By Marc Morano, EPW Blog
The Washington Post reported on July 9 that India was “balking” at the U.S approach to addressing CO2 emissions. India joined four other nations to call for “much steeper reductions” for developed nations.
Fact: India issued its National Action Plan on Climate Change in June 2008 disputing man-made global warming fears and declared the country of one billion people had no intention of stopping its energy growth or cutting back its CO2 emissions.
An article in the Australian Herald on July 9 by Andrew Bolt, noted: “The plan’s authors, the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change, said India would rather save its people from poverty than global warming, and would not cut growth to cut gases.”
The report declared: “No firm link between the documented [climate] changes described below and warming due to anthropogenic climate change has yet been established.” The report made clear that India has no plans to cut back energy usage. “It is obvious that India needs to substantially increase its per capita energy consumption to provide a minimally acceptable level of wellbeing to its people. India is determined that its per capita greenhouse gas emissions will at no point exceed that of developed countries.” The Australian Herald article noted that this declaration “means India won’t stop its per capita emissions (now at 1.02 tonnes) from growing until they match those of countries such as the US (now 20 tonnes).”
The Australian Herald article continued: “What makes the Indian report so interesting is that unlike our (Australia’s) Ross Garnaut, who just accepted the word of those scientists wailing we faced doom, the Indian experts went to the trouble to check what the climate was actually doing and why. Their conclusion? They couldn’t actually find anything bad in India that was caused by man-made warming. In fact, they couldn’t find much change in the climate at all. Yes, India’s surface temperature over a century had inched up by 0.4 degrees, but there had been no change in trends for large-scale droughts, floods, or rain: ‘The observed monsoon rainfall at the all-India level does not show any significant trend . . .’ It even dismissed the panic Al Gore helped to whip up about melting Himalayan glaciers: ‘While recession of some glaciers has occurred in some Himalayan regions in recent years, the trend is not consistent across the entire mountain chain. It is, accordingly, too early to establish long-term trends, or their causation, in respect of which there are several hypotheses.”
In addition, in January 2008, Indian engineer and economist Rajendra Pachauri, who is the UN IPCC Chairman, announced that he was going “to look into the apparent temperature plateau so far this century.” [Note: Global temperatures have not risen since 1998, according to UN data. See: ‘Global Warming Will Stop,’ New Peer-Reviewed Study Says ]
UPDATE: Roger Pielke Jr. reported here that Rajendra Pachauri has supported the Indian Government plan.
Dr. Robert Rose in Salem, MA News
We do know that, due to the earth’s orbit and the tilt and wobble of the axis of the earth’s spin, global warming is occurring as it has many times in the past; and it will continue for some years before the cooling cycle begins and the glaciers take over, also as they have in the past. We are trying very hard to develop computer simulations to predict the contribution our activities are making to the warming, and the going has been difficult. These models can’t be tested experimentally (unless we can find another planet on which to conduct our experiments) and are tested mostly by fitting them to past behavior, pretty much the same approach as handicapping horse races. Clearly, these are not “facts.” They are computer models. They may be correct or at least lead us to the correct answer, but the earliest model appears to be incorrect. We have also not examined the consequences - human, economic or environmental - of reversing our contribution (whatever it is) to global warming. The unintended consequences of corn-based ethanol on our economy (and even more important on our shrinking water supply) is a good case in point. In any case, it is not helpful for clergy to condemn those with whom they disagree as immoral or untruthful. (Galileo had that problem - one we don’t need a repeat, thank you.)
Robert Rose is an emeritus professor of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT with approximately 50 years of experience teaching various scientific disciplines at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Professor Rose, now retired from DMSE, directs MIT’s Concourse Program
By Seth Sutel, AP
Universal and two partners said Sunday they have reached a deal to buy The Weather Channel from Landmark Communications Inc., ending a drawn-out process that had attracted interest from several major media companies. Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but a person familiar with the matter who insisted on anonymity said the purchase price was $3.5 billion in cash. NBC was joined in the deal by the private equity firms The Blackstone Group LP and Bain Capital LLC.
In addition to The Weather Channel, which can be seen by 97 percent of U.S. cable subscribers, the deal also includes several related assets such as weather services for newspapers and radio stations and the widely used Web site Weather.com. NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co., became the sole bidder for The Weather Channel last month after Time Warner Inc. dropped out. CBS Corp. and cable industry leader Comcast Corp. had also expressed interest earlier.
