant supposedly causing global warming. Even within the closed circle of warmist thinking, these policies are not working. The Germans have been conned into a lot of expense, and don't accomplish their stated goal.
In the worst case scenario, sustainable energy plants might even have a detrimental effect on the climate. As more wind turbines go online, coal plants will be able to reduce their output. This in itself is desirable -- but the problem is that the total number of available CO2 emission certificates remains the same. In other words, there will suddenly be more certificates per kilowatt of coal energy. That means the price per ton of CO2 emitted will fall. ...
Germany was able to sell unused certificates across Europe -- to coal companies in countries like Poland or Slovakia, for example. Thanks to Germany's wind turbines, these companies were then able to emit more greenhouse gases than originally planned. Given the often lower efficiency of Eastern European power plants, this is anything but environmentally beneficial.
This is not exactly shocking news to anyone who thinks through the carbon trading scheme. But evidently nobody bothered to think when proposing, passing, and implementing this legislation.
Incidentally, nowhere in the Spiegel article is any consideration given to the carbon footprint of producing all the cement that is necessary to construct a wind turbine tower. Cement production uses lots of energy. The turbines themselves, and their blades, also need considerable energy inputs to manufacture. Wind farms tend to need a lot of maintenance, and require the construction of extra power transmission lines, since the power production is dispersed over a larger area than would be the case with one large coal-fired (or nuclear) generating station. All of this extra construction and maintenance generates its own large carbon footprint.
But hey, the intentions are good, so only mean conservatives would carp about the actual results.
I recently read a good illustration of how the warming proponents manipulate data in their favor (from this link):
As a graduate student, I have been tasked with proving that people are getting taller over time and estimating by how much. As it turns out, I don’t have access to good historic height data, but by a fluke I inherited a hundred years of sales records from about 10 different shoe companies. After talking to some medical experts, I gain some confidence that shoe size is positively correlated to height. I therefore start collating my 10 series of shoe sales data, pursuing the original theory that the average size of the shoe sold should correlate to the average height of the target population.
It turns out that for four of my data sets, I find a nice pattern of steadily rising shoe sizes over time, reflecting my intuition that people’s height and shoe size should be increasing over time. In three of the data sets I find the results to be equivical — there is no long-term trend in the sizes of shoes sold and the average size jumps around a lot. In the final three data sets, there is actually a fairly clear negative trend - shoe sizes are decreasing over time.
So what would you say if I did the following:
Kept the four positive data sets and used them as-is
Threw out the three equivocal data sets
Kept the three negative data sets, but inverted them
Built a model for historic human heights based on seven data sets - four with positive coefficients between shoe size and height and three with negative coefficients.
My correlation coefficients are going to be really good, in part because I have flipped some of the data sets and in part I have thrown out the ones that don’t fit initial bias as to what the answer should be. Have I done good science? Would you trust my output? No?
Well what I describe is identical to how many of the historical temperature reconstruction studies have been executed (well, not quite — I have left out a number of other mistakes like smoothing before coefficients are derived and using de-trended data).
* Mann once wrote that multivariate regression methods don’t care about the orientation of the proxy. This is strictly true - the math does not care. But people who recognize that there is an underlying physical reality that makes a proxy a proxy do care.
It makes no sense to physically change the sign of the relationship of our final three shoe databases. There is no anatomical theory that would predict declining shoe sizes with increasing heights. But this seems to happen all the time in climate research. Financial modellers who try this go bankrupt. Climate modellers who try this to reinforce an alarmist conclusion get more funding. Go figure.
* Mann is Michael Mann, author of the infamous and now discredited "hockey stick" graph often shown that says temperatures were flat for 1000s of years, and suddenly went up drastically in the 20th century, caused by humans.
[This message has been edited by fierobear (edited 05-19-2009).]
"Curiouser and curiouser", said Alice. Not an unnatural response to the wholesale departure from reality she experienced at the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. And we have precisely the same head-scratching response to the refusal of green ideologues to grasp the energy realities of our age, especially as they affect a realistic role for renewable energy sources.
The Green Gospel
If any group has set the agenda for Green-ism in our age, it is Greenpeace. In 2007 Greenpeace produced a film ‘The Convenient Solution', which succinctly put the case for renewable energy's ‘urgent' solution before the world. Introducing the film on their website Greenpeace makes this statement, "We all know that, to stop climate change, we need to stop burning fossil fuels". Within minutes of the film getting under way we are informed of the "unnecessary dependence on fossil fuels." What the Green gospel also says "we all know..." is that: mankind burning fossil fuels emits carbon dioxide, a ‘polluting' greenhouse gas that significantly contributes to (anthropogenic) global warming. Thus, if we don't quickly change our evil, fossil burning ways dire prognostications will soon befall us.
"We all know ..." Is that so? Because it seems that all the scientists and informed climate observers who signed the Manhattan Declaration clearly don't "already know". Neither do a raft of the world's leading climatologists and scientists in Japan, the UK, Australia, Russia, New Zealand, Denmark, Poland, the United States and hundreds of other prominent scientists, not to mention the 66 percent of Americans who are not convinced. Indeed of the famous 2,000+ who proclaimed to "know" on behalf of the UN's IPCC, it seems a mere 20 percent (yes, around just 400) worked in any climate science capacity. None of which should come as a surprise when even the UN's own objective climate data reveals that the latest cycle of global warming ended in 1998. So when Greenpeace states: "We all know..." what they actually mean is all Green ideologues "know".
Green World/Real World
It is this apocalyptic sense of impending doom created by Greens in tandem with a media with a shameful history of scaremongering ( the latest being the swine flu) that has helped set in motion the panicky international energy-climate renewables juggernaut. The EU has set itself an arbitrary target of 20 percent of energy from renewable sources by the year 2020. That's in just 11 years. President Obama wants to double US renewable energy production within three years, up from under 10 percent at present and up a further 25 percent by 2025. Obama's ultimate goal is to set a course for an 80 percent reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050. The high priest of green alarmism, Al Gore goes way further, demanding the US target 100 percent from renewable energy sources within a decade.
As we have said elsewhere, by the year 2030, while world energy demand is likely to increase by 50 percent, all serious projections agree that oil, gas and coal will still account for around 87 percent of world energy production. Somebody's math somewhere is clearly wildly awry. So let's look at some basic facts.
Wind power is the flagship green energy industry if renewables are to become a serious player in the global energy mix. Wind farms are already a reality and allow green ideologues to provide a romantic picture of endless ‘free' energy from natural sources as easy enough with the right political will. What they play down is the massive high investment and maintenance costs that make wind power such an extremely unattractive proposition to capitalist business investors, requiring constant public finance shots in the arm to maintain itself.
Wind power's inherently low energy returns requires significant further investment in high maintenance gas turbine back-up facilities to cope with its unreliability. Greens cite Denmark, Europe's leading wind power producer as the key example of how wind can play a central role in reducing carbon emissions. But, as the Copenhagen Post recently revealed, the Danish Government is currently under fire over its overblown carbon emission claims. It seems that less than a quarter of the Danish government's 66 million tonnes of carbon cuts (down from 71 mt in 2007) were actually achieved domestically. The highly misleading figure also included climate projects in which Danish organizations were involved overseas and through Denmark's participation in the European Trading Scheme. The truth is, Denmark has one of Europe's highest rates of CO2 emissions per person and has been consistently cited by the European Environment Agency for having "not lived up to the Kyoto criteria".
In December 2008, the UK wind farm industry was forced to halve its over-inflated claims for the benefit of wind power in reducing carbon emissions. What that means in practice is that the UK's 2,400 onshore and offshore turbines would need a further 100,000 turbines to be built to enable it to meet its Kyoto commitments by 2020.
