These estimates of the long-term cost of trying to curb global warming come from the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). However accurate they may, or may not be, the numbers are staggering, and should make everyone stop and think a whole lot.
We have a great deal of doubt about the reliability of computer climate models, and there is much evidence that the world temperature data is inaccurate, and has been tampered with. Finally, there is a huge body of observed scientific information, strongly suggesting that global warming and climate change are natural processes that have been operating to heat and cool the Earth for billions of years. These are processes like variations in the amount of solar energy received by the Earth and the complex interplay between the atmosphere, the land, oceans, the biosphere, the carbon cycle, and the hydrologic cycle.
In light of this vast amount of information to the contrary, it is mind-boggling to think that any rational person is even thinking of trying to control global warming. Yet not only are people thinking of controlling global warming, they are passing laws that will cost billions upon billions of dollars. How can this be people? What is going on here? Have our politicians in their pathological partisan ambition become totally blind to reality? What does this say about all of their supporters?
Peter
from: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,299419,00.html
Junk Science: Global Warming’s Trillion-Dollar Turkey
Thursday, October 04, 2007
By Steven Milloy
A trillion dollars doesn’t buy what it used to — at least when it comes to global warming, according to a new analysis from the Environmental Protection Agency.
Last July, this column reported that the latest global warming bill — the Low Carbon Economy Act of 2007, introduced by Sens. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M. and Arlen Specter, R-Pa. — would cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion in its first 10 years and untold trillions of dollars in subsequent decades.
This week, the EPA sent its analysis of the bill’s impact on climate to Bingaman and Specter. Now we can see what we’d get for our money, and we may as well just build a giant bonfire with the cash and enjoy toasting marshmallows over it.
For reference purposes, the current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 380 parts per million. The EPA estimates that if no action is taken to curb CO2 emissions, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 would be 718 ppm by 2095.
If the Bingaman-Specter bill were implemented, however, the EPA estimates that CO2 levels would be 695 ppm — a whopping reduction of 23 ppm.
The EPA also estimated that if all countries — including China, India, Brazil and other developing nations — curb CO2 emissions, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 would be 491 ppm in 2095, including the above-mentioned 23 ppm reduction from the implementation of the Bingaman-Specter bill.
So it appears that no matter how you slice it, Bingaman-Specter is worth a 23 ppm-reduction in atmospheric CO2 by 2095. But what are the climatic implications of this reduction in terms of global temperature? After all, we are talking about global warming.
Although the EPA didn’t pursue its analysis that far, figuring out the implications are readily doable using the assumptions and formulas of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Under the no-action scenario (718-to-695 ppm), the IPCC formulas indicate that the multitrillion-dollar Bingaman-Specter bill might reduce average global temperature by 0.13 degrees Celsius.
Under the maximum regulation scenario (514-to-491 ppm), Bingaman-Specter might reduce average global temperature by 0.18 degrees Celsius. Actual temperature reductions are likely to be less since these estimates rely on the IPCC’s alarmist-friendly assumptions and formulas.
The question, then, becomes this: Is it really worth trillions of taxpayer dollars over 90 years to perhaps reduce global temperatures by 0.13-0.18 degrees Celsius? If you can’t answer that question, consider this.
Under the no-action scenario, average global temperature might be 1.2 degrees Celsius higher in 2095 than it is today, once again using conservative IPCC assumptions and formulas. Under the maximum-regulation scenario, average global temperature might be 1.03 degrees Celsius higher than today. (For reference purposes, the estimated total increase in average global temperature for the 20th century was about 0.50 degrees Celsius.)
So what’s the difference in mean global temperature between the no-action scenario and the maximum-regulation scenario? Could it be a whopping 0.17 degrees Centigrade? Is that what global warming hysteria is all about?
The Bingaman-Specter bill, then, would cost taxpayers trillions of dollars and produce virtually nothing in terms of temperature outcome. But the pain of Bingaman-Specter doesn’t stop with trillions of taxpayer dollars. The heart of the Bingaman-Specter bill is a so-called cap-and-trade system in which CO2 emission limits (caps) would be decreed and certain businesses and other special interest group emitters (such as farmers and states) would be given permits to emit CO2.
Emitters that have extra permits could sell them in the open market to emitters that weren’t lucky enough to get free permits and that need permits. Extra permits, as such, are essentially free money.
Proponents of the cap-and-trade scheme — generally speaking, conniving environmentalists who want to appear to be business-friendly and special interest emitters who want to feed at the taxpayer trough — portray it as a "market-based" approach to addressing global warming concerns.
Not only is cap-and-trade not "market-based," highly respected economists, including former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Arthur Laffer and Harvard University’s Greg Mankiw, say cap-and-trade will cause significant economic harm.
In a recent paper sponsored by the Free Enterprise Education Institute, a think tank with which I am affiliated, Laffer said that a cap-and-trade scheme would act as a constraint on the energy supply — much like the 1970s-era Arab oil embargoes and other energy crises. He estimates that cap-and-trade would shrink the U.S. economy by 5.2 percent and reduce family income by $10,800 by 2020.