NBC already operates a digital weather and news service called NBC Weather Plus that was launched in 2004 and would make a logical fit with The Weather Channel. NBC Weather Plus is owned by NBC and its affiliated TV stations and can be seen on digital cable services and digital subchannels operated by NBC stations. NBC and Landmark said in a statement that The Weather Channel would be operated as a separate entity out of its base in Atlanta. They said they expected the transaction to close by year-end, pending regulatory approvals. Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., GE Commercial Finance, GSO Capital Partners and Sankaty Advisors LLC will provide debt financing for the transaction. The Weather Channel was launched in 1982. Its Web site has about 37 million monthly unique visitors, putting it in the top 15 Web sites, according to the company. The Weather Channel has 1,300 employees and estimated annual revenues of $550 million. Read more here.
By Peter Sasso, Newsbusters
While guest hosting Wednesday’s “Morning Joe”, former General Electric CEO Jack Welch condemned global warming, the very theory MSNBC has been peddling for years. GE, of course, owns MSNBC; the rebuke of MSNBC’s favorite alarmist hypothesis came in a segment where hosts share noteworthy editorials. Welch decided to share an opinion piece from Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal aptly titled “Global Warming As Mass Neurosis.” Welch informed the audience that the article has “a lot of technical numbers here to show you that NASA overstated what’s happening.” Welch summarized the article by saying “And they got an argument that states that global warming is the attack on capitalism that socialism couldn’t bring”
After Jack’s synopsis, co- host Pat Buchanan interjects his belief that global warming is “a neo-Marxist idea for the transfer of wealth and power.” Jack Welch jumps in to agree saying “Right” Pat Buchanan then decides to carry his rebuke even further by saying “And at the end global elites, and they’re, you know they’re gonna to dictate to all of us because of this phony idea that we’re all in some eminent danger. I agree with that 100 %.” Welch, the former GE CEO enthusiastically jumped in to agree saying “Absolutely!”
Later in the segment Mika Brzezinski did her best to put pressure on her former boss by saying “Alright, but I just want to say at some point this [global warming] is going to come back and haunt us if we don’t address it, Jack.” However ‘Neutron Jack’ refused to cede his ground and sarcastically responded “We’ll see.” What makes this vivacious segment so amusing is that as the former Chief Executive Officer of General Electric, Jack Welch, was once the head of a company that owns MSNBC. MSNBC is a network that hawks global warming mythology on a regular basis. Just two months ago Newsbusters profiled how MSNBC firebrand Chris Matthews was shocked by global warming skepticism. Apparently, Matthews never talked to his old boss about the subject. Read more including transcript here.
Andrew Revkin, New York Times Dot Earth Blog
One of the most vivid symbols of global warming used by scientists and campaigners to spur society to curb climate-warming emissions is photography of gushing rivers of meltwater plunging from the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet into the depths. Recent studies have shown these natural drainpipes, called moulins, can speed up the slow seaward march of the grinding ice by lubricating the interface with bedrock below. The faster that ice flows, the faster seas rise. Now, though, A new Dutch study of 17 years of satellite measurements of ice movement in western Greenland concludes that the speedup of the ice is a transient summertime phenomenon, with the overall yearly movement of the grinding glaciers not changing, and actually dropping slightly in some places, when measured over longer time spans.
The work, the authors and other experts caution, does not mean that more widespread surface melting could not eventually destabilize vast areas of the world’s second-largest ice storehouse. But for the moment, the study, which is being published in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, throws into question the notion that abrupt ice losses in Greenland are nigh. “The positive-feedback mechanism between melt rate and ice velocity appears to be a seasonal process that may have only a limited effect on the response of the ice sheet to climate warming over the next decades,” said the paper. The study was led by Roderik S.W. van de Wal of the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research of the University of Utrecht. More coming anon. Read full blog here.
This peer reviewed new study in the journal Science puts yet another fork into the man-made global warming fear machine. See coverage also in New Scientist here. See also July 2007 U.S. Senate Report: Latest Scientific Studies Refute Fears of Greenland Melt.
By M.P. McQueen, Wall Street Journal
Scientists say the jury is still out on whether rising sea temperatures will cause more hurricanes to hit U.S. coastlines. Yet some insurance companies are boosting premiums based on assumptions that they will. Others are withdrawing from coastal communities altogether. Last year, Leanne Lord of Marion, Mass., decided to put her house up for sale after her insurance premiums more than doubled to about $2,892 a year since 2005. Many of her Cape Cod neighbors, who hadn’t seen a hurricane in the area since 1991, followed suit. Today, there’s a glut of houses on the local market.
“A lot of people can’t afford to live here anymore, between the insurance and the taxes having gone up so much,” says Ms. Lord, a 52-year-old public-health nurse. “They have been forced to leave and I think that is really sad.” Costs for homeowner insurance along the East and Gulf coasts have risen 20% to 100% since 2004, says the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group. In the three years through 2006, says the institute, property and casualty insurers registered record profits, topping out at $65.8 billion in 2006. (Despite severe U.S. weather that has caused about $8.9 billion in insured property losses to date this year, it’s too early to forecast 2008 profits.)
