Tag Archives: climate

A Bit More on “Climate”

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Recall that Candidate Barack Obama said in 2008 that if

someone wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can.  It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.

In President Obama’s speech last week, he announced the next phase of his assault on our economycontributions to climate dysfunction, and in it he’s going after existing coal-fired power plants.  Indeed, Obama’s attack on coal—on cheap energy for the American economy—and on coal-related jobs is now explicit: his climate advisor, Daniel Schrag (formally, Schrag is a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology), also said last week that

a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.

Some of the broader economic damage to be done through Obama’s new policy phase has been estimated by The Heritage Foundation.

First, some highlights from the Heritage Foundation‘s report:

In March 2012, the EPA proposed a rule that would prohibit new power plants from emitting more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity generated.  Without the addition of carbon capture and sequestration…the regulation would effectively ban the construction of new coal-fired plants.*

The President’s recent announcement also threatens existing plants and would adversely affect the more than 1,100 coal-fired generators at nearly 600 plant locations that generate 40 percent of America’s affordable, reliable energy.**

Last year, the EPA finalized new mercury and air toxics standards that will force utilities to use maximum achievable control technology standards to reduce mercury emissions and other hazardous air pollutants.  By the agency’s own admission, the rule will cost $10 billion by 2015 but have only $6 million in purported benefits from mercury reductions.

[Never mind that i]n the absence of these new regulations, US air quality [already] has improved significantly over the past several decades.  Emission of toxic pollutants [already] has dropped as much as 96% since 1980.

Now, some of the economic losses that will occur by 2030 according to the Heritage Foundation:

  • Employment falls by more than 500,000 jobs;
  • Manufacturing loses over 280,000 jobs;
  • A family of four’s annual income drops more than $1,000 per year, and its total income drops by $16,500 over the period of analysis;
  • Aggregate Gross Domestic Product (GDP) decreases by $1.47 trillion;
  • Electricity prices rise by 20%;
  • Coal-mining jobs drop 43%; and
  • Natural gas prices rise 42%.

In sum, Obama’s war on coal will cut GDP by $1.47 trillion by 2030.  All for no impact at all on our climate, since atmospheric CO2 (the biggest target of this war) is well-established as a trailing indicator confirming warming that’s already occurring and increasing health of the planet.

 

*It’s important to note that carbon capture has never been successfully demonstrated in a production-sized mechanism and that no one—including Obama’s administration—has been able to figure out what to do with the “15–20 super tankers’ worth of liquid carbon dioxide that…carbon capture would create” annually.

**This also ignores the impact on an already marginally stable American electric power grid that cannot handle such a catastrophic drop in power production while demand continues to rise—or would with an actual economic recovery.

 

h/t Power Line

Arrogance

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Fox News‘ headline says it all:

Obama planning to sidestep Congress for next phase in climate change agenda

He came through on that in his Tuesday speech: he intends to implement his climate change claptrap by diktat through his EPA, wholly ignoring the will of the people and our representatives.  In the realization of his speech, his

national plan to combat climate change…include[s] the first-ever federal regulations on carbon dioxide emitted by existing power plants….

In a speech at Georgetown University Tuesday Obama…announce[d] he’s issuing a presidential memorandum to implement the regulations….

And

…he is directing his administration to allow enough renewables on public lands to power 6 million homes by 2020, effectively doubling the capacity from solar, wind and geothermal projects on federal property.

But he won’t allow oil and gas drilling—or the associated jobs and cheap energy.  Expensive energy that the unemployed can’t get is better, you see.  Additionally, there’ll be

…$8 billion in federal loan guarantees to spur investment in technologies that can keep carbon dioxide produced by power plants from being released into the atmosphere.

Never minding that actual science, rather than the pseudo-science of his followers, has shown that CO2 is a trailing indicator of increasing health of the planet.

Congress?  I don’ need no stinkin’ Congress.

A Bit of Climate

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What’s up with this?  Is it getting warmer?  Well, yes, maybe, depending on the time scale and the baseline of comparison.  It’s warmer today than during the last Ice Age.  It’s warmer today than during the Little Ice Age of some 3-4 hundred years ago and that ended around 1 hundred years ago.  It’s hard to say, though, how today’s temperature compares with the Medieval Warm Period of some 1,000 years ago, since data sets like NASA’s have been falsified to plus up the claimed warming of today.  We aren’t warmer than we were a decade and a half ago.

The claims of warming and of disastrous continued warming get their force in large part from climate models—more than 70 of them—all of which have been predicting warming rates ranging from worrisome to disastrous.  There’s nothing like actual observation, empirical data, to see what’s up, though.  Anthony Watts, of Watts Up With That, has reprinted a graph from Dr Roy Spencer [“doctor” from his PhD in Meteorology, and currently Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama] that compares the year-by-year predictions of those models with satellite and balloon observational data.  The graph has been adjusted by Spencer to produce an artificial agreement between the models and reality in 1979, and then lets the predictions and the empirical data flow from there.

The squares and circles represent the satellite and balloon, respectively, actual observations; the various lines the predictions of the models; and the heavy black line the simple average of the models.  For the climate-worriers’ concerns of the dangerous effects of a 1.5ºC increase in temperature, the overstatement of the models compared to reality of nearly 1ºC lends incredulity to their claims.

