Commentary by James H. Shott
The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) is a panel of scientists organized in 2003 by Dr. S. Fred Singer and the Science & Environmental Policy Project. Unlike the better-known Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is a government-sponsored and politically motivated group with a man-causes-global-warming bias, the NIPCC receives no funding from government and does not share the IPCC’s predisposition that climate change is man-made and therefore requires a United Nations solution.
Hence, Dr. Singer’s group, which consists of some 50 independent scientists from universities and private institutions around the world (the US, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Norway, Canada, Italy, the UK, France, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Spain) who disagree with the IPCC’s theory, “seeks to objectively analyze and interpret data and facts without conforming to any specific agenda,” according to a summary of the 1,200-page report “Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science” that was released in September of this year.
Most of what we read, see and hear from the media is the opinion held and promoted by the United Nations’ IPCC. No matter what your opinion about whether or not human activities have a significant effect, or any effect, on the Earth’s climate, it certainly cannot hurt to have available the analysis of a group of scientists – the NIPCC – that believes the data show a different reality than that promoted by the IPCC.
Among the group’s findings are:
• Atmospheric CO2 is a mild greenhouse gas that exerts a diminishing warming effect as its concentration increases.
• Earth has not warmed significantly for the past 16 years despite an 8 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 emissions, which represents 34 percent of all extra CO2 added to the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution.
• The causes of historic global warming remain uncertain, but significant correlations exist between climate patterning and multidecadal variation and solar activity over the past few hundred years.
• The overall warming since about 1860 corresponds to a recovery from the Little Ice Age modulated by natural multidecadal cycles driven by ocean-atmosphere oscillations, or by solar variations at the de Vries (~208 year) and Gleissberg (~80 year) and shorter periodicities.
• CO2 is a vital nutrient used by plants in photosynthesis. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere “greens” the planet and helps feed the growing human population.
• No close correlation exists between temperature variation over the past 150 years and human-related CO2 emissions. The parallelism of temperature and CO2 increase between about 1980 and 2000 AD could be due to chance and does not necessarily indicate causation.
• The causes of historic global warming remain uncertain, but significant correlations exist between climate patterning and multidecadal variation and solar activity over the past few hundred years.
The summary also presents key facts about surface temperature that argue against the UN IPCC’s position, a few of which follow:
• Whether today’s global surface temperature is seen to be part of a warming trend depends upon the time period considered.
• Over (climatic) time scales of many thousand years, temperature is cooling; over the historical (meteorological) time scale of the past century temperature has warmed. Over the past 16 years, there has been no net warming despite an increase in atmospheric CO2 of 8 percent. (See second bullet above.)
• There was nothing unusual about either the magnitude or rate of the late twentieth century warming pulses represented on the HadCRUT record, both falling well within the envelope of known, previous natural variations.
• No empirical evidence exists to support the assertion that a planetary warming of 2 degrees Centigrade would be net ecologically or economically damaging.
These findings by this group of international scientists that contradict the positions of the IPCC gain strength from the evidence of fraud among scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia, many associated with the IPCC. Emails exchanged between these scientists obtained in 2009 demonstrated fraud, dishonesty and errors in the arguments supporting the theory of man-made global warming.
As reported in Human Events online edition, some of the emails revealed contempt for disagreeable scientific data and a “slavish devotion to the climate change political agenda pushed by the politicians and government bureaucrats funding their research.”
In the report’s Conclusion the authors say: “Few scientists deny that human activities can have an effect on local climate or that the sum of such local effects could hypothetically rise to the level of an observable global signal. The key questions to be answered, however, are whether the human global signal is large enough to be measured and if it is, does it represent, or is it likely to become, a dangerous change outside the range of natural variability?”
The Conclusion includes a quote by British biologist Conrad Waddington from 1941: “It is … important that scientists must be ready for their pet theories to turn out to be wrong. Science as a whole certainly cannot allow its judgment about facts to be distorted by ideas of what ought to the true, or what one may hope to be true.”
