Rep. Dana Rohrabacher - WikimediaIf you believe in man-made climate change — and think the nation’s unemployment rate truly has fallen to 7.5 percent — then Rep. Dana Rohrabacher has a bridge to sell you.
Climate
Change Dispatch news
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The European Union’s
climate change policy is on the brink of collapse today after MEPs torpedoed
Europe’s flagship CO2 emissions trading scheme by voting against a measure to
support the price of carbon permits. The price of carbon crashed up to 45 per
cent to a record-low €2.63 a metric ton, after the European Parliament rejected
a proposal to change the EU emissions-trading laws to delay the sale of 900m
CO2 permits on the world’s biggest carbon markets. --Bruno Waterfields, The Daily
Telegraph, 16 April 2013
Global Warming and Other Superstitions
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Published
: February 20th, 2013
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Update: February 13, 2013
Each of the three great experiments in
authoritarian government in the senior economy included some promotional
inspiration. As Rome was corrupted from a republic to a police state the
"Genius of the Emperor" provided compelling guidance.
In the Sixteenth Century "Papal Infallibility" provided the front
for a venal and corrupt bureaucracy. The current financial experiment started
around 1900 and essential dogma has included the omniscience and omnipotence
of central bankers.
The wonders of extremely intrusive
government under the label of Communism was rejected by an always
dissatisfied and, in 1989, suddenly critical public. The fall of the Berlin
Wall was the symbol. Just as suddenly, full-on socialism could not be sold to
the public by control freaks. "The Freeman" in the early 1990s had
an article that named the names that turned to environmentalism as a possibly
more successful way to impose control. The most successful and at the same
time the most dangerous within this political movement has been
"Anthropogenic Global Warming" (AGW). Then, the promoters
discovered that the climate has been warming for some 12,000 years and the
pitch was morphed to "Climate Change". The labels also included
"Greenhouse Effect" and no matter what the weather event the
"cause" has been the evils of free-market economies.
Research behind the effort was quite
limited - the assumption has been that there has been only one influence upon
the climate and that is atmospheric carbon dioxide. This was an IPCC
selection from all of the influences upon climate. The main ones are solar
energy, which is variable, and the amount received at the Earth's
surface, which also varies. Both variations are periodic - as are consequent
warming phases and cooling phases.
On the nearer-term, Solar Cycle 23-24
has been the weakest since 1913. Solar physicists, Livingston and Penn, have
been working on the possibility of diminishing solar output since the
mid-1990s. A link to the 2008 review of their updated paper follows.
Subject: Livingston and Penn paper:
"Sunspots may vanish by 2015″. | Watts Up With That?
In early January, the UK Met
Office quietly released their study that temperatures have not increased since 1998
The chart below clearly shows the
"Maunder Minimum" and the "Modern Maximum", which is the
period of unusually high output that prevailed from the 1940s to the 1990s.
Prof. Solanki at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich states that
this is the sun's brightest period in a thousand years. Temperatures have
been at the highest in a thousand years, but not as high as with the Medieval
Maximum.
The latest warming trend seems to have
stalled out, naturally, almost 15 years ago. The following chart (1979 to
date) plots temperature history (blue line)
trending sideways. CO2 (green line) is still going up. If the Left's theories
about CO2 were valid the rise in global temperature would be getting steeper.
It isn't. As in "paper covers rock", solar energy trumps CO2.
Note CO2's remarkably regular seasonal
variation. This is explained as due to seasonal variation from plant life
(land and sea) changing from emitting CO2, to absorbing CO2. Global
commercial and industrial activity does not show the equivalent variation.
Beginning with the 1990s low, the next
chart covers Cycles 23-24 when the high count was 170 sunspots with the peak
in 2000. So far the high has been slightly less than 100 in 2011. This
compares to the high of 254 in 1957.
Solar activity has been diminishing
since and recently solar physicists have provided the research that explained
and anticipated the decline to the lowest minimum since 1913. The current
cycle has been scheduled to reach its best this year (one review expects this
leg up to peak at 84 in August) and then turn down.