Hmm….

Carbon Tax?

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Ex-Secretary of Labor, State, and Treasury George Schultz and Economics Professor Gary Becker say we should have one.  They even insist that it be revenue neutral.

The problem is, though, that they’re arguing from two false premises, and it’s unfortunate that two such well-educated men should be so caught up in drama rather than fact.

The first false premise is that any tax change (as the imposition of a carbon tax would be) must be revenue neutral.  This may, in fact, be needful for the politics surrounding imposing a new tax (or cutting old ones), but there’s no rational reason for revenue neutrality.  The economic necessity, given our exploding deficit (though President Barack Obama says his budget shrinks it, and, sure, he is an honorable man) and our even more explosive national debt, demands a reduction in spending with its associated reduction in borrowing.  Taxes need not be increased under any nearby circumstances, nor need the imposition of a new tax be “paid for” with an equal increase in spending or reduction in tax somewhere else.  With spending coming down to eliminate our deficit and further, taxes overall can be cut, too.

The second false premise is that carbon, or carbon dioxide, is a pollutant, the blatherings of the political bureaucrats at the EPA notwithstanding.  The climate facts here are that CO2—the primary product of, say, Schultz’ and Becker’s energy companies—is a lagging, a confirmatory, indicator.  The climate record demonstrates that CO2 increases in Earth’s atmosphere lags climate warming on a global scale by some hundreds of years.  Since CO2 “emissions” are primarily from plant and animal respiration—even adding in the output of those energy plants—that lag following planetary warming comes from increased plant and animal life on the warmer planet.  It’s a confirmation of the increasing health of the planet.  That’s not much of a pollutant.

We don’t need a carbon tax, though.  Come to that, we don’t need any tax at the levels at which they’re charged today.

Anthropogenic Climate Change

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…and dishonesty.  More is beginning to leak out, this time from of all places the UN.  That august body’s IPCC has had leaked a draft of its latest “study” on the man-caused disaster in climate, and it isn’t a pretty example of the outcome of climate “scientist” incestuousness.

High points on the leak are from Matt Ridley, in The Wall Street Journal, and they concern a “pollutant” that our present administration is going after, and damn the economy—and damn the

poor people whose lives are being ruined by high food and energy prices caused by the diversion of corn to biofuel and the subsidizing of renewable energy driven by carboncrats[.]

The question at hand:

How much warming will a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide actually produce?

Ridley’s information comes from Nic Lewis.

A semiretired successful financier from Bath, England, with a strong mathematics and physics background, Mr Lewis has made significant contributions to the subject of climate change.

Per Lewis [emphasis added]:

[T]he latest observational estimates of the effect of aerosols (such as sulfurous particles from coal smoke) find that they have much less cooling effect than thought when the last IPCC report was written.  The rate at which the ocean is absorbing greenhouse-gas-induced warming is also now known to be fairly modest.  In other words, the two excuses used to explain away the slow, mild warming we have actually experienced—culminating in a standstill in which global temperatures are no higher than they were 16 years ago—no longer work.

Thus [again, emphasis added],

We can now estimate, based on observations, how sensitive the temperature is to carbon dioxide.  We do not need to rely heavily on unproven models.  Comparing the trend in global temperature over the past 100-150 years with the change in “radiative forcing” (heating or cooling power) from carbon dioxide, aerosols and other sources, minus ocean heat uptake, can now give a good estimate of climate sensitivity.

The conclusion—taking the best observational estimates of the change in decadal-average global temperature between 1871-80 and 2002-11, and of the corresponding changes in forcing and ocean heat uptake—is this: A doubling of CO2 will lead to a warming of 1.6°-1.7°C (2.9°-3.1°F).

This is much lower than the IPCC’s current best estimate, 3°C (5.4°F).

In the end,

A cumulative change of less than 2°C by the end of this century will do no net harm.  It will actually do net good—that much the IPCC scientists have already agreed upon in the last IPCC report.  Rainfall will increase slightly, growing seasons will lengthen, Greenland’s ice cap will melt only very slowly, and so on.

There’s more to this climate pseudo-science failure, and it flows from the CO2 interactions via alleged feedback loops [emphasis added]:

A little warming (from whatever cause [including atmospheric CO2]) heats up the sea, which makes the air more humid—and water vapor itself is a greenhouse gas.  The resulting model-simulated changes in clouds generally increase warming further, so the warming is doubled, trebled or more.

[The problem is,] water vapor may not be increasing.   A recent paper from Colorado State University concluded that “we can neither prove nor disprove a robust trend in the global water vapor data.”  [On top of that], as one Nobel Prize-winning physicist with a senior role in combating climate change admitted to me the other day: “We don’t even know the sign” of water vapor’s effect—in other words, whether it speeds up or slows down a warming of the atmosphere.

One reason for the uncertainty of the sign is that atmospheric water vapor means more clouds, and clouds reflect inbound sunlight while trapping outbound heat.  Which has the greater effect—reducing the inbound inputs or holding onto the outbound outputs?  Only a climate pseudo-scientist claims to know at this point in the data collection and analysis.  Especially given the…quality…of their data and of their models.

There’s a whole lot more at the Watts Up With That? site, both on the present topic and on anthropogenic climate change, generally.