Those scientists who believe that man’s activities harm the planet should take this good advice to heart.
Cross-posted from Observations
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Mr. Slick and Dummy encourage us to ignore the negatives of ethanol
There’s a TV commercial featuring a ventriloquist named Mr. Slick and his dummy, named “Dummy,” promoting the wondrous benefits of ethanol, not by actually listing those specific benefits – as one ought to do if one has real benefits to tout – but by implying that the evil oil companies don’t want you to know about them. Dummy answers questions that make the oil companies look bad, and Mr. Slick, portraying an evil oil baron, is horrified at Dummy’s responses and eventually puts his hand over Dummy’s mouth to shut him up. The announcer then asks the question, “Why don’t the oil companies want you to know the truth about ethanol?”
Ethanol has some useful qualities, like reducing the amount of petroleum-based fuels that are burned and the pollution they produce, but it has many disadvantages.
The all-knowing central planners at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have decreed that gasoline must currently have 10 percent ethanol (E10) mixed in, and the EPA is raising that requirement by 50 percent (E15), thus increasing by a half the negatives of ethanol in gasoline.
Putting ethanol in fuel means currently that approximately 40 percent of the corn from which ethanol is made is used for ethanol instead of food and animal feed. The amount of corn we burn could feed an estimated 570 million people annually. Shifting that much food corn to ethanol production raises the cost of food corn for human and animal consumption, as well as other food crops, such as wheat and hops, because farmers stop growing those crops and start growing corn to get the federal subsidies, and that creates shortages and higher prices for those crops, too. A PricewaterhouseCoopers study prepared for the National Council of Chain Restaurants said the federal ethanol mandate cost each restaurant $18,000 a year in higher food prices. Guess who pays that additional cost?
Every gallon of ethanol produced requires 5 gallons of water, and that affects the dry western states where ethanol is produced by shifting more of the sometimes-scarce liquid to farmers and away from urban areas, and could easily lead to water shortages and/or higher urban water prices.
Worse, however, is the great potential for damage to gas storage tanks, pumping equipment, other equipment involved in the delivery chain and engines that are the end user of ethanol in fuels. This point is supported by a December 2010 study commissioned by the Department of Energy that found 40 percent of new dispensing equipment designed for use with E10 fuels had failed tests, and 70 percent of previously used E10 equipment failed tests.
Ethanol fuels are deadly to small gasoline engines, such as lawnmowers, string trimmers, chain saws, boat motors, motorcycles and ATVs to the extent that manufacturers may void warranties when these fuels are used in their products.
Gasoline stabilizers must be added to ethanol infused gasoline to protect these smaller engines, at a cost, of course. But, however, owners of these machines have an option that car and truck owners don’t have: they can buy pure gasoline that has no added ethanol for only $20 to $32 a gallon.
If you get decent miles per gallon from your car or truck, you’d be getting even better mileage without ethanol in your gas. E10 and E15 mixtures routinely get fewer miles per gallon because ethanol contains less energy than pure gasoline. Estimates of lost miles per gallon range from 3-to-5 percent, to as high as 20 percent.
The Renewable Fuel Standard mandates the use of corn-based ethanol and other biofuels for transportation fuel. It promised less dependence on foreign oil and lower fuel prices and greenhouse gas emissions; however, many view the mandate as an economic and environmental boondoggle.
The benefits of infusing gasoline with ethanol to improve emissions from gas burning vehicles and tools are unclear. There has been some reduction in the use of petroleum in fuels, but the price we have paid for it has been comparatively high when the costs of producing ethanol and blending it with gasoline are considered, along with the increased prices of food for humans and animal feed. The House Energy and Commerce Committee has launched a bipartisan review of the Renewable Fuel Standard to determine its level of success.