In spring 2008, faced with a vastly expensive "Manhattan Project" for green energy proposals in America, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) sought to standardize the cost of public subsidy per megawatt hour. It found that coal was subsidized at 44 cents, natural gas at 25 cents and nuclear power at $1.59. Wind power came in at $23.37 per energy unit. As high as it is for wind, subsidy for solar, however, is even higher at $24.34 per megawatt hour.
Solar power in particular requires high subsidies because the best solar cells have to be grown from silicon crystals, an extremely slow and costly process. While new solar technologies are addressed, solar power is unlikely to become a commercially feasible source of energy anytime soon. But while reliable solar energy in less sunnier climes is a key drawback, even sunny countries like Spain are finding the high rate of heavy subsidies difficult to sustain.
In the United States, far less than 1 percent of the 7 percent of energy currently produced from renewable sources is achieved from solar sources. Both the wind and solar industries continue to demand more of the public pie. Yet, as a Wall Street Journal editorial commenting on the EIA's standardized figures has pointed out, "Wind and solar have been on the subsidy take for years, and they still account for less than 1 percent of total net electricity generation."
What is clear is that solar energy needs a second-generation technological breakthrough to dramatically reduce its costs, which, for the foreseeable future, continue to price it out of the commercial mass market. And of course, even with such dramatic breakthroughs solar will always suffer from two unassailable facts: it works where there is sun and even there it is a very diffuse energy source, requiring massive and expensive facilities to produce anything of relevant size.
Water (hydro, tidal) and Geo-thermal
Some of the Greens already hate hydroelectric and for certain they would hate geothermal if they knew the type of facilities that it would entail. But even with the more radical characters aside hydroelectric and geothermal are very site specific. One cannot generate new mountains laden with running water nor can a geothermal anomaly with prolific hot water or steam reservoirs can be made to order. There is absolutely nothing wrong with either hydroelectric or geothermal but they happen where they happen and cannot be manufactured anywhere else. Regarding tidal energy, this has been just talk for at least forty years, an academic exercise with little relation to implementation reality.
Biofuel/Biomass
Biofuel is perhaps the biggest energy scam, ever. People hate to hear statistics like this but biofuels have a negative energy balance: they require more energy to produce than their consumption provides. And even ignoring this science, if we were to use all of the corn grown in the US to produce motor vehicle fuel, without regard to what that would do to food prices, it would still be less than 20 percent of our gasoline demand and a lot of the world would go hungry.
The EIA study mentioned above reported that ethanol and biofuels received a subsidy of $5.72 per BTU compared with just 3 cents per BTU for natural gas and petroleum products.
Nuclear
Environmentalists can't decide whether nuclear power should be classed as a renewable energy. On the whole, most green ideologues are anti-nuclear and thus shoot themselves in their own carbon-reducing footprint. A shame, as the EIA reveals nuclear power, so key to the global energy mix, receives 15 times less subsidy than wind.
Conclusion
An irrational fear of ‘climate apocalypse' has driven nature-worshipping green ideologues in every age generation. Being inherently anti-capitalist they care little whether their demands threaten to bankrupt modern economies, or deny poorer nations the same cheap, hydro-carbon powered industrialization path out of poverty taken by developed nations. For Green World, preposterous self-righteous claims are morally self-evident, Real World facts and reason mere irrelevancies. "The adventures first," said the Gryphon to Alice, "explanations take such as long time."
Peter C. Glover is European Associate Editor at Energy Tribune. Michael J. Economides is Energy Tribune's Editor-in-Chief.
Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.
The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers, researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the might of the "military-industrial complex," cautioning that "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." He worried that "there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."
This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a "climate-industrial complex" is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain.
This phenomenon will be on display at the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen this weekend. The organizers -- the Copenhagen Climate Council -- hope to push political leaders into more drastic promises when they negotiate the Kyoto Protocol's replacement in December.
The opening keynote address is to be delivered by Al Gore, who actually represents all three groups: He is a politician, a campaigner and the chair of a green private-equity firm invested in products that a climate-scared world would buy.
Naturally, many CEOs are genuinely concerned about global warming. But many of the most vocal stand to profit from carbon regulations. The term used by economists for their behavior is "rent-seeking."
The world's largest wind-turbine manufacturer, Copenhagen Climate Council member Vestas, urges governments to invest heavily in the wind market. It sponsors CNN's "Climate in Peril" segment, increasing support for policies that would increase Vestas's earnings. A fellow council member, Mr. Gore's green investment firm Generation Investment Management, warns of a significant risk to the U.S. economy unless a price is quickly placed on carbon.
Even companies that are not heavily engaged in green business stand to gain. European energy companies made tens of billions of euros in the first years of the European Trading System when they received free carbon emission allocations.
American electricity utility Duke Energy, a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, has long promoted a U.S. cap-and-trade scheme. Yet the company bitterly opposed the Warner-Lieberman bill in the U.S. Senate that would have created such a scheme because it did not include European-style handouts to coal companies. The Waxman-Markey bill in the House of Representatives promises to bring back the free lunch.
U.S. companies and interest groups involved with climate change hired 2,430 lobbyists just last year, up 300% from five years ago. Fifty of the biggest U.S. electric utilities -- including Duke -- spent $51 million on lobbyists in just six months.
The massive transfer of wealth that many businesses seek is not necessarily good for the rest of the economy. Spain has been proclaimed a global example in providing financial aid to renewable energy companies to create green jobs. But research shows that each new job cost Spain 571,138 euros, with subsidies of more than one million euros required to create each new job in the uncompetitive wind industry. Moreover, the programs resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs for every job created.
The cozy corporate-climate relationship was pioneered by Enron, which bought up renewable energy companies and credit-trading outfits while boasting of its relationship with green interest groups. When the Kyoto Protocol was signed, an internal memo was sent within Enron that stated, "If implemented, [the Kyoto Protocol] will do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory business."
The World Business Summit will hear from "science and public policy leaders" seemingly selected for their scary views of global warming. They include James Lovelock, who believes that much of Europe will be Saharan and London will be underwater within 30 years; Sir Crispin Tickell, who believes that the United Kingdom's population needs to be cut by two-thirds so the country can cope with global warming; and Timothy Flannery, who warns of sea level rises as high as "an eight-story building."
Free speech is important. But these visions of catastrophe are a long way outside of mainstream scientific opinion, and they go much further than the careful findings of the United Nations panel of climate change scientists. When it comes to sea-level rise, for example, the United Nations expects a rise of between seven and 23 inches by 2100 -- considerably less than a one-story building.
There would be an outcry -- and rightfully so -- if big oil organized a climate change conference and invited only climate-change deniers.
The partnership among self-interested businesses, grandstanding politicians and alarmist campaigners truly is an unholy alliance. The climate-industrial complex does not promote discussion on how to overcome this challenge in a way that will be best for everybody. We should not be surprised or impressed that those who stand to make a profit are among the loudest calling for politicians to act. Spending a fortune on global carbon regulations will benefit a few, but dearly cost everybody else.
Mr. Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus, a think tank, and author of "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming" (Knopf, 2007).
Corruption and deck stacking when it comes to such an important issue? It has to be the republicans and big oil because the altruistic socialists and green companies only have the best of intentions......
They're in such a hurry to pass the carbon tax, they might hire speed reader if there is a call to read the entire bill. I guess they figure if they don't pass it quickly enough, people will have time to figure out it's bullshit, and will gut our economy...
WASHINGTON -- Democrats in the House Energy and Commerce Committee have taken a novel precaution to head off Republican efforts to slow action this week on a sweeping climate bill. They are hiring a speed reader.
