I Am Not Making This Up
Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) — World leaders flying into Copenhagen today to discuss a solution to global warming will first face freezing weather as a blizzard dumped 10 centimeters (4 inches) of snow on the Danish capital overnight.
Copenhagen (CNN) –- In a strange twist, a Washington snowstorm is forcing Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, to make an early departure from a global warming summit here in Denmark.
Pelosi told CNN that military officials leading her Congressional delegation have urged the 21 lawmakers to leave Copenhagen several hours earlier than scheduled on Saturday.
The Speaker said she has agreed to the new travel plan so that lawmakers can get back to Washington before much of the expected storm wallops the nation’s capital.
Washington Post: Before long, we will be buried by several times that amount making this a record breaking December storm. Double digit accumulations have already been reported to our south in central Virginia. This is a dangerous, severe storm with the worst still to come.
…
True enough, as President Obama’s courtiers at Media Matters remind us, one day’s weather doesn’t change the climate. Indeed, they quote Pat Michaels making that point last year in the New York Times:
Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist and commentator with the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, has long chided environmentalists and the media for overstating connections between extreme weather and human-caused warming. (He is on the program at the skeptics’ conference.)
But Dr. Michaels said that those now trumpeting global cooling should beware of doing the same thing, saying that the ”predictable distortion” of extreme weather ”goes in both directions.”
Still, I think we know that if it were unseasonably warm this week, there’d be people pointing that out on television from Copenhagen.
Filed under: Energy and Environment; Government and Politics
Copenhagen Agreement Is Just More Hot Air
Late Friday afternoon, the White house announced a “meaningful agreement” at the Copenhagen climate summit. Details are currently unavailable, but a White House official said that developed and developing countries have agreed to list their national actions and commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with a “target” of a two degree (Celsius) limit to any further global warming.
In other words, there are no specific emissions reductions targets and timetables. A country may choose no national reductions, or maybe a national program and that would be their “list.” And just what carbon dioxide level will stop warming over two degrees?
No one knows, at least until computer models stop forecasting warming that isn’t happening and/or drastically overstating the warming that is verifiable.
It sounds like the Copenhagen agreement is just more hot air. But not to worry, it will be hailed as a “breakthrough” by all the participants.
In reality, nothing much was accomplished and any significant agreement for emissions reductions has been punted to the next UN climate confab, beginning on November 8, 2010 in Mexico City, six days after our congressional election.
Filed under: Energy and Environment; International Economics and Development
Weekend Links
- How to manufacture a climate consensus: “The East Anglia emails are just the tip of the iceberg.”
- Forecast for Copenhagen: “Cloudy with a chance of nothing.”
- A tale of how far modern “constitutional law” has taken us toward the executive state.
- How the president’s policies are holding back the economy: “Right now, the best thing Washington can do for our economy is to simply stop what it has been doing.”
- Podcast: “Liberty, Tradition and Values“
Obama’s Copenhagen Speech
Politico asks, “Was he convincing?”
My response:
In Copenhagen this morning, President Obama convinced only those who want to believe — of which, regrettably, there is no shortage. Notice how he began, utterly without doubt: “You would not be here unless you, like me, were convinced that this danger is real. This is not fiction, this is science.” The implicit certitude is no part of real science, of course. But then the president, like the environmental zealots cheering him in Copenhagen, is not really interested in real science. Theirs, ultimately, is a political agenda. How else to explain the corruption of science that the East Anglia Climate Research email scandal has brought to light, and the efforts, presently, to dismiss the scandal as having no bearing on the evidence of climate change? If that were so, then why these efforts, or the earlier suppression of contrary or mitigating evidence that is the heart of the scandal?
We find such an effort in this morning’s Washington Post, by one of those at the center of the scandal, Penn State’s Professor Michael E. Mann. Set aside his opening gambit — “I cannot condone some things that colleagues of mine wrote or requested” — this author of the famous, now infamous, “hockey stick” article seems not to recognize himself in Climategate. That he then goes after Sarah Palin as his critic suggests only that on a witness stand, confronted by his real critics, he’d be reduced to tears by even a mediocre lawyer. One such real critic is my colleague, climatologist Patrick J. Michaels, who documents the scandal and its implications for science in exquisite detail in this morning’s Wall Street Journal.