So the Bingaman-Specter bill not only would waste taxpayer money, but it would harm economic growth and reduce family income — all without affecting global temperature in any sort of meaningful or even detectable way.
Although the EPA acknowledged, "Since the variation in cumulative global greenhouse gas emissions are small under [Bingaman-Specter], the variation in the resulting CO2 concentrations are small," this only hints at the bill’s futility.
There can be little doubt as to why the EPA failed to carry through the ultimate implications of the 23 ppm impact of Bingaman-Specter. The agency would have "officially" exposed the bill and global warming alarmism as utterly absurd.
Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and DemandDebate.com. He is a junk science expert, and advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
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Showing posts with label Steve Miloy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Steve Miloy. Show all posts
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Saturday, August 18, 2007
More About Climate Models, NASA's Blunder, and Arctic Warming
Here is the latest commentary from JunkScience.com. Althought the author has been criticized as being a "big oil" front man, I find what he says to be rational, and although biased, (aren't we all, one way or another?) he seems to be factual.
Peter
From:
http://www.junkscience.com/ByTheJunkman/20070809.html
New Science Challenges Climate Alarmists
Thursday, August 09, 2007By Steven Milloy
“People like to complain about the weather,” goes the old saw. This is especially true nowadays as bad weather becomes an excuse for the climate alarmist-friendly media to trot out its manmade global warming boogeyman.
The alarmists seem to need thinly-veiled headlines – such as the Washington Post’s “Across Globe, Extremes of Heat and Rain” (Aug. 8) and the New York Times’ “Warming Threatens Farms in India, U.N. Officials Says” (Aug. 8) – as two more studies published this week in the journal Science and the discovery of an embarrassing temperature error rained on their parade.
In the first study, UK researchers claim to have “improved the forecasting skill of a global climate model by incorporating information about the actual state of the ocean and the atmosphere, rather than the approximate ones most models use.” The new model predicts that warming will slow during the next few years but then speed up again, and that at least half of the years after 2009 will be warmer than 1998 – the warmest year on record according to global warming legend (more on that later).
“A common criticism of global climate models, particularly for predicting the coming decade, has been that they only include factors, such as solar radiation, atmospheric aerosols and greenhouse gases, which are affected by changes from outside the climate system [while neglecting] internal climate variability that arises from natural changes within the system, like El Niño, fluctuations in ocean circulation and anomalies in ocean heat content,” researchers said.This internal variability could lead to short-term changes, especially regionally, that are quite different from the warming predicted to occur over the next century by global climate models, said researchers.
While the researchers want us to believe that climate modeling has advanced, it really has not.First, and as an overarching comment, if existing climate models are so prone to error, then why would Congress want to rely on them as a basis for enacting energy price-hiking and economy-harming laws and regulations?The new model predicts that, during the coming decade, average global temperature will be 0.3 degrees Centigrade (plus/minus 0.21 degrees Centigrade) higher than the 2004 average temperature.But can mathematical models really estimate global temperature change within 0.3 degrees Centigrade when we don’t even know what the average global temperature is to within 0.7 degrees Centigrade?
As NASA’s alarmist-in-chief James Hansen admits, we have no definition of what we are trying to measure in the context of average global temperature. “For the global mean, the most trusted models produce a value of roughly 57.2 degrees Fahrenheit, but it may easily be anywhere between 56 and 58 degrees Fahrenheit and regionally, let alone locally, the situation is even worse,” says Hansen.
For a dimmer view of the concept of average global temperature, consider the thoughts of renowned theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson who says that average land temperature is “impossible to measure… is a fiction… nobody knows what it is… there’s no way you can measure it.”
The UK researchers (and most other climate alarmists) are even wrong on the matter of 1998 being the warmest year on record – at least for the U.S. According to a new analysis which discovered an error in a NASA dataset, 1934 is the new warmest year on record for the U.S. In fact, four of the warmest 10 years in the U.S. date from the 1930s while only three date from the last 10 years. This is an embarrassing setback for alarmists, especially since about 80 percent of manmade carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions occurred after 1940.
In the second Science study, Desert Research Institute scientists report that increased levels of industrial pollution (soot) in Arctic snow during the late-19th and early-20th centuries may have caused the warming occurring in that region at that time. The researchers say the soot reduced the reflectivity of snow and ice, allowing the surface to absorb more energy from the sun.
If true, that line of reasoning may be relevant to the ongoing Arctic warming trend.
Though alarmists attribute that warming trend to increased atmospheric CO2, this argument seems easily batted aside by the observation that there is little correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature in the Arctic region.
Could ongoing Arctic deposition of soot be a possibility? You might not think so because U.S., Canadian and Western European industries now operate under strict soot control regulations. But what about China? After all, it burns more coal than the U.S., EU and Japan combined – typically without the emissions controls of developed nations.
A 2006 New York Times article, entitled “Pollution From Chinese Coal Casts a Global Shadow,” reported that soot emissions from the thousands of Chinese coal-burning factories and power plants waft across the Pacific Ocean and are easily detectable in the U.S. Northwest. The Desert Research Institute scientists note in their paper that, “Some models suggest that a large fraction of Arctic pollutants originate in south Asia.”