Republicans on the committee have said they may force the reading of the entire 946-page bill -- as well as major amendments that measure several hundred pages -- all aloud. This is a procedure lawmakers have a right to invoke. Republicans are largely against the bill, which aims to cut emissions of so-called greenhouse gases by more than 80% over the next half-century but would be costly.
Republicans haven't tried the tactic, but Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) is prepared.
A committee spokeswoman said the speed reader -- a young man who was on door duty at the hearing as he awaited a call to the microphone -- was hired to help staffers. After years of practice, the panel's clerks can read at a good clip. But the speed reader is a lot faster, she said.
"Judging by the size of the amendments, I can read a page about every 34 seconds," said the newly hired staff assistant, who declined to give his name. Based on that estimate, it would take him about nine hours.
It took the committee more than two hours Tuesday to debate and vote on the first proposed amendment. By the time Capitol Hill interns finally left for tacos and happy-hour drinks at the local Mexican restaurant, the panel had approved just three amendments. Among them was a proposal to give government subsidies to people who trade in old cars or trucks for new, more efficient ones.
Mr. Waxman has said he still hopes to finish the bill by Thursday, meeting his goal of moving the climate bill out of committee by Memorial Day.
"He's dreaming. It ain't going to happen," said Texas Rep. Joe Barton, the panel's ranking Republican. He added that Republicans "have 400 amendments that we could offer, but there are at least 75-80 that we almost have to offer."
The hypocrisy of the left...when Bush pressured the EPA not to allow California's tailpipe emissions standards, the left screamed that Bush was overstepping his bounds. Now that Obama is doing basically the same by using the EPA to further his objectives...they don't have a problem with the president influencing the EPA.
Posted by: Matt Dempsey Matt_Dempsey@epw.senate.gov
What role should the White House play in agency decision making? During eight years of the Bush Administration, the Democrats answered: none. Recall the colorful investigative extravaganzas over the denial of California’s waiver to set tailpipe emissions standards. The House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, then chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), was particularly incensed by White House intervention in the waiver process at EPA. Former EPA Administrator Steve Johnson, the committee concluded in a report, was forced by a rogue White House, contrary to law, into denying the waiver. “It appears that the White House played a significant role in the reversal of the EPA position,” the committee wrote. “This raises questions about the basis for the White House actions.”
Indeed, in the committee’s view, the White House role raised some weighty constitutional and legal questions: “The President has an obligation under the Constitution to take care that the laws of the United States are faithfully executed. In this case, the applicable law is the Clean Air Act, which requires that California's petition to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles be decided on the merits based on specific statutory criteria. It would be a serious breach if the President or other White House officials directed Administrator Johnson to ignore the record before the agency and deny California's petition for political or other inappropriate reasons. Further investigation will be required to assess the legality of the White House role in the rejection of the California motor vehicle standards.”
No question this is a serious charge, and one would therefore expect the committee, and the Democratic majority, to investigate, as they see it, similar breaches of legal authority within the Executive branch whenever they occur.
FACT: When Democrats control the White House, one man’s legal breach is another man’s effort to save the planet. As recounted in a recent report the legal authority of the EPA Administrator was apparently overridden by Carol Browner and Mary Nichols, head of the California Air Resources Board (CARB), both of whom “were key in crafting a plan to impose the first-ever national carbon limits on cars and trucks.”
In fact, it seems that Administrator Jackson was, at best, a marginal player in the decision to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars. As Greenwire reported, “In an interview yesterday, Nichols said Browner quietly orchestrated private discussions from the White House with auto industry officials.” “Browner started the talks,” Greenwire found, “soon after becoming Obama's special assistant on energy and climate.” It was then that “Nichols and Browner decided to keep their discussions as quiet as possible, holding no group meetings and taking care to not leak updates to the press. This strategy, they felt, would help facilitate fast progress outside the media frenzy that often dominates Washington politics.” Nichols made a special trip to Washington to “meet with Browner only after the former U.S. EPA administrator had contacted industry officials individually and the White House staff had mastered the technical and legal issues associated with California's attempt to regulate the auto industry.” A new standard has thus emerged: So long as the White House supports the right policies, White House influence is perfectly fine.
No American city is among the top 50 cities in the world for air pollution according to the World Bank. (1) Another list, ‘The Top Ten of the Dirty Thirty,' compiled by the Blacksmith Institute of New York compared the toxicity of contamination, the likelihood of it getting into humans and the number of people affected. Places were bumped up in rank if children were impacted. No US or European sites made the list. Sites in China, India and Russia occupied six of the top ten spots. Some examples: at Linfen in Shanxi province-the heart of China's coal industry-industrial and automobile emissions put the health of 3 million people at risk. At Sukinda in the state of Orissa in India, 2.6 million people face the hazards of one of the world's opencast chromite mines. And in Dzerzhinsk, Russia, 300,000 people are exposed to toxic by-products from chemical weapons. (2)
Have you heard about this? Probably not. But there's more. Another report states that seven of the world's ten most polluted cities are in China. Of the ten cities in the world with the highest levels of air pollution, three are in India. (3). There are more reports but by now you probably get the point. Note that no US city has been mentioned. Steven Hayward in discussing the Blacksmith report makes an observation that could well apply to all of these documents: "Not surprisingly the media and green campaigners in the United States completely overlooked this report." (4)
China has some of the worst pollution problems in the world. Nearly two-thirds of China's 343 major cities currently fail to meet the nation's air quality standards. Pollution levels in China's major cities are 10 to 50 times higher than the worst smoggy day in Los Angeles (5). The twenty fastest growing cities in the world are all in China.
China is adding 100 gigawatts of coal-fired electrical capacity a year. That's another whole United States' worth of coal consumption added every three years, with no stopping point in sight. Much of the rest of the developing world is on a similar path. (6)
As Fareed Zakaria notes,
"The combined carbon dioxide emissions from the 850 new coal-fired power plants that China and India are building between now and 2012 are five times the total savings of the Kyoto accords. So you can put in all those curly light bulbs and drive all the Priuses you want: India just ate that for breakfast and China will eat the next round of conservation for lunch." (7)
Jane Orient adds this on the futility of reducing emissions; "In a symbolic gesture, the Forces of Darkness, which are trying to end an age of enlightenment and reason, urged people to turn off their lights for an hour between 8:30 and 9:30 PM local time. Bjorn Lomborg calculated that if 1 billion turned off their lights for 1 hour, it would have been the equivalent of shutting of China's emissions for a full 6 seconds. (8)
Although China receives the most attention, it is not the only Asian nation where this concern is present. India is also growing rapidly, and its major cities experience particulate levels often eight to ten times higher than the worst American cities. India is the fourth-most coal dependent country in the world and has enough reserves to last for the next 100 years. Carbon emissions in India are rising faster than nearly every other country on the planet. Between 1980 and 2006, India's carbon output increased by 341%, compared to 321% for China, 103% for Brazil 238% for Indonesia and 272% for Pakistan. (9)
Peter Huber sums this up quite well:
"Cut to the chase. We rich people can't stop the world's 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can't even make any durable dent in global emissions-because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we can do, if we're foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and their carbon emissions faster still." (6)
References
1. Steven F. Hayward, Index of Leading Environmental Indicators 2009, (San Francisco, Pacific Research Institute, 2009), 3 2. "The Top Ten of the Dirty Thirty," New York, Blacksmith Institute, September 2007 3. Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent, The New Consumers, (Washington, DC, Island Press, 2004), 77 & 90 4. Steven F. Hayward, Index of Leading Environmental Indicators 2009, (San Francisco, Pacific Research Institute, 2009), 10 5. Steven F. Hayward, "China Comes Clean," http://www.aei.org/publicat...24262/pub_detail.asp 6. Peter W. Huber, "We Cannot Make a Dent in Global Carbon Emissions," http://www.opposingviews.co...bal-carbon-emissions 7. Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World, (New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 2008), 90 8. Jane Orient, "Earth Hour Celebrates Darkness," Civil Defense Perspectives, 25, 2, March 2009 9. Priyanka Bhardwaj and Robert Bryce, "India Chooses Coal, Not Kyoto," http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=1736
There is a lot being made in some circles about how we are currently on an emissions pathway that exceeds even the worst case projections used by the IPCC. This is used to support pleadings that we take immediate and significant action to reduce our profligate usage of fossil fuels, or we risk making the planet inhospitable to human societies.