But to return to the president and his speech, having uncritically subscribed to the science of global warming, Mr. Obama then lays out an ambitious policy agenda for the nation. We will meet our responsibility, he says, by phasing out fossil fuel subsidies (which pale in comparison to the renewable energy subsidies that alone make them economically feasible), we will put our people to work increasing efficiency in our homes and buildings, and we will pursue “comprehensive legislation to transform to a clean energy economy.”
Mark that word “legislation,” because at the end of his speech the president said: ”America has made our choice. We have charted our course, we have made our commitments, and we will do what we say.” But we haven’t made “our choice” — cap and trade, to take just one example, has gone nowhere in the Senate — even if Obama has made “our commitments.” And that brings us to a fundamental question: Can the president, with no input from a recalcitrant Congress, commit the nation to the radical economic conversion he promises?
Environmental zealots say he can. Look at the report released last week by the Climate Law Institute’s Center for Biological Diversity, “Yes He Can: President Obama’s Power to Make an International Climate Commitment Without Waiting for Congress,” which argues that in Copenhagen Obama has all the power he needs under current law, quite apart from the will of Congress or the American people, to make a legally binding international commitment. Unfortunately, under current law, the report is right. I discuss that report and the larger constitutional implications of the modern “executive state” in this morning’s National Review Online.
There is enough ambiguity in the president’s remarks this morning to suggest that he may not be prepared to exercise the full measure of his powers. But there is also enough in play to suggest that it is not only the corruption of science but the corruption of our Constitution that is at stake.
Filed under: Energy and Environment; Law and Civil Liberties
A Few Notes on Climate Change
As the Copenhagen Climate Conference is taking place, it is appropriate to clarify once again what is more or less accurately known about the climate of our planet and about climate change.
Obviously, a brief post can not substitute for detailed studies of professionals in a variety of scientific disciplines – climatology, atmospheric physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, and economics. However, a short post can summarize basic theses on the main trends in climate evolution, on its forecasts, and on its actual and projected effects.
1. The Earth’s climate is constantly changing. The climate was changing in the past, is changing now and, obviously, will be changing in the future – as long as our planet exists.
2. Climatic changes are largely cyclical in nature. There are various time horizons of climatic cycles – from the annual cycle known to everyone to cycles of 65-70 years, of 1,300 years, or of 100,000 years (the so called Milankovitch cycles).
3. There is no fundamental disagreement among scientists, public figures and governments about the fact that the climate is changing. There is a broad consensus that climate changes occur constantly. The myth, created by climate alarmists, that their opponents deny climate change is sheer propaganda.
4. Current debate among climatologists, economists and public figures is not about the fact of climate change, but about other issues. In particular, disagreements exist on:
- Comparative levels of modern day temperatures (relative to the historically observed),
- The direction of climate change depending on the length of record,
- The extent of climate change,
- The rate of climate change,
- Causes of climate change,
- Forecasts of climate change,
- Consequences of climate change,
- The optimal strategy for human beings to respond to climate change.
5. Unbiased answers to many of these issues are critically dependent on a chosen time horizon – whether it is 10 years, or 30 years, or 70 years, or 1000 years, or 10,000 years, or hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Depending on the time horizon, the answers to many of these questions may be different, even opposite.
Thursday Links
- You call this a “moderate compromise?”: The public option’s rotten replacement.
- Why Copenhagen is all pain and no gain. Meanwhile, Brookings finds that “meeting the Waxman-Markey emissions targets would result in a loss of personal consumption from $1 trillion to $2 trillion; GDP would be lower by 2.5 percent by 2050; and there would be 1.7 million fewer jobs.”
- Dear U.S. government: This is how you create a job.
- Podcast: “Recounting the cost of ObamaCare.“
Who Wants to Make Sarah Palin the Leader of the Republican Party?
Could it be the Washington Post? Bannered across the top of the Post’s op-ed page today is a piece titled “Copenhagen’s political science,” titularly authored by Sarah Palin. I’m delighted to see the Post publishing an op-ed critical of the questionable science behind the Copenhagen conference and the demands for massive regulations to deal with “climate change.”