Government efforts to make our lives better nearly always fail, or at least unleash new problems on the American people. The feds thought incandescent light bulbs that have served us so well for so long used too much energy, so they have mandated that we use the new CFL bulbs, which do use less electricity, but cost more and contain mercury, and create a haz-mat emergency when one of them breaks. Efforts to clean up emissions from electricity production have produced job losses in the coal and power industries and forced the sale of more domestic coal to foreign countries that do not make any effort to clean up their emissions.
Government mandates cost us billions of dollars a year for compliance, plus the cost of the bureaucracy to create and monitor compliance with regulations. Given the poor record of success the government has amassed, we’d be much better off with less government interference.
Ethanol has some useful qualities, like reducing the amount of petroleum-based fuels that are burned and the pollution they produce, but it has many disadvantages.
The all-knowing central planners at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have decreed that gasoline must currently have 10 percent ethanol (E10) mixed in, and the EPA is raising that requirement by 50 percent (E15), thus increasing by a half the negatives of ethanol in gasoline.
Putting ethanol in fuel means currently that approximately 40 percent of the corn from which ethanol is made is used for ethanol instead of food and animal feed. The amount of corn we burn could feed an estimated 570 million people annually. Shifting that much food corn to ethanol production raises the cost of food corn for human and animal consumption, as well as other food crops, such as wheat and hops, because farmers stop growing those crops and start growing corn to get the federal subsidies, and that creates shortages and higher prices for those crops, too. A PricewaterhouseCoopers study prepared for the National Council of Chain Restaurants said the federal ethanol mandate cost each restaurant $18,000 a year in higher food prices. Guess who pays that additional cost?
Every gallon of ethanol produced requires 5 gallons of water, and that affects the dry western states where ethanol is produced by shifting more of the sometimes-scarce liquid to farmers and away from urban areas, and could easily lead to water shortages and/or higher urban water prices.
Worse, however, is the great potential for damage to gas storage tanks, pumping equipment, other equipment involved in the delivery chain and engines that are the end user of ethanol in fuels. This point is supported by a December 2010 study commissioned by the Department of Energy that found 40 percent of new dispensing equipment designed for use with E10 fuels had failed tests, and 70 percent of previously used E10 equipment failed tests.
Ethanol fuels are deadly to small gasoline engines, such as lawnmowers, string trimmers, chain saws, boat motors, motorcycles and ATVs to the extent that manufacturers may void warranties when these fuels are used in their products.
Gasoline stabilizers must be added to ethanol infused gasoline to protect these smaller engines, at a cost, of course. But, however, owners of these machines have an option that car and truck owners don’t have: they can buy pure gasoline that has no added ethanol for only $20 to $32 a gallon.
If you get decent miles per gallon from your car or truck, you’d be getting even better mileage without ethanol in your gas. E10 and E15 mixtures routinely get fewer miles per gallon because ethanol contains less energy than pure gasoline. Estimates of lost miles per gallon range from 3-to-5 percent, to as high as 20 percent.
The Renewable Fuel Standard mandates the use of corn-based ethanol and other biofuels for transportation fuel. It promised less dependence on foreign oil and lower fuel prices and greenhouse gas emissions; however, many view the mandate as an economic and environmental boondoggle.
The benefits of infusing gasoline with ethanol to improve emissions from gas burning vehicles and tools are unclear. There has been some reduction in the use of petroleum in fuels, but the price we have paid for it has been comparatively high when the costs of producing ethanol and blending it with gasoline are considered, along with the increased prices of food for humans and animal feed. The House Energy and Commerce Committee has launched a bipartisan review of the Renewable Fuel Standard to determine its level of success.
Government efforts to make our lives better nearly always fail, or at least unleash new problems on the American people. The feds thought incandescent light bulbs that have served us so well for so long used too much energy, so they have mandated that we use the new CFL bulbs, which do use less electricity, but cost more and contain mercury, and create a haz-mat emergency when one of them breaks. Efforts to clean up emissions from electricity production have produced job losses in the coal and power industries and forced the sale of more domestic coal to foreign countries that do not make any effort to clean up their emissions.