The problem is that it is unclear who “we” are. Since most of these pleadings seem to be aimed at the current U.S. Congress to get it to pass legislation to limit the lifestyle of those under its control, it would seem like “we” are Americans.
But it this really a very effective course of action? Are Americans the reason that the current pathway of total global carbon dioxide emissions exceeds the IPCC’s wildest expectations? Or is there a more appropriate target audience?
To help you decide for yourself, we plot below the annual (energy-based) carbon dioxide emissions from various portions of the world for the past 10 years (through 2006, the last data available from the Energy Information Administration).
Figure 1. Annual energy-related carbon dioxide emissions from various portions of the world, 1997-2006 (source: Energy Information Administration)
Notice that one of these things is not like the others. And that thing is…China.
The emissions growth in China over the past 10 years (actually over the past 6-7) is simply astounding. Since 2000, China has increased its CO2 emissions by nearly 50% more than the rest of the world combined. In fact, had China’s CO2 emission changes for the past 10 years paralleled those of the United States (which was responsible for only a few percent of the global emission growth since 2000), the world would be on an emissions pathway that would lie very near the lowest scenario considered by the IPCC.
If other words, “we” (Americans) have little responsibility for “our” (global) emissions growth during the past 5-10 years.
Here is another way to look at it.
China has increased its national emissions since 2000 by an amount equivalent to about half the total annual U.S. emissions. That means, just to offset Chinese emissions growth, each and every one of us (Americans) would have had, on average, to have reduced our CO2 emissions by 50% during the same period. And this would only to be to offset China’s growth! Give China a few more years (although the global recession will slow things down a bit—temporarily) and China’s emissions growth will have exhausted our (Americans) potential to effect any more offsets—in other words, even it we (Americans) in 2000 had eliminated all our CO2 emissions, China, by the end of this decade, would most likely have completely replaced them through growth of its own. In only 10 short years, our (Americans) tremendous sacrifice would be forever erased by China’s growth.
The bottom line is clearly thus:
The loudest the pleas to limit carbon dioxide emissions should be being made in Chinese (rather than English), for without reigning in China’s emissions growth, America’s impact on future global climate change will be minuscule. So the alarmists should quit pestering us (Americans) about our energy usage until they have made some serious inroads with China. Recent trends show that “we” are not the problem.
We've been occasionally discussing temperatures and how they aren't (or are, depending on what you believe) going up over the last 10 years. Here is a good primer on temperature, and where we get our temperature data from:
(note there are some graphs and stuff at the below link that are referenced in this article)
THERE are four official global temperature data sets and there has been much debate and discussion as to which best represents change in global temperature.
Tom Quirk has analysed variations within and between these data sets and concludes there is 1. Substantial general agreement between the data sets, 2. Substantial short-term variation in global temperature in all data sets and 3. No data set shows a significant measurable rise in global temperature over the twelve year period since 1997.
Global Temperature Revisited by Tom Quirk
One of the most vexing things about climate change is the endless debate about temperatures. Did they rise, did they fall or were they pushed? At times it seems like a Monty Python sketch of either the Dead Parrot or the 5 or 10 Minute Argument.
However it is possible to see some of the issues by looking at the four temperature series that are advanced from:
GISS - Goddard Institute for Space Studies and home of James Hansen, Hadley Centre - British Meteorological Office research centre UAH - The University of Alabama, Huntsville, home of Roy Spencer with his colleagues including John Christy of NASA and RSS - Remote Sensing Systems in Santa Rosa, California, a company supported by NASA for the analysis of satellite data.
The first two groups use ground based data where possible with a degree of commonality. However since 70% of the surface of the earth is ocean and it is not monitored in a detailed manner, various procedures with possibly heroic assumptions and computer modelling, are followed to fill the ocean gap.
The last two groups use satellite data to probe the atmosphere and with the exception of the Polar Regions which are less than 10% of the globe, they get comprehensive coverage.
One question is of course are the two groups measuring the same temperature? After all the satellite looks down through the atmosphere, while the ground stations are exactly that.
There is an important distinction to be made between measuring the temperature and measuring the change in the temperature. Since the interest is in changing temperatures then what is called the global temperature anomaly is the starting point. The issue of measuring absolute temperatures should be put to one side.
Data from 1997 to 2009 was drawn from the four group websites on the 28 April 2009. When data for 1997 to early 2008 was compared to data acquired in early 2008 differences were found as shown in the first table.
This is evidence of substantial reprocessing and re-evaluation of data. This is not unusual with complicated analysis systems but there is so much interest in the results that adjustments are regarded with great suspicion. This is the fault of those publishing the temperature data as they fail to make the point that monthly and even yearly measurements are about weather and not climate.
The latest series of temperature anomalies are shown in the graph where the monthly data has been averaged into quarters. All statistical analysis that follows is on the monthly data unless stated otherwise.
From inspection, there is substantial agreement over the years 1997 to 2008. This can be statistically measured through correlations. This is a measure of how closely related the series may be. A value of 0 implies independent series while a value of 1 implies complete agreement. The correlation in turn indicates the degree of commonality in the comparison.
This is remarkable agreement given the two very different techniques used.
It is important to note that the two satellite analysis groups draw measurements from the same satellites. So the differences in temperatures are a result of analysis procedures that are not simple. In fact corrections to the data have been the subject of exchanges between the two groups.
The ground based measurements also have a common data base but it is clear and acknowledged that the two groups have different analysis procedures. While the satellite analysis procedures have converged to reduce their differences over the last thirty years, this has not been the case for the ground based procedures.
It is also clear looking at the measurements that there are substantial short-term, say less than 2 years, variations over the period 1997 to 2009. In fact, while the overall monthly variations show a scatter with standard deviation of 0.20C, the month to month variations are 0.10C. This is a measure of features that are clear in the data. The short run sequences of temperature movement are a reflection of variability in the atmosphere from events such as El Ninos (1997-98) and La Ninas.
Looking for a simple trend by fitting curves through a highly variable series is both a problem and a courageous exercise. The results on an annual rather than a monthly basis are given in the third table. The problem of dealing with real short term variations was resolved by ignoring them.
So for twelve years there has been a rise 0.10C with a 140% error, in other words, no significant measureable temperature rise. You can play with the data. If you omit 1998 then you can double the change. But 1998 was an El Nino year followed in 1999 by a La Nina. If we omit both years then the results are unchanged.
However the lesson from this is to look at the detail.
There is so much variability within the 12 year period that seeking a trend that might raise the temperature by 20C over 100 years would not be detectable. On the other hand there are clearly fluctuations on a monthly and yearly scale that will have nothing to do with the predicted effects of anthropogenic CO2.
The twelve year temperature changes from the data of the four analysis centres reveal some possible differences. Since there is a high degree of commonality amongst the results, any differences may be systematic. Both the GISS and Hadley series show a larger temperature increase then the satellite measurements. This may be due to urban heat island effects.