If you’re worried about polar bears floating on melting chunks of ice, clamping down on CO2 emissions from SUVs may do absolutely nothing to alleviate that concern.
Because of the many questions about the science used to inflate the climate-worry bubble – and as reported on the Fox News Channel show Special Report (Aug. 7) – my Web site JunkScience.com is offering quite a nice prize to the first person who can scientifically prove that humans are causing catastrophic global warming. But it’s going to take a lot more than ominous weather reports to win the “Ultimate Global Warming Challenge.”
Peter
From:
http://www.junkscience.com/ByTheJunkman/20070809.html
New Science Challenges Climate Alarmists
Thursday, August 09, 2007By Steven Milloy
“People like to complain about the weather,” goes the old saw. This is especially true nowadays as bad weather becomes an excuse for the climate alarmist-friendly media to trot out its manmade global warming boogeyman.
The alarmists seem to need thinly-veiled headlines – such as the Washington Post’s “Across Globe, Extremes of Heat and Rain” (Aug. 8) and the New York Times’ “Warming Threatens Farms in India, U.N. Officials Says” (Aug. 8) – as two more studies published this week in the journal Science and the discovery of an embarrassing temperature error rained on their parade.
In the first study, UK researchers claim to have “improved the forecasting skill of a global climate model by incorporating information about the actual state of the ocean and the atmosphere, rather than the approximate ones most models use.” The new model predicts that warming will slow during the next few years but then speed up again, and that at least half of the years after 2009 will be warmer than 1998 – the warmest year on record according to global warming legend (more on that later).
“A common criticism of global climate models, particularly for predicting the coming decade, has been that they only include factors, such as solar radiation, atmospheric aerosols and greenhouse gases, which are affected by changes from outside the climate system [while neglecting] internal climate variability that arises from natural changes within the system, like El Niño, fluctuations in ocean circulation and anomalies in ocean heat content,” researchers said.This internal variability could lead to short-term changes, especially regionally, that are quite different from the warming predicted to occur over the next century by global climate models, said researchers.
While the researchers want us to believe that climate modeling has advanced, it really has not.First, and as an overarching comment, if existing climate models are so prone to error, then why would Congress want to rely on them as a basis for enacting energy price-hiking and economy-harming laws and regulations?The new model predicts that, during the coming decade, average global temperature will be 0.3 degrees Centigrade (plus/minus 0.21 degrees Centigrade) higher than the 2004 average temperature.But can mathematical models really estimate global temperature change within 0.3 degrees Centigrade when we don’t even know what the average global temperature is to within 0.7 degrees Centigrade?
As NASA’s alarmist-in-chief James Hansen admits, we have no definition of what we are trying to measure in the context of average global temperature. “For the global mean, the most trusted models produce a value of roughly 57.2 degrees Fahrenheit, but it may easily be anywhere between 56 and 58 degrees Fahrenheit and regionally, let alone locally, the situation is even worse,” says Hansen.
For a dimmer view of the concept of average global temperature, consider the thoughts of renowned theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson who says that average land temperature is “impossible to measure… is a fiction… nobody knows what it is… there’s no way you can measure it.”
The UK researchers (and most other climate alarmists) are even wrong on the matter of 1998 being the warmest year on record – at least for the U.S. According to a new analysis which discovered an error in a NASA dataset, 1934 is the new warmest year on record for the U.S. In fact, four of the warmest 10 years in the U.S. date from the 1930s while only three date from the last 10 years. This is an embarrassing setback for alarmists, especially since about 80 percent of manmade carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions occurred after 1940.
In the second Science study, Desert Research Institute scientists report that increased levels of industrial pollution (soot) in Arctic snow during the late-19th and early-20th centuries may have caused the warming occurring in that region at that time. The researchers say the soot reduced the reflectivity of snow and ice, allowing the surface to absorb more energy from the sun.
If true, that line of reasoning may be relevant to the ongoing Arctic warming trend.
Though alarmists attribute that warming trend to increased atmospheric CO2, this argument seems easily batted aside by the observation that there is little correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature in the Arctic region.
Could ongoing Arctic deposition of soot be a possibility? You might not think so because U.S., Canadian and Western European industries now operate under strict soot control regulations. But what about China? After all, it burns more coal than the U.S., EU and Japan combined – typically without the emissions controls of developed nations.
A 2006 New York Times article, entitled “Pollution From Chinese Coal Casts a Global Shadow,” reported that soot emissions from the thousands of Chinese coal-burning factories and power plants waft across the Pacific Ocean and are easily detectable in the U.S. Northwest. The Desert Research Institute scientists note in their paper that, “Some models suggest that a large fraction of Arctic pollutants originate in south Asia.”
If you’re worried about polar bears floating on melting chunks of ice, clamping down on CO2 emissions from SUVs may do absolutely nothing to alleviate that concern.
Because of the many questions about the science used to inflate the climate-worry bubble – and as reported on the Fox News Channel show Special Report (Aug. 7) – my Web site JunkScience.com is offering quite a nice prize to the first person who can scientifically prove that humans are causing catastrophic global warming. But it’s going to take a lot more than ominous weather reports to win the “Ultimate Global Warming Challenge.”
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