Government mandates cost us billions of dollars a year for compliance, plus the cost of the bureaucracy to create and monitor compliance with regulations. Given the poor record of success the government has amassed, we’d be much better off with less government interference.
The Obama “War on Coal” is a disgusting government over-reach
President Barack Obama continues working to destroy the coal industry, most recently by changing carbon emission standards in such a way that a) coal-fired power plants will be heavily affected, b) encourages plant owners to convert to natural gas, and c) will discourage the construction of coal-fired plants overseas.
Rather than work to solve the very real problems of the nation – like unemployment, the economy, his scandal-ridden administration and the troubles on the international scene – he chooses to fight a war on coal through agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, which impose extreme regulations and severe penalties on the industry.
Federal agencies routinely put regulations in effect without regard for the chaos and harm they will cause. Coal mining and related job losses and other financial repercussions just don't matter to the president and the bureaucrats. To them, the jobs of tens of thousands of Americans and the economies of 27 states are far less important than their narrow ideological goals.
These agencies criminalize behavior through regulations and impose fines or jail time as if those regulations were law. But according to Article I of the U.S. Constitution, only Congress can make law.
These agencies create regulations and penalties because Congress repeatedly fails to determine how measures it passes should be implemented, and allows or directs the Executive branch to decide how to do that. But the Constitution does not provide the Legislative branch the authority to transfer its law-making obligation to Executive branch agencies.
The Founders deliberately set up a tripartite government with specific and limited roles for each of the branches and a system of checks and balances specifically to prevent any of the three branches from assuming too much power, all based upon the concept of a limited government with few and specific responsibilities.
Briefly summarized, the Legislative branch makes laws, the Executive branch administers and enforces laws, and the Judicial branch rules on questions of law and operates the court system.
By abdicating its duty to complete the lawmaking process, and leaving part of that function to the Executive branch, the Congress has failed in its fundamental duty, which is a basic tenet of the Constitution, and it abets the Executive branch in developing its evolving tyrannical persona.
Since the nation's law-making authority resides with the Legislative branch, the rules and penalties federal agencies wield so freely and often arbitrarily are void of any true authority. It is time, therefore, for the people and the states to stand up and say, like Howard Beale in "Network": "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"
The federal government collectively does not have the authority to target a given industry for destruction, and the Executive branch darned sure doesn't have that authority all by itself.
If any one or more of the 27 states that mine coal want to mine continue doing so, they need to do it as responsibly as is possible and feasible, and tell the federal government officially and formally to buzz off. The time-honored mechanism for restraining an over-reaching federal leviathan is known as "nullification."
The United States seems to be infected by a philosophy like that expressed by entertainer Britney Spears, whose inferior talent actually looks good compared to her abysmal thinking: "I think we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens."
Fortunately, Ms. Spears' naive reasoning was not shared by Thomas Jefferson, who had a better idea and suggested that rather than just sit back and allow a president or Congress or judges to arbitrarily alter the meaning of the Constitution, we must make only those changes that have popular consent and do so through the amendment process, which the Founders sensibly included in the Constitution.
Not all amendments have been good ones, of course, as evidenced by numbers 16, 17, and 18 (which was repealed), but that process is far superior to what we have done and are doing to the first 10 amendments the other way.
It is indeed sad to observe the embarrassing and shameful lack of knowledge and understanding of the founding principles of our country and how legions of Americans who don't know or understand them threaten our very survival as a free nation.
But as bad as that is, it is far worse when our elected officials, who took an oath to "preserve, protect and defend" the United States Constitution, share in this ignorance. Or worse, if they ignore their oath in favor of not preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution in order to "fundamentally transform the United States of America" to meet some foreign ideological vision.
Just how many of our 535 elected representatives in Congress and the hundreds of thousands of other federal employees – including the president and his cabinet – really understand the supreme law of the land, the United States Constitution, is unknown. But watching Mr. Obama's behavior and the behavior of the rest of the government suggests that number is horrifyingly small.
