Looking Up Not Down
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People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.
AJ Liebling
2007: Global Warming Alarmism Reaches A "Tipping Point"
The American people will soon be asked to support global warming cap-and-trade legislation that will be billed as a "solution" to global warming. These bills come at a time when the science is overwhelmingly taking away the basis for alarm.
An abundance of new peer-reviewed studies, analyses, and data error discoveries in the last several months has prompted scientists to declare that fear of catastrophic man-made global warming "bites the dust" and the scientific underpinnings for alarm are "falling apart."
I have addressed global warming on the Senate floor more than a dozen times since 2003, and today's speech will reveal that peer-reviewed studies and scientists are coming over to many of the concerns I raised years ago.
I want to talk to you today for what may be a personally unprecedented two hours or more of time to report on the recent developments which are turning 2007 into a "tipping point" for climate alarmism. I will detail how even committed left-wing scientists now believe the environmental movement has been "co-opted" into promoting global warming as a "crisis' and I will expose the manufactured façade of "consensus."
I will also address the economic factors of so-called "solutions" to global warming and how they will have no measurable impact on the climate. But these so called "solutions" will create huge economic harm for American families and the poor residents of the developing world who may see development hindered by unfounded climate fears.
We are currently witnessing an international awakening of scientists who are speaking out in opposition to former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, the Hollywood elitists and the media-driven "consensus" on man-made global warming.
We have witnessed Antarctic ice GROW to record levels since satellite monitoring began in the 1970's. We have witnessed NASA temperature data errors that have made 1934 -- not 1998 -- the hottest year on record in the U.S. We have seen global averages temperatures flat line since 1998 and the Southern Hemisphere cool in recent years.
These new developments in just the last six months are but a sample of the new information coming out that continues to debunk climate alarm.
But before we delve into these dramatic new scientific developments, it is important to take note of our pop culture propaganda campaign aimed at children.
HOLLYWOOD TARGETS CHILDREN WITH CLIMATE FEARS
In addition to Gore's entry last year into Hollywood fictional disaster films, other celebrity figures have attempted to jump into the game.
Hollywood activist Leonardo DiCaprio decided to toss objective scientific truth out the window in his new scarefest "The 11th Hour." DiCaprio refused to interview any scientists who disagreed with his dire vision of the future of the Earth.
In fact, his film reportedly features physicist Stephen Hawking making the unchallenged assertion that "the worst-case scenario is that Earth would become like its sister planet, Venus, with a temperature of 250 [degrees] centigrade."
I guess these "worst-case scenario's" pass for science in Hollywood these days. It also fits perfectly with DiCaprio's stated purpose of the film.
DiCaprio said on May 20th of this year: "I want the public to be very scared by what they see. I want them to see a very bleak future." (LINK)
While those who went to watch DiCaprio's science fiction film may see his intended "bleak future," it is DiCapro who has been scared by the bleak box office numbers, as his film has failed to generate any significant audience interest.
Gore's producer to kids: ‘Be activists'
Children are now the number one target of the global warming fear campaign. DiCaprio announced his goal was to recruit young eco-activists to the cause.
"We need to get kids young," DiCaprio said in a September 20 interview with USA Weekend.
Hollywood activist Laurie David, Gore's co-producer of "An Inconvenient Truth" recently co-authored a children's global warming book with Cambria Gordon for Scholastic Books titled, The Down-To-Earth Guide to Global Warming.
David has made it clear that her goal is to influence young minds with her new book when she recently wrote an open letter to her children stating: "We want you to grow up to be activists."
Apparently, David and other activists are getting frustrated by the widespread skepticism on climate as reflected in both the U.S. and the UK according to the latest polls.
It appears the alarmists are failing to convince adults to believe their increasingly shrill and scientifically unfounded rhetoric, so they have decided kids are an easier sell.
But David should worry less about recruiting young activists and more about scientific accuracy. A science group found what it called a major "scientific error" in David's new kid's book on page 18.
According to a Science and Public Policy Institute release on September 13:
"The authors [David and Gordon] present unsuspecting children with an altered temperature and CO2 graph that reverses the relationship found in the scientific literature. The manipulation is critical because David's central premise posits that CO2 drives temperature, yet the peer-reviewed literature is unanimous that CO2 changes have historically followed temperature changes."
David has now been forced to publicly admit this significant scientific error in her book.
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Speeches&ContentRecord_id=dceb518c-802a-23ad-45bf-894a13435a08
We had believed so many things so often, I suppose that's why my generation finds it so hard to believe all the climate warming hysteria. Although often highly intelligent people do believe it, probably because it fits so neatly in with their other left wing views; and it all makes sense. There had to be a price to pay for this terrible world. For the skyscrapers defying nature, for the apartment blocks defying the Biblical edict: do not build house upon house. For the traffic clogged streets and the factories pouring forth smoke into the atmosphere - although of course some of the most dramatic pictures are of power stations emitting water vapour.
My kids are appalled and embarrassed that I'm reading all the climate change sceptic stuff; including ordering the book The Deniers on the Internet yesterday, the first book I've ever ordered on line. I was virtually the last person in Australia to get a mobile phone, or so it seemed, and now I've actually bought something on the web. Yeehah. There are many different splatterings, awakenings, cringings in the corridors. U Are Brainwashed, my daughter scrawled across the pages of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years.
In that concrete university all those years ago Zero Population Growth was the biggest thing of the day, and the impending ice age. And the horror of the straight world, as we consumed Marcuse's One Dimensional Man and wrote essay after ridiculous essay on Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectics of Sex.
Everything was valid, every culture was of the same importance as every other. So striking were these revelations, so daring did we feel, that they stayed with us throughout our lives. The Head Shop, at the bottom of the concrete steps, where they sent my jeans away to get decorated with mushrooms and butterflies, was, briefly, the centre of our world; the smell of incense and hash, the gorgeous woman who ran it. We were all in love with her. We devoured Colin Wilson's The Outsider, we knew we were different, we knew we were going to change the world.