Finally, if you are looking for temperature increases from CO2 in the atmosphere, then you should choose the satellite approach of measuring temperatures in the atmosphere!
Short term, less than thirty years, temperature series are not the place to seek evidence of human induced global warming.
With television hosts unwilling to joke about President Barack Obama as those comedians regularly ridicule conservatives, there’s a bright spot coming up this week in a new TV show set to debut on ABC which will mock leftist environmentalism. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday:
The new animated television series ‘The Goode Family’ is a send-up of a clan of environmentalists who live by the words ‘What would Al Gore do?’ Gerald and Helen Goode want nothing more than to minimize their carbon footprint. They feed their dog, Che, only veggies (much to the pet's dismay) and Mr. Goode dutifully separates sheets of toilet paper when his wife accidentally buys two-ply. And, of course, the family drives a hybrid.
The series, from Mike Judge who created Beavis and Butt-Head for MTV and King of the Hill for Fox, will debut Wednesday night at 9 PM EDT/PDT, 8 PM CDT/MDT. The May 22 Journal article, “Making a Mockery of Being Green -- The creator of ‘Beavis and Butt-Head' and ‘King of the Hill' has a new target: environmentalists,” observed: “Much as Mr. Judge's series King of the Hill finds humor in the dramas of a working-class Texas family, Goode lampoons a liberal Midwestern household. In Goode, the characters are often mocked for being green just to fit in with their friends and neighbors.”
ABC.com has a preview video with commentary from Judge and his collaborators.
DebbieSchlussel.com, “Can't Wait for This: New Animated ABC Mike Judge Series Mocks Liberal Enviro-Crazies,” has gathered in one post three YouTube clips from the show.
These are the guys Al Gore is afraid of. He refuses to debate any of them in any sort of public forum including Senate Hearins that were to talk place LAST fall.
These are the guys Al Gore is afraid of. He refuses to debate any of them in any sort of public forum including Senate Hearins that were to talk place LAST fall.
They've been leading the fight, but it's an uphill battle getting coverage from a media that doesn't want to admit they've been backing a dead horse.
I read about the hearing. They wouldn't allow anyone to speak who didn't agree with warming. Let me repeat that - they would not allow anyone to speak who did not agree with warming. Our government is not allowing any discussion of the subject that doesn't agree with their conclusion. Is there any doubt left that this whole issue is politics, rather than science?
Is there any doubt left that this whole issue is politics, rather than science?
It's "almost" (wink wink, nudge nudge) as if the U.N. and governments ALL got together to look for A TAX with the broadest possible worldwide implications. By creating a scenario where fossil fuel energy is the "enemy" and is a MEASURABLE commodity (unlike water vapor - the MAJOR "greenhouse gas") they have managed to tax the production of fossil fuels, tax the use of fossil fuels, tax products manufactured and transported by fossil fuels and likely managed to "tax the tax" when they came up with "Cap & Trade" and "Carbon Credits" on tops of all that.
Cap & Trade and Carbon Credits is nothing more than a market for shuffling paper and money around the world. Buying Carbon Credits is about the same as YOU paying SOMEONE ELSE to go on a diet for YOU - and just as ridiculous.
[This message has been edited by fierosound (edited 05-25-2009).]
A few months ago, the blogosphere and talk radio were abuzz with the story of how the nation's various weather stations and temperature reading devices have been improperly located or badly constructed and how the data received from these improper devices must be suspected as inaccurate. The MSM briefly mentioned this story but quickly dropped it like the proverbial hot rock. It makes one wonder why?
Since global warming research often uses the suspect data that is gotten from these failed stations, the accuracy of the entire theory must therefore be called into question as its conclusions are derived from likely false data. Still the MSM ignores this explosive story.
If one saw where some of these weather stations were located one would immediately know that the data they were supplying is flawed.
One measure of the fantasy world now inhabited by our sad MPs was the mindless way that they nodded through, last October, by 463 votes to three, by far the most expensive piece of legislation ever to go through Parliament. This was the Climate Change Act, obliging the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change to reduce Britain's "carbon emissions" by 2050 to 20 per cent of what they were in 1990 – a target achievable only by shutting down most of the economy.
Such is the zombie state of our MPs that they agreed to this lunatic measure without the Government giving any idea of what this might cost. Only one, Peter Lilley, raised this question, and it was he who, last month, alerted me to the fact that the minister, Ed Miliband, had at last slipped out a figure on his website (without bothering to tell Parliament). The Government's estimate was £404 billion, or £18 billion a year, or £760 per household every year for four decades.
Such figures, produced by a computer model, are, of course, meaningless. But one of the mysteries of our time is how impossible it is to interest people in the mind-boggling sums cited by governments all over the world as the cost of the measures they wish to see taken to "stop climate change".
Last week I dined with Professor Bob Carter, a distinguished Australian paleoclimatologist, who has been trying to alert politicians in Scandinavia, Australia and New Zealand to the scarcely believable cost of these proposals. He gave me a paper he presented to a committee of New Zealand MPs. China and India, as the price of their participating in the UN's planned "Kyoto Two" deal to be agreed in Copenhagen next December, are demanding that developed countries, including Britain, should pay them 1 per cent of their GDP, totalling up to more than $300 billion every year.
Africa is putting in for a further $267 billion a year. South American countries are demanding hundreds of billions more. In the US, the latest costing of President Obama's "cap and trade" Bill is $1.9 trillion, a yearly cost to each US family of $4,500.
Meanwhile, as Mr Obama's Nobel Prize-winning Energy Secretary, Stephen Chu, babbles on the BBC's Today programme about how the world's energy needs can be met by wind and solar power (for which, he assured us, we would need to cover only 5 per cent of the planet's deserts with solar panels), a study shows that for every job created in Spain's "alternative energy industry" since 2000, 2.2 others have been lost. (Mr Obama talks about creating "five million green jobs" in the US.)
Last week the BBC and various newspapers excitably greeted the opening by Alex Salmond of Whitelee, "Europe's largest onshore wind farm", 140 giant 2.3 megawatt turbines covering 30 square miles of moorland south-east of Glasgow. It was happily reported that these would "generate" 322MW of electricity, "enough to power every home in Glasgow". They won't, of course, do anything of the kind. Due to the vagaries of the wind, this colossal enterprise will produce only 80MW on average, a quarter of its capacity and barely enough to keep half Glasgow's lights on.
It really is time people stopped recycling the thoroughly bogus propaganda claims of the wind industry in this way. Any journalist who still falls for these lies by confusing turbines' "capacity" with their actual output is either thoroughly stupid or dishonest. The truth is that the 80MW average output of "Europe's largest wind farm" is only a fraction of that of any conventional power station, at twice the cost. For this derisory amount of power, the hidden subsidy to Whitelee over its 25-year life will, on current figures, be £1 billion, paid by all of us through our electricity bills.
Truly, our world has gone off its head, and no one seems to notice – not least those wretched MPs who allow all this to happen without having the faintest idea what is going on.
[This message has been edited by fierobear (edited 05-28-2009).]
All great national powers have relied on access to and control of large quantities of natural resources, including energy and foodstuffs, to maintain their influence and status. Government policy that limits access to these resources must certainly weaken the nation as a whole.
It would be bad enough if we had a president who simply refuses to plan for future energy needs and does nothing. What we have now is a president who intends to do a great deal -- to reduce the amount of energy available to American industries and individuals. With the full support of the president, the Democratic Congress is gearing up to pass a cap and trade program which would force American businesses to purchase carbon credits at a total price now under negotiation, but originally estimated to be as much as $100 billion per year. This cost would be passed on to consumers in the form of higher utility bills, higher gasoline prices, higher prices for services, and higher prices for everything that is manufactured and transported.
