SOURCE:
The Week That Was (July 23, 2022)Brought to You by SEPP (www.SEPP.org)The Science and Environmental Policy Project
“The only source of knowledge is experience.”
– Albert Einstein
THIS WEEK:, by Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
SUMMARY:
After the Supreme Court stopped any effort to use the EPA to remake energy use in the American economy, green advocates hoped to use Congress to pass sweeping legislation to eliminate the use of fossil fuels and promote the use of unreliable wind and solar even further than the current subsidies and mandates require. Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia, a coal producing state that has been severely hurt by the anti-fossil fuel fad, announced he would not support the proposed legislation. This sent advocates of the Green New Deal, including the popular press, into a rage. In their anger many so-called progressives revealed how anti-liberal and anti-democratic they are. This will be discussed in light of economic systems as described in classical economics.
It is July and parts of the Northern Hemisphere are subject to heat waves from stagnant high-pressure systems. These are being used as “proof” of global warming. But they are not global, or even widespread over the land masses in the Northern Hemisphere.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bjorn Lomborg uses a study in The Lancet, Planetary Health to buttress his assertions that warming is beneficial to humanity, cold is far more dangerous.
Atmospheric scientist Roy Spencer created a simple model for estimating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions through the year 2050 and beyond. He compares his model with the various projections of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that uses various guesses of what may happen rather than what is happening. Also, he estimates when the atmosphere will have a CO2 concentration twice that of the assumed preindustrial level.
The American Meteorological Society (AMS) was once a highly respected organization of professionals wishing to learn about changing weather and climate. It is now a highly politicized organization advocating human emissions of CO2 are causing dangerous global warming, using models that fail basic testing against actual atmospheric temperature trends. The AMS statement on the Supreme Court decision in West Virginia v. EPA illustrates how low the organization has sunk.
... Economic Systems: In classical economics, pre-Keynesian, economic systems could be roughly separated by two questions: One, who controls the means of production (farms, factories, etc.); and two, who controls what is produced? In a free-market system, called Capitalism by Karl Marx for its most distasteful characteristic, the wealthy few capitalists; individuals, and groups of individuals (corporations) control the means of production; and markets (individuals acting in groups) control what is produced. In Communism, government controls both the means of production and what is produced. In Socialism government (no matter which type) controls the means of production but the market determines what is produced.
In Fascism, government controls what is produced, but not the means of production. For example, before World War II in Germany, individuals, and corporations (groups of individuals) controlled the means of production. The government controlled what is produced by favoring certain products and by disallowing or outlawing others.
Interestingly, many advocates of a Green New Deal are advocating moving towards a Fascist system – favoring certain types of energy for electricity generation such as wind and solar while punishing other types of energy for electricity generations such as fossil fuels or nuclear (by making disposal of radioactive waste prohibitively expensive).
Such desires were in full display as a result of West Virginia v. EPA. As an editorial in the Wall Street Journal states:
“Democrats denounced Donald Trump as a dictator for invoking emergency powers to build his border wall after he was blocked in Congress. Well, now they’re demanding that President Biden declare climate change a national emergency to advance their anti-carbon agenda that Congress won’t pass. Apparently, dictators are in the eye of the beholder.
Progressives are furious at West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin for scuttling a big climate spending bill. ‘With legislative climate options now closed, it’s now time for executive Beast Mode,’ Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse tweeted last week. And now the White House is leaking that the President may declare a national climate emergency as soon as this week.
This would be an even greater abuse of power than Mr. Trump’s repurposing of military funds for the border wall. We criticized Mr. Trump at the time and warned that a Democratic President might use the precedent to declare a climate emergency. And here we are.
While a President may sometimes need to act with dispatch during an emergency, climate change isn’t close to such an event. Climate change is neither sudden nor unexpected. The world has warmed by 1.1 degree Celsius since the late 19th century, and the pace of future warming is uncertain and depends on multiple variables.
In any case, nothing progressives want Mr. Biden to do will affect the climate or even reduce global CO2 emissions. China and India will continue to build coal plants that offset all of the West’s climate sacrifices.
But that isn’t stopping progressives from demanding that Mr. Biden roll over the Constitution’s separation of powers. One irony is that Congress passed the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to limit abuses of executive power. The law requires the President to activate his powers under one of 130 or so statutes that authorize emergency actions.
Here are some of the ways progressives now want Mr. Biden to impose his climate agenda without democratic assent:
• Halt oil exports. A 2015 legislative compromise by Barack Obama and Paul Ryan lifted the decades-old ban on crude exports in return for extending green-energy tax credits. This helped unleash U.S. oil production, especially in the Permian basin.
Progressives want to end shale fracking. But banning U.S. exports would drive up global oil prices, and the U.S. would still have to import refined products and crude to meet demand. In the name of meeting a climate emergency, they’d create a bigger energy emergency.