I always had an arms full of books, falling up the stairs, arguing with the Academic Senate whether my three month late essay should be accepted without penalty. Everything was valid, man, remember. We're changing the world here, sitting around getting stoned, get off our backs. Like attracts like, they say, and I moved in with the bad boy of the campus; and our house was infinitely outrageous, as we pursued our own demons into servitude and despair.
And now we fast forward and we're not just adults, but generations have been and gone; and dozens have died. That feeling of the eternal dawn, of freshness, courage, bravery, of holding hands behind the toilet block, new and daring, was long past. When he was 16 he would not be seen dead without a cigarette, and would smoke 100 a day. Then the world changed, and these days no one will be seen dead with one, because smoking is so unfashionable. The only person who smokes in the latest X File movie is the paedophile psychic who promptly dies of lung cancer.
All is not lost. There is much that can be gained. Secret avenues will open. God works in mysterious ways. And we are so brave, we are so happy, and the joy we could have known all our lives has finally arrived. Saw The Strangers with Phillip Seymour Hoffman yesterday, at the Dendy with Joyce, who is finally out of hospital. After the horror of her experience, in those terrible locked wards with the vestiges of humans propped up in their beds, the movie about two siblings thrown together again to deal with their dying father, resonated sadly. Life is finite, all too finite.
We're warm now, we've learnt to appreciate the day. We were in The Strand Arcade, Polly and me, contemplating coffee, lunch, some form of indulgence, and I said for no particular region except that I was scratchy from lack of cigarettes, there's a meeting around the corner. I've never been to one, I'd really like to go, she said, so we did. And I sat there quietly, shuddering to think what she was making of the Twelve Steps and people blathering on about their Higher Power and how they're so f'n grateful, and they pointed at her and she declared how much she was enjoying it all and how profound she was finding it, and I was delighted to find I didn't have to deal with her barrage of cynicism and sarcasm afterwards, more a battery of questions. She spends half her life in New York, not getting out of bed until two, struggling with depression. But NY's the heart of all this, I say, people wouldn't believe you're letting all those opportunities fly by.
But that, of course, is exactly what I did for years: let all the opportunities fly by, living a life of unfinished books and half finished projects and sporadic attacks of lyricism, waiting for the world to recognise my unique genius. Oddly, they ain't come knocking; that's another of the many lessons we learn too late in life. You make your own luck. If you fail once, get up and try again. Instead of sulking in clouds of smoke, staring at the wall, waiting for the knock on the door that never came.
THE BIGGER STORY:
Studies find Arctic, Alaska climate due to natural factors
The media will not report on the historical perspective of Greenland, the ice growing in Antarctica or the Southern Hemisphere cooling. Instead the media's current fixation is on hyping Arctic sea ice shifts.
What the media is refusing to report about the North Pole is that according to a 2003 study by Arctic scientist Igor Polyakov, the warmest period in the Arctic during the 20th Century was the late 1930s through early 1940s. Many scientists believe that if we had satellite monitoring of the Arctic back then, it may have shown less ice than today.
According to a 2005 peer-reviewed study in Geophysical Research Letters by astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon, solar irradiance appears to be the key to Arctic temperatures. The study found Arctic temperatures follow the pattern of increasing or decreasing energy received from the sun.
In another 2005 study published in the Journal of Climate, Brian Hartmann and Gerd Wendler linked the 1976 Pacific climate shift to a very significant one-time shift upward in Alaskan temperatures. These evidence based scientific studies debunk fears of man-made warming in the Arctic and in Alaska.
A NASA study published in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters on October 4, 2007, found Arctic winds blew "older thicker" ice to warmer southern waters.
Despite the media's hyping of global warming, Ignatius Rigor a co-author of the NASA study explained: "While the total [Arctic] area of ice cover in recent winters has remained about the same, during the past two years an increased amount of older, thicker perennial sea ice was swept by winds out of the Arctic Ocean into the Greenland Sea. What grew in its place in the winters between 2005 and 2007 was a thin veneer of first-year sea ice, which simply has less mass to survive the summer melt." (LINK)
Do not expect the media to report about this new NASA study blaming the "unusual winds" for moving ice out of the Arctic.
Global warming has stopped
It is important to point out that the phase of global warming that started in 1979 has itself been halted since 1998.
You can almost hear my critics skeptical of that assertion. Well, it turns out not to be an assertion, but an irrefutable fact, according to the temperature data the UN relies on.
Paleoclimate scientist Dr. Bob Carter, who has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, noted on June 18 of this year:
"The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stability has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2. Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 parts per million (17 %)."
Yes, it is true that 1998 was influenced by the warming effect of a particularly strong El Nino. But, lest you think Dr. Carter somehow misinterpreted the data, I have more evidence to bury any ‘skepticism.'
UK Officially Concedes Global Warming Has Stopped
The UK Met Office, Britain's version of our National Weather Service, was finally forced to concede the obvious in August of this year -- global warming has stopped.
After the UK Met Office --a group fully entrenched in the global warming fear movement-- was forced to acknowledge this inconvenient truth in August, they continued stoking man-made climate alarm.
Their response was to promote yet more unproven dire computer model projections of the future. They now claim climate computer models predict "global warming will begin in earnest in 2009" because greenhouse emissions will then overtake natural climate variability.
Hyping yet more unproven computer models of the future in response to inconvenient real world evidence based data is the ONLY bag of tricks left for the promoters of man-made climate doom. But it is a bit refreshing to hear climate doomsters be forced to utter the phrases like natural climate variability.
Meteorologist Joseph Conklin recently weighed in on these new developments.
Conklin wrote in August: "A few months ago, a study came out that demonstrated global temperatures have leveled off. But instead of possibly admitting that this whole global warming thing is a farce, a group of British scientists concluded that the real global warming won't start until 2009."