What is the cost of cap and trade per taxpayer in terms of future inflation, reduced productivity, and slower job creation? One estimate would be $333 per person -- the $100 billion figure (based on White House Budget Director Peter Orszag's admittedly "underestimated" figure of $646 billion over ten years as reported on February 2, 2009 in US News and World Report and allowing for annual inflation of 3%) divided by the population of the United States. (Other estimates run as high as $2 trillion.)
More significant, perhaps, is the figure of $1332 per family of four, multiplied by two: $2664. That is the amount that each taxpaying family of four would pay in additional energy costs, since under current proposals non-taxpayers would have their energy bills subsidized through some form of government payment or credit (such as an energy tax rebate for tax filers who pay no federal tax to begin with -- otherwise known as welfare). And that figure of $2664 is itself subject to upward revision as energy supplies per capita are squeezed in future years while population and energy needs -- such as the electricity it takes to operate a large flat panel television set -- grow while the use of fossil fuels is gradually choked off, meaning higher prices for the consumer.
The fact is that the Obama administration is intent on diminishing, not increasing, our energy supplies. The administration's environmental policy, contrary to promises made during the campaign, has turned against expanded offshore drilling. By executive order it has removed a million acres of western lands from development and, for the time being if not indefinitely, has shut down exploration in Alaska's government lands. It has issued edicts banning mountaintop mining of coal, and with its proposed new standards of emissions, has placed most new coal-powered plants on hold. A hundred years worth of natural gas (at current usage levels) sits in the ground unused and perhaps ten times this amount lies unexplored onshore and offshore, but the Obama administration keeps talking wind and solar farms, which provide for less than two percent of current needs.
Barack Obama was not kidding when he stated during the 2008 campaign that he "wouldn't mind" if the price of gasoline went to twelve dollars a gallon, though this statement was disavowed when public outrage surfaced as the price of gas actually did go to over four dollars a gallon. There are many ways to drive the price of gasoline to $12 a gallon without seeming to do so. Cap and trade is the most far-reaching, but there are a wide range of additional restrictions, legal delays, lease renegotiations, and new or increased taxes that will move us further toward this "goal": the goal, that is, of reshaping the American economy into a nonproductive, high-unemployment, "post-material" society resembling the leftist enclaves of Berlin or Brussels.
Then there is the "multiplier" effect of energy strangulation, an effect which is more difficult to compute but which would manifest itself in the form of slower growth, reduced trade, job losses, and less innovation -- all of this for the announced purpose of slowing so-called global warming. As has been pointed out by scientists worldwide, the earth's climate has periodically warmed and cooled in natural cycles since the beginning of time. As recently as 1970, mankind was shivering through a cold cycle. During the past decade, we have entered another cycle of cooling, according to Professor Bill Gray at Colorado State University and Jeremy Ross at Storm Exchange, as reported in Barrons. The twenty-first century will undoubtedly witness further cycles of warming and cooling, none of them leading to the "catastrophic" consequences that the Obama administration so confidently predicts.
Add to this the rather inconvenient truth that even those scientists who support the global warming thesis are insisting that a cap on CO2 emissions would have practically no effect on the earth's temperature, either because they recognize that warming takes place largely as a result of natural cycles or because they adopt the more radical position that it is too late to do anything about it. In either case, why should we bother? A cap and trade policy has now been in effect in Europe for over a decade: has it had even the slightest effect on the earth's temperature? What can be demonstrated quite conclusively is that far-reaching cap and trade legislation would create a costly bureaucracy, reduce economic activity, and lead to inflation, and these effects would not be a one-time hit: they would amount to a permanent tax on the American people.
Why, one might ask, is Obama pursuing this destructive energy policy? The answer is, because he is a politician beholden to a powerful environmentalist lobby, and that lobby is opposed to all forms of economic growth, not just fossil fuels and nuclear energy. To put it bluntly, Obama's energy policy is beholden to a Luddite fantasy of happy peasants shoveling manure in a sustainable village economy. It is not an energy policy that bears any relation at all to the modern world, but it is a fantasy of "niceness" that garners liberal votes.
The current recession will likely end within twelve months, and when it does the global demand will drive energy prices back up to their pre-recession levels. It would seem that a reasonable course of action would be to prepare for this inevitability by establishing policies that would increase energy production from traditional as well as from alternative sources. This is precisely what the Chinese government is doing as it aggressively buys up the rights to natural resources around the world. A recent Wall Street Journal article noted that, unlike American producers, CNOOC, the Chinese state-run oil company, had expanded its exploration budget during the current recession. Unfortunately, neither Obama nor the Democratic Congress has any idea of the energy time-bomb that is ticking away.
Just when we should be expanding our own energy supplies, Obama is doing everything he can to reduce them. In fact, the current proposals for cap and trade, lease renegotiation, and increased taxes follow a long pattern of liberal mismanagement and willful interference with the free market. Does anyone seriously believe that Congress is capable of managing the production of oil and gas, or of anything else, more efficiently than private industry? Anyone so deluded need only calculate the return on equity of Congressional expenditures during the past several decades. Democrats like to camouflage new government spending by calling it an "investment," but that's one form of investment that has earned less than nothing. It's a shame that we don't have Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson in Congress instead of Schumer, Kennedy, Pelosi, and Reid. Then our national government might be as well run as some of our outstanding private corporations.
Thank you, Barack Obama, for making my life less rich. Thank you for making our country less secure as your expanded ethanol proposal sets the stage for hunger around the globe. Now I read that, with your program of new mileage standards, the cost of new vehicles will rise by an average of $1,400 in the future. Perhaps that is how the administration intends to make a profit with its "investment" in Chrysler and GM. What's next? A tax on household pets? New regulations for how much toothpaste we squeeze out every morning?
Cap and trade is another name for national decline. By restricting the production of fossil fuels, we are reducing future growth. At the same time, we are setting the scene for spiraling inflation. Slow growth and high inflation - stagflation -- will strangle our country until the Obama energy policy is reversed. If it is not reversed, we can expect our nation to fade to the second rank of countries. Our national security depends upon the availability of affordable and stable sources of energy. Windmills and solar farms constitute a nice little two percent of this energy, but what about the other ninety-eight percent?
I would read all this stuff, but when it's June 3 in East Texas, and I can't sit outside in short sleeves at night, I don't need to read much to know something is amiss with the global warming crap.
I would read all this stuff, but when it's June 3 in East Texas, and I can't sit outside in short sleeves at night, I don't need to read much to know something is amiss with the global warming crap.
Standing in front of an array of photovoltaic solar panels at Nellis Air Force Base last Wednesday, President Obama gave us to understand that his vision for an America powered by clean, renewable energy and awash in green jobs is becoming a reality faster than anyone could have imagined. Nellis, near Las Vegas, is the home of the largest solar-energy plant in the Western Hemisphere and, in the president’s words, a “shining example” of what renewable energy can do to put our economy on a “firmer foundation for economic growth.” It is a success story that needs to be replicated “in cities and states across America,” Obama said, and he announced a “solar energy technology program” to do just that.
The figures do indeed look impressive at first sight. The $100-million plant was built without a penny of government money, we are told, yet it provides the base with electric power costing 2.2 cents per kilowatt/hour, which is less than one-fourth of the 9 cents that Nevada Power charges its other customers. The annual savings will amount to $1 million, guaranteed for 20 years. Proof positive, it seems, that our green future is now. Or is it?