• Stop oil and gas drilling in the outer continental shelf. Mr. Biden has already imposed a de facto moratorium on new offshore leases, but progressives want him to suspend existing leases. This would reduce U.S. production by about 1.8 million barrels a day—about two to three times as much as Russian output has declined owing to Western sanctions.
Progressives want Mr. Biden to self-sanction the U.S. oil and gas industry while they prod him to lift sanctions on Venezuela and Iran. Canceling active leases would abrogate contracts and presumably require compensation, which would require money from Congress.
• Use the Defense Production Act to build green energy. This Cold War-era law lets the President marshal domestic industry for national security. Mr. Biden has already invoked the DPA to boost manufacturing of solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, and heat pumps.
While Mr. Biden could try to command manufacturers to make more green products, logistical snags would abound. Auto makers couldn’t easily convert factories into making solar panels or even electric vehicles. A shortage of critical minerals such as cobalt and lithium would also limit production, and it takes years to develop new mines.
• Repurpose funds as Mr. Trump did. The climate left wants Mr. Biden to use funds for disaster relief or military construction to build green energy systems. Americans whose homes are destroyed in wildfires or hurricanes won’t be happy if Mr. Biden raids disaster funds to build solar plants.”
The most serious harm with all this would be to the rule of law. The Supreme Court in its landmark Youngstown Steel (1952) decision blocked Harry Truman’s attempt to nationalize steel mills during the Korean War. Justice Robert Jackson famously explained in his concurrence that a President’s authority is ‘at its maximum’ when he ‘acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress,’ while it’s weaker when acting ‘in the absence of a congressional grant or denial of authority.’” [Boldface added]
Francis Menton has an essay on how ridiculous climate emergency claims are. Climate has been warming since the end of the Little Ice Age, which the IPCC and climate advocates ignore or try to disguise. If CO2 eliminated this period of widespread starvation, famine, and disease, which is doubtful, then humanity should be grateful for the use of fossil fuels not condemn it.
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It’s Summertime: A severe heat wave hit parts of western Europe, setting record temperatures in England. This was highly played up in the popular press, claiming such heat waves will become more common in the future. This future is built on models that are contradicted by physical evidence. Separately, Anthony Watts and Cliff Mass discuss this heat wave. Also, Watts discusses the heat wave in the U.S.
Both show maps of all of Europe. It is hot in the west, but cold in the east and the north. For some reason, the alarmist press ignores the cold regions. On July 20, a hot day in England, the low temperature rose to minus 97°F (minus 72°C) at Vostok Station, Antarctica. It had been minus 100°F (minus 73°C) for several days ending on July 12. All too often the word global does not mean the entire globe.
Further, Tony Heller reports that the famed Northwest Passage through the Arctic is not yet open for shipping. Despite predictions, year-round shipping is still to come.
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Making Matters Worse: Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bjorn Lomborg discusses how twisted the fear of global warming has become. He starts:
“The chattering classes who jet to conferences at Davos or Aspen have for years been telling the rest of us that our biggest immediate threats are climate change, environmental disasters, and biodiversity loss. They point to the current heat waves killing thousands across Europe as the latest reason to change our societies and economies radically by switching to renewables.
Such arguments are misleading. It’s true that as temperatures rise the world will experience more heat waves, but humans also adapt to such things. In Spain, for example, rising temperatures have actually led to fewer heat deaths, because people have adapted faster than temperatures have gone up. It simply took air conditioning, public cooling centers and better treatment of maladies that are caused or aggravated by heat, such as heatstroke and heart disease.
The exclusive focus on heat deaths is also misleading. Across the world, low temperatures are much more dangerous than high ones: Half a million people die each year from heat, but more than 4.5 million die from cold. While rising temperatures will increase heat deaths, they will also decrease cold deaths. A recent Lancet study found that rising temperatures since 2000 have on net reduced the number of temperature-related deaths. Researchers concluded that by the end of the 2010s, rising temperatures globally were causing 116,000 more heat deaths annually, but also leading to 283,000 fewer cold deaths a year.
Moreover, politicians’ singular focus on climate change ignores that people are much more worried about rampant inflation, especially rising food, and energy prices. And climate policies are making those problems worse.
Much of the extreme energy-price increase that normal people are dealing with is caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine. But things wouldn’t be nearly as bad if the West hadn’t thrown up green roadblocks to its own energy security, such as President Biden’s moratorium on gas leases or Europe’s refusal to dig into its substantial shale gas reserves. Climate policies also increase energy prices by subsidizing renewables like solar and wind. That makes it even harder to adapt to the extreme temperatures climate activists bemoan. You need cheap and reliable energy to afford air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter.
Rising fuel prices are also making food more expensive. Low-cost synthetic fertilizer is one of the greatest technologies humanity has invented for feeding the world, but it’s mostly made with natural gas. Even with almost a billion people at risk of starvation, climate-obsessed bureaucrats still object to producing more fertilizer because of the fossil fuels required.”