This new claim that "global warming will begin in earnest in 2009" sounds like the reverse of the 1930's Great Depression slogan of: ‘Prosperity is just around the corner.' Only in this instance the wording has been changed to "A climate catastrophe is just around the corner."
This is not to say that global average temperatures may not rise again - change is what the Earth naturally and continually does, and part of this is temperatures fluctuating both up and down. However, the awkward halting of global warming since 1998 despite rising emissions is yet another indication that CO2 levels and temperature are not the simple relationship many would have us believe.
U.S. surface weather measurement ‘scandal'
Another key development in 2007 is the research led by Meteorologist Anthony Watts of SurfaceStations.org which has revealed massive U.S. temperature collection data errors biasing thermometers to have warmer readings.
Meteorologist Conklin explained on August 10, 2007:
"The (U.S.) National Climate Data Center (NCDC) is in the middle of a scandal. Their global observing network, the heart and soul of surface weather measurement, is a disaster. Urbanization has placed many sites in unsuitable locations - on hot black asphalt, next to trash burn barrels, beside heat exhaust vents, even attached to hot chimneys and above outdoor grills! The data and approach taken by many global warming alarmists is seriously flawed. If the global data were properly adjusted for urbanization and station siting, and land use change issues were addressed, what would emerge is a cyclical pattern of rises and falls with much less of any background trend."
Adding to the further chilling of warming fears is a NASA data error correction that made 1934 the warmest year on record in the U.S., not the previously hyped 1998. Revised data now reveals four of the top ten hottest years in the U.S. were in the 1930's while only three of the hottest years occurred in the last decade.
Perhaps the most humorous reaction to this inconvenient correction came from NASA's James Hansen who tried to minimize the data error in August when he wrote: "No need to read further unless you are interested in temperature changes to a tenth of a degree over the U.S."
This comment was particularly outlandish, given that Hansen has become a media darling in recent years by hyping temperature differences of "tenth of a degree" to any reporter he could get within ear shot.
Essential Point #2: Unproven Computer Models Drive Climate Fears
Even the New York Times has been forced to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that the Earth is currently well within natural climate variation. This inconvenient reality means that all the warming doomsayers have to back up their climate fears are unproven computer models predicting future doom. Of course, you can't prove a prediction of the climate in 2100 wrong today, which reduces the models to speculating on what ‘could' ‘might' ‘may' happen 50 or 100 years from now.
But prominent UN scientists have publicly questioned the reliability of climate models.
In a candid statement, IPCC scientist Dr. Jim Renwick-a lead author of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report-publicly admitted that climate models may not be so reliable after all.
Renwick stated in June: "Half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don't expect to do terrifically well."
Let me repeat: a UN scientist admitted, "Half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable."
Also in June, another high-profile UN IPCC lead author, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, echoed Renwick's sentiments about climate models by referring to them as nothing more than "story lines."
"In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers ‘what if' projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios," Trenberth wrote in journal Nature's blog on June 4, 2007. He also admitted that the climate models have major shortcomings because "they do not consider many things like the recovery of the ozone layer, for instance, or observed trends in forcing agents. There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess."
Climate models made by unlicensed ‘software engineers'
A leading scientific skeptic, Meteorologist Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, a scientific pioneer in the development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at The Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute, recently took the critique of climate computer models one step further.
Tennekes said in February 2007, "I am of the opinion that most scientists engaged in the design, development, and tuning of climate models are in fact software engineers. They are unlicensed, hence unqualified to sell their products to society."
Meteorologist Augie Auer of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, former professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wyoming, agreed, describing climate models this way: "It's virtual science, it's virtual reality."
On a New Zealand radio interview in May, Auer joked about climate models: "Most of these climate predictions or models, they are about a half a step ahead of PlayStation 3 [video games]. They're really not justified in what they are saying. Many of the assumptions going into [the models] are simply not right."
Predictions ‘simply cannot happen'
Prominent scientist Professor Nils-Axel Morner, also denounced computer models in August 2007 saying: "The rapid rise in sea levels predicted by computer models simply cannot happen."
Morner is a leading world authority on sea levels and coastal erosion who headed the Department of Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics at Stockholm University. Morner, who was president of the Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution from 1999 to 2003, has published a new booklet refuting climate model predictions of catastrophic sea level rise.
Physicist Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu, the former director of both University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute and International Arctic Research Center, told a Congressional hearing in 2006 that highly publicized climate models showing a disappearing Arctic were nothing more than "science fiction." Akasofu has twice been named one of the "1000 Most Cited Scientists."
Geologist Morten Hald, an Arctic expert at of the University of Tromso in Norway has also questioned the reliability of computer models that predict a future melting of the Arctic.
"The main problem is that these models are often based on relatively new climate data. The thermometer has only been in existence for 150 years and information on temperature which is 150 years old does not capture the large natural changes," Hald, who is participating with a Norwegian national team in Arctic climate research, said in May 2007.
Physicist Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, called himself a "heretic" on global warming.
"The fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated," writes Dyson in his 2007 book "Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe." Dyson is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London.
Dyson focuses on debunking climate models predictions of climate doom: "They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models."
Gore Challenged to Bet on Climate Model Accuracy
Internationally known forecasting pioneer Dr. Scott Armstrong of the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, challenged Gore to a $10,000 bet in June over the accuracy of climate computer models predictions. Armstrong and his colleague Professor Kesten Green of Monash University's in Australia, found: "Claims that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying that it will get colder." According to Armstrong, the author of "Long-Range Forecasting," the most frequently cited book on forecasting methods.: "Of 89 principles [of forecasting], the [UN] IPCC violated 72."
Internationally renowned scientist Dr. Antonino Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists and a retired professor of advanced physics at the University of Bologna, has also taken climate models to task.
According to an April 27, 2007 article at Zenit.org, Zichichi, who has published over 800 scientific papers, said "the mathematical models used by the [UN's] IPCC do not correspond to the criteria of the scientific method."