Livingston and Penn called for a significant
decline in solar activity and the numbers are confirming it. Within a couple
of years it could be concluded that the Modern Maximum is over. That the
trend could continue to another minimum that would be as severe as the
Maunder Minimum is uncertain.
The main thing is that IPCC was run by
a political caste that selected theories about climate disaster and when
necessary data were cooked to "prove" otherwise unsupportable
notions. The goal was to create hysteria that could only be remedied through
massive increases in taxation and intrusion upon private life.
The advance of science has always
depended upon skepticism, sound data and logic. This authoritarian age has
created some interesting departures. Throughout mankind's history we have
thrived during climate warming and suffered during extensive cooling. The
IPCC insists that for the first time in history warming is harmful. Oh well,
it goes with the ideology - the Berlin Wall was the first wall ever built to
keep the people in rather than the bad guys out.
The last time the authoritarians made
it dangerous to hold scientific theories that denied the politically correct
ones was at the end of the last great experiment in intrusion. In the early
1600s Galileo was condemned for denying that the solar system rotated around
the Earth.
A couple of pieces we published in 2009
concluded that the mania about "AGW", or "Climate Change"
was peaking. These are attached.
Other
Superstitions
Ambitious authoritarians promoted that
only one thing was influencing climate change and that is the amount of CO2
in the atmosphere. That it makes up only 0.038% of the gases surrounding our
planet does not matter. Nor does the long history whereby the amount of CO2
lags temperature change by some 400 to 800 years.
Of course, ambitious governments using
one focus for control have not been limited to climate hysteria. Beginning in
the early 1900s financial adventurers touted that a US central bank would end
financial panics and disguised as the Federal Reserve System it was imposed.
Original and subsequent promoters seem to have overlooked that the tout
behind the formation of the Bank of England in 1694 was that it would
"infallibly" lower interest rates. Naturally, to prevent financial
disasters. There have been many since - usually two or three big ones per
century. Sometimes severe enough for the establishment to distress itself
about the inadequacies of the prevailing banking system. The other part of
the pattern is that the same establishment during a financial mania boasts
the current government financial agency will prevent things from going wrong.
In the 1873 Bubble enthusiasms were
assured because the US did not have a central bank and the Treasury System
was proof against contraction. At the crest of the 1929 Bubble enthusiasms
were supported by the tout that the old and dreadful Treasury System was gone
and replaced by a "scientific" Federal Reserve System.
The Fed was the first of over-rated
concepts that were selected to serve authoritarian ambition.. The next was
the grand idea that a central agency can and should "manage" a
"national" economy. Keynesian theories were selected because they
enabled a massive expansion of government, which extended its power through
mainly one thing - the amount of money in circulation. Warm-mongers have been
obsessed about atmospheric CO2 and policymakers have been obsessed about M1,
M2, etc.
Financial history has a long record of
dynamic economic expansions turning into eras of magnificent asset inflations
- including financial assets. After the huge expansion of credit a long
post-bubble contraction has followed. The feature of which has been severe
recessions and weak recoveries.
Essentially on a global scale, when
policymakers have discovered that there is no such thing as a
"national" economy.
The financial mania that climaxed in
2007 virtually replicated all of the great bubbles since the first one in
1720. Ours was number six and 1929 was number five. And the record is that
the senior central bank has never been able to keep a bubble going and has
never prevented the lengthy post-bubble contractions.
Wrap
The next few years are going to be very
interesting. Solar activity and its influence upon the warming trend that
began out of the exceptionally cold winters of the late 1600s is ending. The
Maunder Minimum became the Modern Maximum and the latter is ending. This
would be supported by the sunspot count resuming its downtrend in the fall.
The establishment has been boasting
that by manipulation of only one gas society can be saved from a
self-inflicted climate disaster.
In 2007 the establishment boasted that
through manipulation of interest rates a financial calamity was impossible.
They had a "Dream Team" of economists. Then the same establishment
admitted that it was the worst recession since the last Great Depression.
Then they boasted that without their "stimulus" the 2008 Panic
would not have ended. Now they admit that this has been the weakest recovery
since the 1930s. This is the basic pattern of a post-bubble contraction.