Lomborg goes into some details about protests against green policies and concludes with:
“It’s starting to dawn on some elites that their policies are creating political dangers. Frans Timmermans, the European Commission’s vice president, has said that many millions of Europeans may not be able to heat their homes this winter. This, he concludes, could lead to ‘very, very strong conflict and strife.,
He’s right. When people are cold, hungry, and broke, they rebel. If the elites continue pushing incredibly expensive policies that are disconnected from the urgent challenges facing most people, we need to brace for chaos.”
Given what modern measurements reveal about the greenhouse effect, there is no reason to believe anyone selling dangerous global warming.
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CO2 Concentration Forecast: Using a simple model which he describes, atmospheric scientist Roy Spencer gives a summary of his latest work on CO2 concentration forecasts.
“Summary
The simple CO2 budget model I introduced in 2019 is updated with the latest Mauna Loa measurements of atmospheric CO2 and with new Energy Information Administration estimates of global CO2 emissions through 2050. The model suggests that atmospheric CO2 will barely double pre-industrial levels by 2100, with a total radiative forcing of the climate system well below the most extreme scenario (RCP8.5) used in alarmist literature (and the U.S. national climate assessment), with the closest match to RCP4.5. The model also clearly shows the CO2 reducing effect of the Mt. Pinatubo eruption of 1991.”
Based on his graph, the model forecasts that CO2 will double from pre-industrial levels around 2090. There is no reason to assume that China and the rest of Asia will stop using fossil fuels, regardless of the rants by western politicians.
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How Low Can You Go? In the wake of West Virginia v. EPA, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) released a statement beginning with
“1. Climate change is extraordinarily dangerous to humanity and all life
- Climate is a basic life-support system for people and all life.
- Global climate changes occurring now are larger and faster than any humanity is known to have endured since our societal transition to agriculture.
- The physical characteristics of the planet, biological systems, and the resources they provide, and social institutions we have created all depend heavily on climate, are central to human well-being, and are sensitive to climate change.
“2. People are changing climate
- Multiple independent lines of scientific evidence confirm that people bear responsibility.
- The warming effect of our greenhouse gas emissions is demonstrated through laboratory experiments, evidence from past changes in climate on Earth, and the role of greenhouse gasses on other planets.
- The patterns of climate change occurring now match the characteristics we expect from our greenhouse gasses and not the other potential drivers of change: the sun, volcanoes, aerosols, changes in land-use, or natural variability.
“3. The scientific conclusions summarized here result from decades of intensive research and examination
- The scientific evidence has been assessed comprehensively by independent scientific institutions and independent experts that consider all evidence.
- Accuracy is central to credibility for scientific institutions such as the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Meteorological Society, and American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS], all of which have assessed climate science.
- No broadly contradictory assessments from credible scientific organizations exist.”
Apparently, AMS is unaware that climate has been changing for hundreds of millions of years, long before humanity existed. The current warming is not unusual and over the past 8000 years it has been generally cooling. The atmosphere is not warming at the rate claimed by the scientific institutions. About fifty years of atmospheric evidence shows that the assumptions used by the scientific institutions are out-of-date, obsolete.
In 2011 William Gray, a pioneer in forecasting of hurricanes, wrote about the leadership of AMS:
“The AMS Executive Director Keith Seitter and the other AMS higher-ups and the Council have not shown the scientific maturity and wisdom we would expect of our AMS leaders.”
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Mixing Data Sources: The 2008 report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate” contained a graph of “Sea Level Since Last Glacial Maximum” (p.17). It was based on coral and peat data from the Caribbean, which is geologically stable. For the last 4000 years the sea level rise has been generally constant, after rising significantly for about 8000 years. Sea levels are about 120 meters (400 feet) above what they were 18,000 years ago. The journal AAAS Science Advances published a paper with a press release stating:
“According to an international team of researchers led by University of South Florida geologists, sea level has risen 18 centimeters since the start of the 20th century.”
The 18 cm per century (7 inches) is consistent with the findings in the NIPCC report. Yet, the paper used speleothems (stalactites or stalagmites) from a cave in Mallorca, a Mediterranean island off Spain, to estimate a lower sea level rise from for 3,860 to 2,840 years ago. Why did they mix data sources? There was no standardization period given indicating the measurements are similar. The National Science Foundation funded the research.
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Number of the Week: 50 years. On July 22, NASA announced 50 years of the Landsat series of satellites. According to the press release:
“Landsat shows us Earth from space. For 50 years, the mission has collected data on the forests, farms, urban areas, and freshwater of our home planet, generating the longest continuous record of its kind. Decision makers from across the globe use freely available Landsat data to better understand environmental change, manage agricultural practices, allocate scarce water resources, respond to natural disasters and more.”
The press release ignored probably the most important accomplishment of these satellites. They provide fifty years of pictorial evidence that the earth is greening, most likely from enhanced atmospheric carbon dioxide. See links under Social Benefits of Carbon Dioxide.