UN Scientist Claims no climate model has ever been ‘validated'
IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr Vincent Gray, of New Zealand, an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports going back to 1990, ridiculed the IPCC process as "dangerous scientific nonsense." Gray, the author of "Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of "Climate Change 2001," explained on April 10, 2007:
"My greatest achievement was the second [IPCC] report where the draft had a chapter ‘Validation of Climate Models'. I commented that since no climate model has ever been ‘validated' that the word was inappropriate. They changed the word to ‘evaluate' 50 times, and since then they have never ‘predicted' anything. All they do is make ‘projections' and ‘estimates.'"
In fact, so much of climate computer modeling is based on taking temperature data from a very short time frame and extrapolating it out over 50 or 100 or more years and coming up with terrifying scare scenarios. There is often no attempt to look at the longer geologic record.
But much of this type of modeling has about as much validity as me taking my five year old granddaughter's growth rate from the last two years and using that to project her height when she is 25. My projections may show her to be 12 feet tall based on such short time frames. Yet that is exactly how many of the computer model fears of the future are generated for sea level rise estimates and ice melt projections in places like Greenland and the Arctic.
Once again, computer model predictions are not evidence.
Computer models drive polar bear extinction fears
In September, yet another report was issued based on computer models predictions. This report found that polar bear populations are allegedly going to be devastated by 2050 due to global warming. The report was issued as part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's consideration of listing the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act.
This is a classic case of reality versus unproven computer model predictions. The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the polar bear population is currently at 20,000 to 25,000 bears, whereas in the 1950s and 1960s, estimates were as low as 5,000-10,000 bears. We currently have an estimated four or five times more polar bears than 50 years ago. A 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain noted that the polar bear populations ‘may now be near historic highs.'
Top biologists and wildlife experts are dismissing unproven computer model concerns for polar bears.
In 2006, Canadian biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor, the director of wildlife research with the Arctic government of Nunavut, dismissed these fears with evidence based data on Canada's polar bear populations.
"Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present," Taylor said, noting that Canada is home to two-thirds of the world's polar bears.
He added: "It is just silly to predict the demise of polar bears in 25 years based on media-assisted hysteria."
In September, Taylor further debunked the latest report hyping fears of future polar bear extinctions.
"I think it's naive and presumptuous," Taylor said, referring to a recent report by the U.S. government warning that computer models predict a dire future for the bears due to projected ice loss.
Less Ice = More Polar Bears?
Taylor also debunked the notion that less sea ice means less polar bears by pointing out that southern regions of the bears' home with low levels of ice are seeing booming bear populations. He noted that in the warmer southern Canadian region of the Davis Strait with lower levels of ice, a new survey will reveal that bear populations have grown from an estimated 850 bears to an estimated 3000 bears. And, despite the lower levels of ice, some of the bears measured in this region are among the biggest ever on record.
"Davis Strait is crawling with polar bears. It's not safe to camp there. They're fat. The mothers have cubs. The cubs are in good shape," he said, according to a September 14, 2007 article.
He added: "That's not theory. That's not based on a model. That's observation of reality."
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Speeches&ContentRecord_id=dceb518c-802a-23ad-45bf-894a13435a08
In his new book, The Age of Turbulence Alan Greenspan wrote:
"There is no effective way to meaningfully reduce emissions without negatively impacting a large part of an economy," Greenspan wrote. "Net, it is a tax. If the cap is low enough to make a meaningful inroad into CO2 emissions, permits will become expensive and large numbers of companies will experience cost increases that make them less competitive. Jobs will be lost and real incomes of workers constrained."
Renowned economists Arthur Laffer and Wayne Winegarden drove this point home in an October 2 op-ed in the Financial Post when they wrote:
"The costs of reducing [greenhouse gases] through cap-and-trade regulations are not trivial. If implemented, cap-and-trade policies would add significant costs to production and would likely have a severe negative impact on long-term U.S. growth, an amount we estimate at US $10,800 per family."
This bill [S. 2191] is patterned after the Lieberman-McCain bill which according to an EPA analysis, would impose a price increase for oil of 20% and for natural gas of 23%. An MIT study earlier this year found the bill would increase energy costs an amount equivalent to $3500 per family of four. This study demonstrates the enormous wealth transfers involved in cap and trade schemes.
Now, there is apparently some confusion about this study, so let me describe it as best I can. The study calculated the amount of money that would be raised from businesses regulated under the bill if all the allowances under these bills were auctioned and the monies distributed, per family of four. So this figure represents not only the cost to industry, but also theoretical distributions to households. But of course, none of the bills actually distribute the monies raised from auctioning allowances to households, nor has this even been proposed. The cost of buying allowances, however, would be substantial - equal to $3,500 per family of four, and would be passed onto investors as losses and consumers as higher prices, in short, families. So however you want to describe it, at the end of the day, households are left bearing the burden of this legislation.
This will have enormous impacts, especially on the poor. A 2006 survey of Colorado homeless families with children found that high energy bills were cited as one of the two main reasons they became homeless. The Congressional Budget Office found that greenhouse gas cap and trade schemes are highly regressive and put the highest burden on the poor.
This bill apparently is designed to reward some states and penalize others to obtain votes, but is even less workable and more expensive than its predecessor, the Lieberman-McCain bill.
The bill also appears designed to drive up fuel costs in this country as quickly as possible. By setting the first emissions target only four years away, the bill creates a mandate which can only be met through massive fuel switching to natural gas for electric generation -- thus robbing home owners of affordable natural gas home heating, and driving factories overseas that depend on natural gas or low energy prices. Just last week, we heard testimony from Alcoa that its future growth is not in the U.S., where it doesn't plan to build any more plants, but in countries where energy prices are low.
I agree with Greenspan's assessment, where he states:
"Cap-and-trade systems or carbon taxes are likely to be popular only until real people lose real jobs as their consequence."
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Speeches&ContentRecord_id=edd348f9-802a-23ad-486d-7d0b009781df&Region_id=&Issue_id=
Shellharbour, NSW, Australia, pictures taken during a morning walk.