But Sarah Palin? Of all the experts and political leaders a great newspaper might call on for a critical look at the science behind global warming, Sarah Palin?
What’s even more interesting is that the Post also ran an op-ed by Palin in July. But during this entire year, the Post has not run any op-eds by such credible and accomplished Republicans as Gov. Mitch Daniels; former governors Mitt Romney or Gary Johnson; Sen. John Thune; or indeed former governor Mike Huckabee, who might be Palin’s chief rival for the social-conservative vote. You might almost think the Post wanted Palin to be seen as a leader of Republicans.
I should note that during the past year the Post has run one op-ed each from John McCain, Bobby Jindal, Newt Gingrich, and Tim Pawlenty. (And for people who don’t read well, I should note that when I call the people above “credible and accomplished,” that’s not an endorsement for any political office.) Still, it’s the rare political leader who gets two Post op-eds in six months, and rarer still the Post op-eds by ex-governors who can’t name a newspaper that they read.
Tuesday Links
- Patrick Michaels on Copenhagen: “Expect a lot of heat, not much light, and a punt right into our next election.”
- Why the Supreme Court should strike down the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board: “Imagine a government agency with the authority to create and enforce laws, prosecute and adjudicate violations, and impose criminal penalties. Then throw in the power to levy taxes to pay for all the above. And for good measure, make the agency independent of political oversight.”
- Discussing Hayek over at Cato Unbound: Four problems with spontaneous order.
- Podcast: “Obama’s Patriot Act Duplicity.”
Copenhagen: Let the Games Begin!
25,000 bureaucrats, factota, hangers on, and representatives of various environmental organizations have just converged on Copenhagen for the UN’s latest “Conference of the Parties (COP) to its infamous 1992 climate treaty. Expect a lot of heat, not much light, and a punt right into our next election.
President Obama says that the US will agree to a “politically binding” reduction of our emissions of carbon dioxide to a mere 17% of 2005 levels by 2050. This will allow the average American the carbon dioxide emission of the average citizen in 1867. Obama’s pronouncement has stepped all over the toes of the US Senate, which really doesn’t want to vote on similar legislation this election year. Jim Webb, a democrat heretofore very loyal to the President recently wrote Obama a very tersely worded note reminding him that the power to commit the nation to such a regulation lies with the Senate, not with the Commander-in-Chief.
The UN’s own climate models show that even if every nation that has obligations under the failed Kyoto Protocol (which is supposed to be replaced by the Copenhagen Protocol) did what Obama wants, that only 7% of prospective warming would be prevented by 2100. The world’s largest emitter—China—was exempt then, and won’t agree to these reductions now.
Instead they will agree to reduce “carbon intensity”—the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit GDP—by 20% per decade. This is nothing but business as usual for a developing or robust economy. In fact, when President George W. Bush said that was our global warming policy, he was roundly booed. The Chinese announcement—already telegraphed, is being greeted with unmitigated praise by the same environmentalists who beat on Bush for the exact same policy. India has just announced that there is no way that they will agree to any emission reductions unless we pay them lotsa money. Obama thinks that’s a good idea, too. Polling data, anyone?
Since there’s no way that India and China will agree to large reductions, the real result of Copenhagen is that the climate can will be kicked down the road to the next COP, which begins on November 8, 2010, right down the road in Mexico City. That’s six days after our Congressional election, guaranteeing that cap-and-tax will be on the voters’ minds when they close the curtain on the current Congress.
The Long Road to Copenhagen
There are two different stories coming from the same political party on global warming, leading to only one conclusion: President Obama is about to (or has) ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to mandate some type of cap on U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.
Harry Reid and other democratic leaders in the Senate have clearly indicated that cap-and-trade legislation will be put off at least, until what they call “spring”, which is long after the upcoming UN climate conference in Copenhagen next month. At the same time, President Obama has said that the U.S., along with China, will announce some type of emissions cap in Copenhagen. Obviously this cannot refer to legislation that has yet to be voted on in the Senate.
President Obama keeps using the language “operationally significant” when referring to what the U.S. will agree to in Copenhagen. The only way that he can get around the Senate and still have a credible position in Copenhagen is for the EPA to announce specific regulations for carbon dioxide emissions between now and the conclusion of the Copenhagen meeting in mid-December.
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