Beyond these numbers, uncritically reported by the mainstream media, is the reality of a make-believe industry touted by environmental zealots, corporate freeloaders parading as entrepreneurs, and a president capable of staggering disingenuousness. If the Nellis solar project is a “shining example,” it is a shining example of everything that’s wrong with Obama’s green delusions. The project makes no economic sense on its own merits and, like all renewable-energy projects, was made possible only by a combination of government coercion and state and federal handouts at the expense of utility customers and the American taxpayer. The coercion in this case came in the form of a state mandate that Nevada utilities must obtain 20 percent of their power from hugely expensive renewable sources by 2015; the handouts came in the form of a 30 percent federal tax credit, accelerated depreciation rates, “solar energy credits,” and similar goodies. It is such government largesse — and the promise of more to come — that convinces the renewable-energy industry’s corporate welfare queens to line up behind dubious projects like Nellis.
In his speech at Nellis, President Obama asserted that he wants “everybody to know what we’re doing here in Vegas,” and he pointed to Germany as an example to follow in the solar business. He should have followed his own advice and looked more closely at the German example. After Germany guaranteed solar producers a rate seven times as high as the market rate, the country’s electric bill jumped by 38 percent in one year.
Obama also should have mentioned what happens to investors who fall for Washington’s green hype. For the two private companies involved in the Nellis project, it has not been a success story. SunPower Corp., the builder of the solar plant, has lost 75 percent of its market value in just the past year and is facing an uncertain future (to put it mildly). MMA Renewable Ventures, a San Francisco–based firm, which financed the project, was recently sold to the Spanish company Fotowatio for the fire-sale price of $19.7 million, after losing more than half of its business between 2007 and 2008.
The Spanish purchase of the dying MMA made no business sense except in one critical area: It allowed Fotowatio to establish a beachhead in the United States, which, with $20 billion of green-energy tax incentives in 2010 alone, increasingly looks like the world’s last refuge for solar freeloaders. Most European countries have seen the damage that green energy can do to their economies and are rapidly (if quietly) scaling back their support. This is especially true in the countries that have been leaders on solar and wind power. Both Germany and Spain have dramatically slashed their subsidies for renewables, and Spain has reduced its commitment to green power from 2400 megawatts in 2008 to 500 megawatts or less in 2009.
There is yet another lesson from Spain that Obama prefers not to discuss. The $100-million Nellis project created 200 jobs at a cost of $500,000 per job. The longer Spanish experience, according to a recent study from Juan Carlos University, shows a cost of $774,000 for each government-subsidized green job created since 2000. More disturbingly, for each of these jobs, 2.2 jobs in other industries were destroyed because of higher energy prices, not counting manufacturers who vote with their feet. This is surely a success story that Americans can do without.
A study from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland looking at climate data over the past century has concluded that solar variation has made a significant impact on the Earth’s climate. The report concludes that evidence for climate changes based on solar radiation can be traced back as far as the Industrial Revolution.
Past research has shown that the sun goes through eleven year cycles. At the cycle’s peak, solar activity occurring near sunspots is particularly intense, basking the Earth in solar heat. According to Robert Cahalan, a climatologist at the Goddard Space Flight Center, “Right now, we are in between major ice ages, in a period that has been called the Holocene.”
quote
As this graph shows, solar activity has been cyclic in nature going back hundreds of years. Solar activity is also increasing, and we are coming out of the “Little Ice Age” of just a few hundred years ago. Of course the planet is warming–we’re coming out of a cold spell! The Maunder Minimum period of diminished solar activity coincided with the Little Ice Age when Europe and North America experienced bitterly cold winters.
About 1,000 years ago, Greenland was warm enough for the Vikings to colonize and grow vineyards. Today Greenland is almost entirely covered in ice. Tell me: is the earth warmer today than it was 1,000 years ago? Did they have SUVs and coal power plants in the days of the Vikings? This isn’t tough to figure out, people.
And the original article from NASA. Of course, they incorrectly state that man's greenhouse gasses are the prime driver, but it looks like they are forced to admit a much greater solar forcing factor than they'd like to: http://erc.ivv.nasa.gov/top...lar_variability.html
While Congress considers taxing auto and industrial pollution, a U.N. report fingers another guilty party — cows.
The U.N. accuses our bovine buddies of producing 18 percent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions — more than planes, trains and automobiles combined.
"Methane is a greenhouse gas. It leads to climate change, that leads to global warming," explains Frank Mitloehner, an air-quality specialist at the University of California, Davis. "What we do is we study how much methane comes from different animal types, let's say dairy cows or steers."
When cows digest their food, stomach bacteria produce methane, an ozone-forming gas considered 23 times worse than carbon dioxide when it comes to trapping heat in the atmosphere.
"They produce approximately 200 or so pounds of methane a year, and that's per animal," says Mitloehner. "Lactating animals produce twice that."
That makes heifers the Hummers of agriculture. At U.C. Davis, scientists use one-of-a-kind "burp tents" to measure the methane emissions of each animal.
"A lot of people think this gas is coming from the rear end," explains Nancy Hirshberg of Stoneyfield Farms in Highgate, Vt. "Ninety-five percent is actually from the front end, from the burps."
To reduce a cow's carbon hoofprint, farmers in Vermont claim to be designing the cow of the future thru genetics and diet. By replacing corn and soybeans with flaxseed and alfalfa, Stonyfield Farms says it's cut methane emissions by 18 percent.
"It reduces the burps, the methane burps from the cows, and it also improves the nutritional quality of the milk by increasing the omega 3 [fatty acids]," says Hirshberg.
Agricultural producers fear Washington wants to regulate their business. Already, some consumers have stopped eating meat on certain days.
The studies here are meant in part to bring common sense and science to the debate. In the U.S., all livestock only generate about 3 percent of the gases that cause climate change, partly because we have so many more cars and trucks compared to livestock as do other countries.
The dairy industry hopes to save the cow from being labeled the "coal" of agriculture.
"The cows love it, the farmers love it, we love it, it's better for consumers," says Hirshberg. "We've been just thrilled to discover that this could be done. It's been an incredible project for us and we're very excited to share it with the world."
While Congress considers taxing auto and industrial pollution, a U.N. report fingers another guilty party — cows.
This is so they can start adding taxes on FOOD - meat in particular. I tell you, "fight" Global Warming was invented to attach costs to everything related to modern living which is perceived as being "evil".
I would read all this stuff, but when it's June 3 in East Texas, and I can't sit outside in short sleeves at night, I don't need to read much to know something is amiss with the global warming crap.
Agreed. The MOST common term I've seen in weather forecasts so far this year is "Below Seasonal" - all across the country!!
Surprisingly (maybe not) during those forecasts there are NO Global Warming stories anywhere near that weather forecast time slot. But you can bet they'll be close by when a week long heat wave hits.
You'll see a "Record Heat Wave" report followed immediately by some "Global Warming" end-of-the-earth story.
Notice that they don't talk about the actual impact the cap-and-tax bill (Waxman-Markey) would have climate...that's because it wouldn't have any significant impact!
Editor Note: Using mainstream models and assumptions, Mr. Knappenberger finds that in the year 2050 with a 83% emissions reduction (the aspirational goal of Waxman-Markey, the beginning steps of which are under vigorous debate), the temperature reduction is nine hundredths of one degree Fahrenheit, or two years of avoided warming. A more realistic climate bill would be a fraction of this amount. The author will respond to technical questions on methodology and results and invites input on alternative scenarios and analyses.
“A full implementation and adherence to the long-run emissions restrictions provisions described by the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill would result only in setting back the projected rise in global temperatures by a few years—a scientifically meaningless prospect.” (from below)
The economics and the regulatory burdens of climate change bills are forever being analyzed, but the bills’ primary function—mitigating future climate change—is generally ignored.