People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.
AJ Liebling
2007: Global Warming Alarmism Reaches A "Tipping Point"
The American people will soon be asked to support global warming cap-and-trade legislation that will be billed as a "solution" to global warming. These bills come at a time when the science is overwhelmingly taking away the basis for alarm.
An abundance of new peer-reviewed studies, analyses, and data error discoveries in the last several months has prompted scientists to declare that fear of catastrophic man-made global warming "bites the dust" and the scientific underpinnings for alarm are "falling apart."
I have addressed global warming on the Senate floor more than a dozen times since 2003, and today's speech will reveal that peer-reviewed studies and scientists are coming over to many of the concerns I raised years ago.
I want to talk to you today for what may be a personally unprecedented two hours or more of time to report on the recent developments which are turning 2007 into a "tipping point" for climate alarmism. I will detail how even committed left-wing scientists now believe the environmental movement has been "co-opted" into promoting global warming as a "crisis' and I will expose the manufactured façade of "consensus."
I will also address the economic factors of so-called "solutions" to global warming and how they will have no measurable impact on the climate. But these so called "solutions" will create huge economic harm for American families and the poor residents of the developing world who may see development hindered by unfounded climate fears.
We are currently witnessing an international awakening of scientists who are speaking out in opposition to former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, the Hollywood elitists and the media-driven "consensus" on man-made global warming.
We have witnessed Antarctic ice GROW to record levels since satellite monitoring began in the 1970's. We have witnessed NASA temperature data errors that have made 1934 -- not 1998 -- the hottest year on record in the U.S. We have seen global averages temperatures flat line since 1998 and the Southern Hemisphere cool in recent years.
These new developments in just the last six months are but a sample of the new information coming out that continues to debunk climate alarm.
But before we delve into these dramatic new scientific developments, it is important to take note of our pop culture propaganda campaign aimed at children.
HOLLYWOOD TARGETS CHILDREN WITH CLIMATE FEARS
In addition to Gore's entry last year into Hollywood fictional disaster films, other celebrity figures have attempted to jump into the game.
Hollywood activist Leonardo DiCaprio decided to toss objective scientific truth out the window in his new scarefest "The 11th Hour." DiCaprio refused to interview any scientists who disagreed with his dire vision of the future of the Earth.
In fact, his film reportedly features physicist Stephen Hawking making the unchallenged assertion that "the worst-case scenario is that Earth would become like its sister planet, Venus, with a temperature of 250 [degrees] centigrade."
I guess these "worst-case scenario's" pass for science in Hollywood these days. It also fits perfectly with DiCaprio's stated purpose of the film.
DiCaprio said on May 20th of this year: "I want the public to be very scared by what they see. I want them to see a very bleak future." (LINK)
While those who went to watch DiCaprio's science fiction film may see his intended "bleak future," it is DiCapro who has been scared by the bleak box office numbers, as his film has failed to generate any significant audience interest.
Gore's producer to kids: ‘Be activists'
Children are now the number one target of the global warming fear campaign. DiCaprio announced his goal was to recruit young eco-activists to the cause.
"We need to get kids young," DiCaprio said in a September 20 interview with USA Weekend.
Hollywood activist Laurie David, Gore's co-producer of "An Inconvenient Truth" recently co-authored a children's global warming book with Cambria Gordon for Scholastic Books titled, The Down-To-Earth Guide to Global Warming.
David has made it clear that her goal is to influence young minds with her new book when she recently wrote an open letter to her children stating: "We want you to grow up to be activists."
Apparently, David and other activists are getting frustrated by the widespread skepticism on climate as reflected in both the U.S. and the UK according to the latest polls.
It appears the alarmists are failing to convince adults to believe their increasingly shrill and scientifically unfounded rhetoric, so they have decided kids are an easier sell.
But David should worry less about recruiting young activists and more about scientific accuracy. A science group found what it called a major "scientific error" in David's new kid's book on page 18.
According to a Science and Public Policy Institute release on September 13:
"The authors [David and Gordon] present unsuspecting children with an altered temperature and CO2 graph that reverses the relationship found in the scientific literature. The manipulation is critical because David's central premise posits that CO2 drives temperature, yet the peer-reviewed literature is unanimous that CO2 changes have historically followed temperature changes."
David has now been forced to publicly admit this significant scientific error in her book.
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Speeches&ContentRecord_id=dceb518c-802a-23ad-45bf-894a13435a08
We had believed so many things so often, I suppose that's why my generation finds it so hard to believe all the climate warming hysteria. Although often highly intelligent people do believe it, probably because it fits so neatly in with their other left wing views; and it all makes sense. There had to be a price to pay for this terrible world. For the skyscrapers defying nature, for the apartment blocks defying the Biblical edict: do not build house upon house. For the traffic clogged streets and the factories pouring forth smoke into the atmosphere - although of course some of the most dramatic pictures are of power stations emitting water vapour.
My kids are appalled and embarrassed that I'm reading all the climate change sceptic stuff; including ordering the book The Deniers on the Internet yesterday, the first book I've ever ordered on line. I was virtually the last person in Australia to get a mobile phone, or so it seemed, and now I've actually bought something on the web. Yeehah. There are many different splatterings, awakenings, cringings in the corridors. U Are Brainwashed, my daughter scrawled across the pages of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years.
In that concrete university all those years ago Zero Population Growth was the biggest thing of the day, and the impending ice age. And the horror of the straight world, as we consumed Marcuse's One Dimensional Man and wrote essay after ridiculous essay on Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectics of Sex.
Everything was valid, every culture was of the same importance as every other. So striking were these revelations, so daring did we feel, that they stayed with us throughout our lives. The Head Shop, at the bottom of the concrete steps, where they sent my jeans away to get decorated with mushrooms and butterflies, was, briefly, the centre of our world; the smell of incense and hash, the gorgeous woman who ran it. We were all in love with her. We devoured Colin Wilson's The Outsider, we knew we were different, we knew we were going to change the world.