The first business expansion out of the
Crash is becoming mature and any weakening will be dangerous to an economy
still over loaded with debt.
It should be understood that great
financial manias and their consequent contractions have been regular events,
as has been an unusually active sun and its recent decline. Mother Nature
will continue to prevail. Implacable market forces will insist that debt be
contracted and solar physics has arranged for a significant decrease in solar
output.
Fads in "Science"
"During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperatures have fallen,
irregularly at first but more sharply over the past decade. Judging from the
record of past interglacial ages, the present time of higher temperatures
should be drawing to an end...leading into the next ice age." - National
Academy of Science (NAS), 1974 - as quoted in Forbes, December 5, 2009
"The overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that human
activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas), are
responsible for most of the climate change currently being observed." -
National Academy of Science, Website, February 2012
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It's been a rough stretch for Colorado's "new
energy economy." Over the last few months, the Centennial State's green energy
industry, which the new energy economy was supposed to kick start, has been
beset by a series of setbacks. Loveland-based Abound Solar went bankrupt; Vestas
Wind Systems laid off almost 200 workers at its Windsor blade plant; and General
Electric pulled the plug on a planned solar manufacturing plant in Aurora.
The troubles of renewable energy companies
are not unique to Colorado; they extend nationwide. U.S. taxpayers ponied up $60
billion for green energy "investments" as part of the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act of 2009, better known as the stimulus bill. The results are
only coming in only now, and they are not good. The list of "stimulosers" — of
which Solyndra is only the most famous example — is long and growing. It
includes Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, Amonix, A123 Systems, Nevada Geothermal
Power, and many others.
These green industries are in trouble for a
simple reason. They are running out of subsidies. The 2009 stimulus has been
spent and the wind production tax credit is set to expire in December. Without a
steady influx of taxpayer help, renewable energy sources like wind and solar
power cannot compete, due to their high capital costs and intermittent
supply.
How dependent on government are these
industries? The American Wind Energy Association estimates that almost half of
the entire wind power workforce — almost 37,000 people — would lose their jobs
if Congress were to allow a single tax subsidy to expire. Such sudden and severe
contractions are symptomatic of industries whose business plan is predicated on
political favoritism. When the political winds change and the subsidies on which
these companies depend are cut, the bottom falls out from under them.
On the demand side, green energy entails
higher rates for consumers. In 2011, for example, a New Energy Economy policy
known as the Solar*Rewards program accounted for almost 4 percent of sales,
despite generating a scant half a percent of Xcel Energy's system-wide power.
That's a bad deal for Coloradans. Unfortunately, the burden on Xcel ratepayers
will only increase with the expiration of federal subsidies, which have
effectively discounted Colorado's policies.
Somewhat paradoxically, the new energy
economy's biggest expense likely will pertain to fossil fuels. The 2010 Clean
Air Clean Jobs Act mandated that Xcel Energy generate from natural gas almost
1,000 megawatts of base load supply that it now gets from coal. At current
prices, natural gas is historically cheap, but it is still more than twice as
expensive as coal, according to Xcel Energy's regulatory filings.
And let's not forget that the price of
natural gas reached historical highs only four summers ago. In fact, the high
cost and volatility of the natural gas market relative to coal was the primary
reason that the Colorado utilities have relied on the latter to meet the
preponderance of the state's energy needs.
A spike in the price of gas after the current
supply contracts expire would cost Xcel Energy ratepayers dearly.
The worst aspect of the new energy economy
program is its regressive nature. Utility bills represent a larger portion of
poor households' budgets, so the new energy economy's costs are shouldered
disproportionately by those who can least afford them.
Before the new energy economy program came
along, Colorado utilities' decisions on how to provide power to consumers were
guided by considerations on how to do so most efficiently at the least cost.
Now, many of those decisions are based on political considerations, such as the
need to prop up renewable energy, imposed by politicians. As a result, Colorado
ratepayers can expect to pay for unsustainable subsidies, endure lower power
supply reliability, and suffer unexpected consequences — all in the name of
green ideology.
William
Yeatman is assistant director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the
Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington,
D.C.
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