Perhaps that’s because it is simply assumed.
After all, we are barraged daily with the horrors of what the climate will become if we don’t stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (the primary focus being on emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels). So doing something as drastic as that proposed by Waxman-Markey—a more than 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from the United States by the year 2050—must surely lessen the chances of climate catastrophe. Mustn’t it?
But if that were the case, why aren’t the climate impacts being touted? Why aren’t Representatives Waxman and Markey waving around the projected climate success of their bill? Why aren’t they saying: “Economics and regulations be damned. Look how our bill is going to save the earth from human-caused climate apocalypse”?
That reason is that it won’t.
And they know it. That is why they, and everyone else who supports such measures, are mum about the outcome.
The one thing, above all others, that they don’t want you to know is this: No matter how the economic and regulatory issues shake out, the bill will have virtually no impact on the future course of the earth’s climate. And this is even in its current “pure” form, without the inevitable watering down to come.
So discussion of the bill, instead of focusing on climate impacts, is shrouded in economics and climate alarm.
Getting a good handle on the future climate impact of the proposed Waxman-Markey legislation is not that difficult. In fact, there are several ways to get at it. But perhaps the most versatile is the aptly named MAGICC: Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-gas Induced Climate Change. MAGICC is sort of a climate model simulator that you can run from your desktop (available here). It was developed by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (primarily by Dr. Tom Wigley) under funding by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other organizations. MAGICC is itself a collection of simple gas-cycle, climate, and ice-melt models that is designed to produce an output that emulates the output one gets from much more complex climate models. MAGICC can produce in seconds, on your own computer, results that complex climate models take weeks to produce running on the world’s fastest supercomputers. Of course, MAGICC doesn’t provide the same level of detail, but it does produce projections for the things that we most often hear about and care about—for instance, the global average temperature change.
Moreover, MAGICC was developed to be used for exactly the purpose that we use it here—the purpose for which Representatives Waxman and Markey and everybody else who wants a say in this issue should be using it. That purpose is, according to MAGICC’s website, “to compare the global-mean temperature and sea level implications of two different emissions scenarios” —for example, scenarios both with and without the proposed legislative emissions reductions.
So that is what we’ll do. We’ll first use MAGICC to produce a projection of global average temperature change through the 21st century under two of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s future emissions scenarios (which assume no explicit policy implementation). The two are: a mid-range emissions scenario (SRES A1B for those interested in the details) and a high-end emissions scenario (SRES A1FI). Then, we’ll modify these IPCC scenarios by entering in the emissions reductions that will occur if the provisions outlined in the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill are fully met (leaving aside whether or not that could be done). Basically, Waxman-Markey calls for U.S. emissions to be reduced to 20% below the 2005 emissions level by 2020, 42% below 2005 levels by 2030, and 83% below 2005 levels by 2050. We’ll assume that U.S. emissions remain constant at that reduced value for the rest of the century. We’ll then use MAGICC to produce temperature projections using these modified scenarios and compare them with the original projections.*
And here is what we get all rolled into one simple figure.
The solid lines are the projections of the change in global average temperature across the 21st century from the original IPCC A1FI (red) and A1B (blue) high and mid-range emissions scenarios, respectively (assuming a climate sensitivity of 3ºC). The dotted lines (of the same color) indicate the projected change in global average surface temperature when the emissions reductions prescribed by Waxman-Markey are factored in.
By the year 2050, the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill would result in a global temperature “savings” of about 0.05ºC regardless of the IPCC scenario used—this is equivalent to about 2 years’ worth of warming. By the year 2100, the emissions pathways become clearly distinguishable, and so to do the impacts of Waxman-Markey. Assuming the IPCC mid-range scenario (A1B) Waxman-Markey would result in a projected temperature rise of 2.847ºC, instead of 2.959ºC rise— a mere 0.112ºC temperature “savings.” Under the IPCC’s high-emissions scenario, instead of a projected rise of 4.414ºC, Waxman-Markey limits the rise to 4.219ºC—a “savings” of 0.195ºC. In either case, this works out to about 5 years’ worth of warming. In other words, a full implementation and adherence to the emissions restrictions provisions described by the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill would result only in setting back the projected rise in global temperatures by a few years—a scientifically meaningless prospect. (Note: I present the results to three significant digits, not that they are that precise when it comes to the real world, but just so that you can tell the results apart).
Now, various aspects of the MAGICC model parameters can be tweaked, different climate models can be emulated, and different scenarios can by chosen. And different answers will be obtained. That is the whole purpose of MAGICC—to be able to examine the sensitivity of the output to these types of changes. But if you take the time to download MAGICC yourself and run your own experiments, one thing that you will soon find out is: No matter what you try, altering only U.S. emissions will produce unsatisfying results if you seek to save the world by altering its climate.
We have calculated only the climate impact of the United States acting alone. There is no successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol to bind other countries to greenhouse gas emissions reductions. But, truth be told, the only countries of any real concern are China and India. The total increase in China’s emissions since the year 2000 is 50 percent greater than the total increase from rest of the world combined and is growing by leaps and bounds. And consider that India carbon dioxide emissions haven’t started to dramatically increase yet. But it is poised to do so, and an Indian official recently stated that “It is morally wrong for us to agree to reduce [carbon dioxide emissions] when 40 percent of Indians do not have access to electricity.”
Without a large reduction in the carbon dioxide emissions from both China and India—not just a commitment but an actual reduction—there will be nothing climatologically gained from any restrictions on U.S. emissions, regardless whether they come about from the Waxman-Markey bill (or other cap-and-trade proposals), from a direct carbon tax, or through some EPA regulations.
This is something that should be common knowledge. But it is kept carefully guarded.
The bottom line is that a reduction of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions of greater than 80%, as envisioned in the Waxman-Markey climate bill will only produce a global temperature “savings” during the next 50 years of about 0.05ºC. Calculating this isn’t all that difficult or costly. All it takes is a little MAGICC.
[Note: Be sure not to miss Part II of this analysis, where I take a look at what happens if the rest of the world were to play along.]
* Assumptions Used in Running MAGICC
There are many parameters that can be altered when running MAGICC, including the climate sensitivity (how much warming the model produces from a doubling of CO2 concentration) and the size of the effect produced by aerosols. In all cases, we’ve chosen to use the MAGICC default settings, which represent the middle-of-the-road estimates for these parameter values.
Also, we’ve had to make some assumptions about the U.S. emissions pathways as prescribed by the original IPCC scenarios in order to obtain the baseline U.S. emissions (unique to each scenario) to which we could apply the Waxman-Markey emissions reduction schedule. The most common IPCC definition of its scenarios describes the future emissions, not from individual countries, but from country groupings. Therefore, we needed to back out the U.S. emissions. To do so, we identified which country group the U.S. belonged to (the OECD90 group) and then determined the current percentage of the total group emissions that are being contributed by the United States—which turned out to by ~50%. We then assumed that this percentage was constant over time. In other words, that the U.S. contributed 50% of the OECD90 emissions in 2000 as well as in every year between 2000 and 2100. Thus, we were able to develop the future emissions pathway of the U.S. from the group pathway defined by the IPCC for each scenario (in this case, the A1B and the A1FI scenarios). The Waxman-Markey reductions were then applied to the projected U.S. emissions pathways, and the new U.S. emissions were then recombined into the OECD90 pathway and into the global emissions total over time. It is the total global emissions that are entered into MAGICC in order to produce global temperature projections—both the original emissions, as well as the emissions modified to account for the U.S. emissions under Waxman-Markey.