I always had an arms full of books, falling up the stairs, arguing with the Academic Senate whether my three month late essay should be accepted without penalty. Everything was valid, man, remember. We're changing the world here, sitting around getting stoned, get off our backs. Like attracts like, they say, and I moved in with the bad boy of the campus; and our house was infinitely outrageous, as we pursued our own demons into servitude and despair.
And now we fast forward and we're not just adults, but generations have been and gone; and dozens have died. That feeling of the eternal dawn, of freshness, courage, bravery, of holding hands behind the toilet block, new and daring, was long past. When he was 16 he would not be seen dead without a cigarette, and would smoke 100 a day. Then the world changed, and these days no one will be seen dead with one, because smoking is so unfashionable. The only person who smokes in the latest X File movie is the paedophile psychic who promptly dies of lung cancer.
All is not lost. There is much that can be gained. Secret avenues will open. God works in mysterious ways. And we are so brave, we are so happy, and the joy we could have known all our lives has finally arrived. Saw The Strangers with Phillip Seymour Hoffman yesterday, at the Dendy with Joyce, who is finally out of hospital. After the horror of her experience, in those terrible locked wards with the vestiges of humans propped up in their beds, the movie about two siblings thrown together again to deal with their dying father, resonated sadly. Life is finite, all too finite.
We're warm now, we've learnt to appreciate the day. We were in The Strand Arcade, Polly and me, contemplating coffee, lunch, some form of indulgence, and I said for no particular region except that I was scratchy from lack of cigarettes, there's a meeting around the corner. I've never been to one, I'd really like to go, she said, so we did. And I sat there quietly, shuddering to think what she was making of the Twelve Steps and people blathering on about their Higher Power and how they're so f'n grateful, and they pointed at her and she declared how much she was enjoying it all and how profound she was finding it, and I was delighted to find I didn't have to deal with her barrage of cynicism and sarcasm afterwards, more a battery of questions. She spends half her life in New York, not getting out of bed until two, struggling with depression. But NY's the heart of all this, I say, people wouldn't believe you're letting all those opportunities fly by.
But that, of course, is exactly what I did for years: let all the opportunities fly by, living a life of unfinished books and half finished projects and sporadic attacks of lyricism, waiting for the world to recognise my unique genius. Oddly, they ain't come knocking; that's another of the many lessons we learn too late in life. You make your own luck. If you fail once, get up and try again. Instead of sulking in clouds of smoke, staring at the wall, waiting for the knock on the door that never came.
THE BIGGER STORY:
Studies find Arctic, Alaska climate due to natural factors
The media will not report on the historical perspective of Greenland, the ice growing in Antarctica or the Southern Hemisphere cooling. Instead the media's current fixation is on hyping Arctic sea ice shifts.
What the media is refusing to report about the North Pole is that according to a 2003 study by Arctic scientist Igor Polyakov, the warmest period in the Arctic during the 20th Century was the late 1930s through early 1940s. Many scientists believe that if we had satellite monitoring of the Arctic back then, it may have shown less ice than today.
According to a 2005 peer-reviewed study in Geophysical Research Letters by astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon, solar irradiance appears to be the key to Arctic temperatures. The study found Arctic temperatures follow the pattern of increasing or decreasing energy received from the sun.
In another 2005 study published in the Journal of Climate, Brian Hartmann and Gerd Wendler linked the 1976 Pacific climate shift to a very significant one-time shift upward in Alaskan temperatures. These evidence based scientific studies debunk fears of man-made warming in the Arctic and in Alaska.
A NASA study published in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters on October 4, 2007, found Arctic winds blew "older thicker" ice to warmer southern waters.
Despite the media's hyping of global warming, Ignatius Rigor a co-author of the NASA study explained: "While the total [Arctic] area of ice cover in recent winters has remained about the same, during the past two years an increased amount of older, thicker perennial sea ice was swept by winds out of the Arctic Ocean into the Greenland Sea. What grew in its place in the winters between 2005 and 2007 was a thin veneer of first-year sea ice, which simply has less mass to survive the summer melt." (LINK)
Do not expect the media to report about this new NASA study blaming the "unusual winds" for moving ice out of the Arctic.
Global warming has stopped
It is important to point out that the phase of global warming that started in 1979 has itself been halted since 1998.
You can almost hear my critics skeptical of that assertion. Well, it turns out not to be an assertion, but an irrefutable fact, according to the temperature data the UN relies on.
Paleoclimate scientist Dr. Bob Carter, who has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, noted on June 18 of this year:
"The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stability has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2. Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 parts per million (17 %)."
Yes, it is true that 1998 was influenced by the warming effect of a particularly strong El Nino. But, lest you think Dr. Carter somehow misinterpreted the data, I have more evidence to bury any ‘skepticism.'
UK Officially Concedes Global Warming Has Stopped
The UK Met Office, Britain's version of our National Weather Service, was finally forced to concede the obvious in August of this year -- global warming has stopped.
After the UK Met Office --a group fully entrenched in the global warming fear movement-- was forced to acknowledge this inconvenient truth in August, they continued stoking man-made climate alarm.
Their response was to promote yet more unproven dire computer model projections of the future. They now claim climate computer models predict "global warming will begin in earnest in 2009" because greenhouse emissions will then overtake natural climate variability.
Hyping yet more unproven computer models of the future in response to inconvenient real world evidence based data is the ONLY bag of tricks left for the promoters of man-made climate doom. But it is a bit refreshing to hear climate doomsters be forced to utter the phrases like natural climate variability.
Meteorologist Joseph Conklin recently weighed in on these new developments.
Conklin wrote in August: "A few months ago, a study came out that demonstrated global temperatures have leveled off. But instead of possibly admitting that this whole global warming thing is a farce, a group of British scientists concluded that the real global warming won't start until 2009."
This new claim that "global warming will begin in earnest in 2009" sounds like the reverse of the 1930's Great Depression slogan of: ‘Prosperity is just around the corner.' Only in this instance the wording has been changed to "A climate catastrophe is just around the corner."