Ignorance is bliss, they say. But not in our government.
Perplexing immigration issues and some clarity on global warming
Come to the USA
If you’re thinkin’ about illegal immigration,
Be careful when you’re choosin’ the nation
‘Cause breakin’ the law in some countries is frowned upon.
Imagine that.
Sneak into China and they’ll call you a spy
And ship you to Mongolia till you die.
And in Sudan they’ll hang you and the camel you rode in on.
Yeah, and don’t go ahikin’ and enter Iran,
Or you might never be heard from again.
And in Mexico, you might face a firing squad.
Yeah, and forget all about going to North Korea.
That’s a great example of a bad idea,
So when it comes down to it, there’s only one option you got.
Yeah come to the USA.
There's no penalty to pay
Should you get caught illegally immigratin
Those lyrics from Ray Stevens' "Come to the USA" YouTube video illustrate the stark difference in how some countries view people who sneak across their borders, compared to the USA.
The US now has 11-to-20 million immigrants that illegally crossed our borders or over-stayed their visas, and the US Congress, in an attempt to reward those illegal immigrants, is now debating various measures under the guise of "immigration reform" which could easily be even more destructive and costly than the Affordable Care Act.
There is little agreement among our Senators and Representatives about what to do. Ideas being floated range from plain amnesty to plans to convert illegals to legal status and create a path to citizenship, and most pay a bit of lip service to securing the borders. Since they take such a friendly approach to people who are here illegally, these measures are viewed as a form of amnesty, and amnesty failed miserably in 1986. Any act that gives illegals an advantage over the 4 million people waiting in line who entered legally isn’t fair.
An exhaustive study by the Heritage Foundation has found that after amnesty, current illegal immigrants would receive $9.4 trillion in government benefits and services but pay only about $3 trillion in taxes over their lifetimes, leaving a deficit of $6.3 trillion that would be paid for by another big increase in government debt or by raising taxes on those who still pay taxes.
Further, some of the people who have entered illegally are criminals, and perhaps a few terrorists in the mix, and we have to continue rooting out the bad among those millions and secure the border to prevent others like them from sneaking in.
Our government has acted stupidly and negligently over the years allowing national security to suffer by failing to secure the borders. That has to stop now, before any measure to legalize illegals proceeds.
More Inconvenient Truth
Dr. Roy Spencer has serious climate credentials dating back to 1981 that involve research at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, and award-winning climate studies for NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. His research has been entirely supported by the U.S. government through NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Department of Energy.
He has produced a graph based upon 73 separate climate change prediction models that shows the full high/low range of those predictions of increasing global temperatures from 1979 through 2024, as well as the median prediction of those models. These datasets show predictions of global temperatures rising as much as 2 degrees Celsius (C) over that period, and about 1.5 degrees C by 2012.
These predictions shouldn’t surprise anyone; they are the similar to the dozens, hundreds or thousands of news stories of impending global catastrophe if drastic steps are not taken immediately to stop man’s upward pressure on global temperatures. And certainly if these models are accurate and we refuse to take steps to control greenhouse gas emissions, we will be negligent.
“And now,” as the great commentator Paul Harvey used to say, “for the rest of the story.”
Dr. Spencer uses the same graph to show the results of actual temperature observations from balloons and satellites from 1979 through 2012. These observations use actual measurements of temperatures that occasionally show cooling periods or static results, but most of which over the last decade show increases in temperature.
Most important, however, is that even in the years from 2003 through 2012 when the warming trend has been the most consistent, the actual rise in temperature is only .2 degrees C, well below the predicted level of .6 to .8 degrees, and a mere fraction of the highest of the range of predicted increases of 1.3 to 1.5 degrees C.
In explaining this dramatic difference between prediction and reality, Dr. Spencer notes that “to many politicians and the public, the term [global warming] carries the implication that mankind is responsible for that warming. … [M]y group’s government-funded research … suggests global warming is mostly natural, and that the climate system is quite insensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and aerosol pollution.”