Helping to drive these developments is a little-known tool of the insurance world: Computerized catastrophe modeling. Crafted by several independent firms and used by most insurers, so-called cat models rely on complex data to estimate probable losses from hurricanes. But regulators and other critics contend that the latest cat models—which include assumptions about various climate changes—are triggering higher insurance rates (or cancelled or denied coverage).
The impact from cat models on homeowners along the East and Gulf coasts has stirred some of the greatest controversy. In New Jersey, State Farm Mutual Insurance Co. and a subsidiary of Allstate Corp. have declined to renew at least 12,000 customers with homes near the ocean. In Mississippi, several insurers, including Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., have stopped covering wind damage in six counties along the Gulf. Some homeowners in the region got a 90% premium increase in 2006. And in Florida, State Farm, the largest private insurer there, said recently it would no longer write new homeowner policies and planned to drop 50,000 existing ones.
Read more here.
By David Deming, Washington Times
If the price of gasoline is around $4 a gallon, Americans have no one to blame but themselves. For decades, we have demonized the people and businesses who supply our energy. Energy fuels our economy and prosperity, but bad public policies have made it increasingly more difficult to develop our own vast resources. Americans are in danger of falling irreversibly into a dysfunctional culture and fading into the dust of history.
We sit on our own undeveloped energy supplies and complain about the high price of gasoline and imported oil. Public policy in the United States is not designed to facilitate the development of new energy supplies, but to stop it. The U.S. government has placed the Continental Shelves of the U.S. off-limits for drilling. Offshore drilling would have virtually no significant effect on environmental quality. But our energy policies are not determined by science, reason or facts. Energy policy in the United States is held hostage by a fanatical environmentalism based on emotion, fraud and deceit. The common-sense conservation ethics of Henry Thoreau, John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt have been supplanted by a radical ideology that is anti-science, anti-reason, and anti-human. In the 18th century, Rousseau argued that humanity had been ruined by agriculture and metallurgy. In the 21st century, it’s fossil fuels and technology. The exaltation of the primitive is rooted in a hatred of the human mind. This suicidal and nihilistic creed can only lead us back to the Stone Age.
Global warming is a fraud and a hysterical scare tactic. Recent warming trends are very modest, and well within the range of natural variation. Predictions of future warming are based on speculative computer models whose accuracy cannot be evaluated or even tested. Sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere is at the highest level since satellite monitoring began in 1979. Last summer there was record low snowmelt in Antarctica. During April this year, 1,185 new all-time record low temperatures were recorded at U.S. weather stations. Given these facts, it is difficult to see how global warming can be real, or how we can be in the middle of a “climate crisis.”
But when these data are related to environmentalists, there is no sense of relief. Instead, it makes them angry that they might be deprived of their primary excuse to make war on civilization.
We need energy policies that actually produce energy. Fossil fuels, conventional and unconventional, are far from depleted and will remain our primary energy sources for many decades. The United States has enough oil and gas resources to meet our energy needs for hundreds of years. Nothing but our own ignorance stands in the way of developing them.
David Deming is a geophysicist, an adjunct scholar with the National Center for Policy Analysis and an associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma
The Oklahoman Editorial
Senator Barbara Boxer is one of Washington’s most skilled close-in fighters, a tough scrapper unsurpassed in her zeal for bare-knuckled political brawl. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Tulsa, knows this better than most, having served opposite Boxer on the Senate’s environment committee for years. As that panel’s chairwoman, Boxer has led the push for global warming legislation as well as attacks on efforts to boost American sources of oil.
She was fighting again this week, saying U.S. oil companies that favor new exploration in Alaska and off America’s coasts already sit on 68 million acres of federal oil leases - suggesting big oil is trying to leverage new leases and greater profits. “I say they should use it or lose it,” said Boxer, D-Calif.
People who know oil know that Boxer and others don’t know what they’re talking about - or worse, that they’re distorting facts to win a debate.
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Red Cavaney of the American Petroleum Institute recently explained that offshore leases, especially, are a crapshoot. Until exploration occurs, a company can’t know whether a lease will produce, Cavaney wrote. Many don’t. If there isn’t enough oil to justify drilling costs, a company will move to more promising leases. “All during this active exploration and evaluation phase, however, the lease is listed as ‘nonproducing.’ Because a lease is not producing, critics cite it as ‘idle’ when, in reality, it is typically being actively explored and developed.”
Boxer probably knows better, but Washington is accustomed to debates that blur facts to win an argument. This one’s too important for grandstanding. As Cavaney noted, Congress has kept American energy sources locked up too long. If these sources had been developed years ago, “America would not be in the energy bind it finds itself in today,” he wrote. True that.