This is not to say that global average temperatures may not rise again - change is what the Earth naturally and continually does, and part of this is temperatures fluctuating both up and down. However, the awkward halting of global warming since 1998 despite rising emissions is yet another indication that CO2 levels and temperature are not the simple relationship many would have us believe.
U.S. surface weather measurement ‘scandal'
Another key development in 2007 is the research led by Meteorologist Anthony Watts of SurfaceStations.org which has revealed massive U.S. temperature collection data errors biasing thermometers to have warmer readings.
Meteorologist Conklin explained on August 10, 2007:
"The (U.S.) National Climate Data Center (NCDC) is in the middle of a scandal. Their global observing network, the heart and soul of surface weather measurement, is a disaster. Urbanization has placed many sites in unsuitable locations - on hot black asphalt, next to trash burn barrels, beside heat exhaust vents, even attached to hot chimneys and above outdoor grills! The data and approach taken by many global warming alarmists is seriously flawed. If the global data were properly adjusted for urbanization and station siting, and land use change issues were addressed, what would emerge is a cyclical pattern of rises and falls with much less of any background trend."
Adding to the further chilling of warming fears is a NASA data error correction that made 1934 the warmest year on record in the U.S., not the previously hyped 1998. Revised data now reveals four of the top ten hottest years in the U.S. were in the 1930's while only three of the hottest years occurred in the last decade.
Perhaps the most humorous reaction to this inconvenient correction came from NASA's James Hansen who tried to minimize the data error in August when he wrote: "No need to read further unless you are interested in temperature changes to a tenth of a degree over the U.S."
This comment was particularly outlandish, given that Hansen has become a media darling in recent years by hyping temperature differences of "tenth of a degree" to any reporter he could get within ear shot.
Essential Point #2: Unproven Computer Models Drive Climate Fears
Even the New York Times has been forced to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that the Earth is currently well within natural climate variation. This inconvenient reality means that all the warming doomsayers have to back up their climate fears are unproven computer models predicting future doom. Of course, you can't prove a prediction of the climate in 2100 wrong today, which reduces the models to speculating on what ‘could' ‘might' ‘may' happen 50 or 100 years from now.
But prominent UN scientists have publicly questioned the reliability of climate models.
In a candid statement, IPCC scientist Dr. Jim Renwick-a lead author of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report-publicly admitted that climate models may not be so reliable after all.
Renwick stated in June: "Half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don't expect to do terrifically well."
Let me repeat: a UN scientist admitted, "Half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable."
Also in June, another high-profile UN IPCC lead author, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, echoed Renwick's sentiments about climate models by referring to them as nothing more than "story lines."
"In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers ‘what if' projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios," Trenberth wrote in journal Nature's blog on June 4, 2007. He also admitted that the climate models have major shortcomings because "they do not consider many things like the recovery of the ozone layer, for instance, or observed trends in forcing agents. There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess."
Climate models made by unlicensed ‘software engineers'
A leading scientific skeptic, Meteorologist Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, a scientific pioneer in the development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at The Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute, recently took the critique of climate computer models one step further.
Tennekes said in February 2007, "I am of the opinion that most scientists engaged in the design, development, and tuning of climate models are in fact software engineers. They are unlicensed, hence unqualified to sell their products to society."
Meteorologist Augie Auer of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, former professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wyoming, agreed, describing climate models this way: "It's virtual science, it's virtual reality."
On a New Zealand radio interview in May, Auer joked about climate models: "Most of these climate predictions or models, they are about a half a step ahead of PlayStation 3 [video games]. They're really not justified in what they are saying. Many of the assumptions going into [the models] are simply not right."
Predictions ‘simply cannot happen'
Prominent scientist Professor Nils-Axel Morner, also denounced computer models in August 2007 saying: "The rapid rise in sea levels predicted by computer models simply cannot happen."
Morner is a leading world authority on sea levels and coastal erosion who headed the Department of Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics at Stockholm University. Morner, who was president of the Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution from 1999 to 2003, has published a new booklet refuting climate model predictions of catastrophic sea level rise.
Physicist Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu, the former director of both University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute and International Arctic Research Center, told a Congressional hearing in 2006 that highly publicized climate models showing a disappearing Arctic were nothing more than "science fiction." Akasofu has twice been named one of the "1000 Most Cited Scientists."
Geologist Morten Hald, an Arctic expert at of the University of Tromso in Norway has also questioned the reliability of computer models that predict a future melting of the Arctic.
"The main problem is that these models are often based on relatively new climate data. The thermometer has only been in existence for 150 years and information on temperature which is 150 years old does not capture the large natural changes," Hald, who is participating with a Norwegian national team in Arctic climate research, said in May 2007.
Physicist Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, called himself a "heretic" on global warming.
"The fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated," writes Dyson in his 2007 book "Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe." Dyson is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London.
Dyson focuses on debunking climate models predictions of climate doom: "They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models."
Gore Challenged to Bet on Climate Model Accuracy
Internationally known forecasting pioneer Dr. Scott Armstrong of the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, challenged Gore to a $10,000 bet in June over the accuracy of climate computer models predictions. Armstrong and his colleague Professor Kesten Green of Monash University's in Australia, found: "Claims that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying that it will get colder." According to Armstrong, the author of "Long-Range Forecasting," the most frequently cited book on forecasting methods.: "Of 89 principles [of forecasting], the [UN] IPCC violated 72."
Internationally renowned scientist Dr. Antonino Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists and a retired professor of advanced physics at the University of Bologna, has also taken climate models to task.
According to an April 27, 2007 article at Zenit.org, Zichichi, who has published over 800 scientific papers, said "the mathematical models used by the [UN's] IPCC do not correspond to the criteria of the scientific method."