He goes on to say that, “Believe it or not, very little research has ever been funded to search for natural mechanisms of warming … it has simply been assumed that global warming is manmade.”
US experiences warmest year in the history of recorded temperatures
By James Shott
"It's official: 2012 was the warmest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States,” according to a statement by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as reported by Scientific American.
"The average temperature in the lower 48 states reached 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit, shattering the previous record set in 1998 by a full degree," the story continued, noting that government temperature records go back only to 1895.
NOAA climate scientist Jake Crouch explained that "Climate change has had a role in this," cautioning that it is still hard for scientists to know how much of this year's warmer weather was caused by natural variability and how much was caused by man-made climate change.
The obvious question is, "how does the increased temperature in the US extrapolate to Earth's global temperature?" Surprisingly, it doesn't.
According to the UK Daily Mail, the world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, despite the US experience in 2012. From the beginning of 1997 until August of last year there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.
"This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years," the British publication noted.
The new data from the British Met Office was compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, showing that global warming has stalled. Met officials say that by 2017, temperatures will not have risen significantly for nearly 20 years, and admit that previous forecasts were inaccurate. "That the global temperature standstill could continue to at least 2017 would mean a 20-year period of no statistically significant change in global temperatures," according to Dr. David Whitehouse, science adviser to the Global Warming Policy Foundation. "Such a period of no increase will pose fundamental problems for climate models. If the latest Met Office prediction is correct, then it will prove to be a lesson in humility" for supporters of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory.
Predictably, not everyone has accepted this news. Dr. Richard Allan of the University of Reading said: "Global warming is not 'at a standstill,' but does seem to have slowed down since 2000, in comparison to the rapid warming of the world since the 1970s." And Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, commented that 15 or 16 years is too short a period from which to draw conclusions.
However, supporting the view of skeptics of the AGW theory was Professor Judith Curry, the head of the climate science department at Georgia Tech, who said it was clear that the computer models used to predict future warming were "deeply flawed."
Along that same line of thinking is this from forbes.com: "Antarctic sea ice set another record this past week, with the most amount of ice ever recorded on day 256 of the calendar year. ... The mainstream media frequently publish stories focusing on ice loss in these two areas [West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula], yet the media stories rarely if ever mention that ice is accumulating over the larger area of East Antarctica and that the continent as a whole is gaining snow and ice mass."
You may have heard or read that polar bear populations are threatened by ice loss, but as the Forbes report showed, that is not the case in the Antarctic, and perhaps not in the Arctic, either. While environmentalists and animal rights advocates believe the polar bear is threatened, Alaska is fighting to keep them off the endangered species list, arguing that populations are "at an all-time high."
More bad news for the AGW faction comes from German researchers using tree ring data that is a key indicator of past climate. The study suggests Britain experienced a lengthy period of hotter summers than today as far back as 2,000 years ago.
The Earth has experienced warming and cooling periods throughout its history, and is currently experiencing a broad period of warming. It has not been satisfactorily proved that human activities have a significant impact on the global climate, and these new inconvenient truths support the position of skeptics who doubt the impact of human activity on the Earth's environment.
The Daily Mail article labels the data trumpeted by global warming advocates "flawed science," and explains that it has had a substantial negative effect on energy bills. It says that in response to the threat of manmade warming, subsidies paid to spur the renewable energy industry will cause UK households to see an increase in energy bills, and it predicts continuing increases.
In the US the Obama administration's war on coal has cost thousands of jobs and caused great pain in coal state economies, all because of policies based on the theory that burning coal and other fossil fuels is wreaking havoc on the environment. This idea is increasingly challenged by newer scientific data that strongly contradicts the AGW theory.
What we need in Washington is to replace ideological zeal with common sense policies that do not cause more harm than good.
Cross-posted from Observations
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