UN Scientist Claims no climate model has ever been ‘validated'
IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr Vincent Gray, of New Zealand, an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports going back to 1990, ridiculed the IPCC process as "dangerous scientific nonsense." Gray, the author of "Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of "Climate Change 2001," explained on April 10, 2007:
"My greatest achievement was the second [IPCC] report where the draft had a chapter ‘Validation of Climate Models'. I commented that since no climate model has ever been ‘validated' that the word was inappropriate. They changed the word to ‘evaluate' 50 times, and since then they have never ‘predicted' anything. All they do is make ‘projections' and ‘estimates.'"
In fact, so much of climate computer modeling is based on taking temperature data from a very short time frame and extrapolating it out over 50 or 100 or more years and coming up with terrifying scare scenarios. There is often no attempt to look at the longer geologic record.
But much of this type of modeling has about as much validity as me taking my five year old granddaughter's growth rate from the last two years and using that to project her height when she is 25. My projections may show her to be 12 feet tall based on such short time frames. Yet that is exactly how many of the computer model fears of the future are generated for sea level rise estimates and ice melt projections in places like Greenland and the Arctic.
Once again, computer model predictions are not evidence.
Computer models drive polar bear extinction fears
In September, yet another report was issued based on computer models predictions. This report found that polar bear populations are allegedly going to be devastated by 2050 due to global warming. The report was issued as part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's consideration of listing the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act.
This is a classic case of reality versus unproven computer model predictions. The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the polar bear population is currently at 20,000 to 25,000 bears, whereas in the 1950s and 1960s, estimates were as low as 5,000-10,000 bears. We currently have an estimated four or five times more polar bears than 50 years ago. A 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain noted that the polar bear populations ‘may now be near historic highs.'
Top biologists and wildlife experts are dismissing unproven computer model concerns for polar bears.
In 2006, Canadian biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor, the director of wildlife research with the Arctic government of Nunavut, dismissed these fears with evidence based data on Canada's polar bear populations.
"Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present," Taylor said, noting that Canada is home to two-thirds of the world's polar bears.
He added: "It is just silly to predict the demise of polar bears in 25 years based on media-assisted hysteria."
In September, Taylor further debunked the latest report hyping fears of future polar bear extinctions.
"I think it's naive and presumptuous," Taylor said, referring to a recent report by the U.S. government warning that computer models predict a dire future for the bears due to projected ice loss.
Less Ice = More Polar Bears?
Taylor also debunked the notion that less sea ice means less polar bears by pointing out that southern regions of the bears' home with low levels of ice are seeing booming bear populations. He noted that in the warmer southern Canadian region of the Davis Strait with lower levels of ice, a new survey will reveal that bear populations have grown from an estimated 850 bears to an estimated 3000 bears. And, despite the lower levels of ice, some of the bears measured in this region are among the biggest ever on record.
"Davis Strait is crawling with polar bears. It's not safe to camp there. They're fat. The mothers have cubs. The cubs are in good shape," he said, according to a September 14, 2007 article.
He added: "That's not theory. That's not based on a model. That's observation of reality."
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Speeches&ContentRecord_id=dceb518c-802a-23ad-45bf-894a13435a08
In his new book, The Age of Turbulence Alan Greenspan wrote:
"There is no effective way to meaningfully reduce emissions without negatively impacting a large part of an economy," Greenspan wrote. "Net, it is a tax. If the cap is low enough to make a meaningful inroad into CO2 emissions, permits will become expensive and large numbers of companies will experience cost increases that make them less competitive. Jobs will be lost and real incomes of workers constrained."
Renowned economists Arthur Laffer and Wayne Winegarden drove this point home in an October 2 op-ed in the Financial Post when they wrote:
"The costs of reducing [greenhouse gases] through cap-and-trade regulations are not trivial. If implemented, cap-and-trade policies would add significant costs to production and would likely have a severe negative impact on long-term U.S. growth, an amount we estimate at US $10,800 per family."
This bill [S. 2191] is patterned after the Lieberman-McCain bill which according to an EPA analysis, would impose a price increase for oil of 20% and for natural gas of 23%. An MIT study earlier this year found the bill would increase energy costs an amount equivalent to $3500 per family of four. This study demonstrates the enormous wealth transfers involved in cap and trade schemes.
Now, there is apparently some confusion about this study, so let me describe it as best I can. The study calculated the amount of money that would be raised from businesses regulated under the bill if all the allowances under these bills were auctioned and the monies distributed, per family of four. So this figure represents not only the cost to industry, but also theoretical distributions to households. But of course, none of the bills actually distribute the monies raised from auctioning allowances to households, nor has this even been proposed. The cost of buying allowances, however, would be substantial - equal to $3,500 per family of four, and would be passed onto investors as losses and consumers as higher prices, in short, families. So however you want to describe it, at the end of the day, households are left bearing the burden of this legislation.
This will have enormous impacts, especially on the poor. A 2006 survey of Colorado homeless families with children found that high energy bills were cited as one of the two main reasons they became homeless. The Congressional Budget Office found that greenhouse gas cap and trade schemes are highly regressive and put the highest burden on the poor.
This bill apparently is designed to reward some states and penalize others to obtain votes, but is even less workable and more expensive than its predecessor, the Lieberman-McCain bill.
The bill also appears designed to drive up fuel costs in this country as quickly as possible. By setting the first emissions target only four years away, the bill creates a mandate which can only be met through massive fuel switching to natural gas for electric generation -- thus robbing home owners of affordable natural gas home heating, and driving factories overseas that depend on natural gas or low energy prices. Just last week, we heard testimony from Alcoa that its future growth is not in the U.S., where it doesn't plan to build any more plants, but in countries where energy prices are low.
I agree with Greenspan's assessment, where he states:
"Cap-and-trade systems or carbon taxes are likely to be popular only until real people lose real jobs as their consequence."
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Speeches&ContentRecord_id=edd348f9-802a-23ad-486d-7d0b009781df&Region_id=&Issue_id=
Shellharbour, NSW, Australia, pictures taken during a morning walk.
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