Libertarian Leanings

Science in The Service of Politics

Simon Carr of the Independent recently reported on a presentation by climate scientist Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT to the House of Commons.  (My emphasis below.)

Over the last 150 years CO2 (or its equivalents) has doubled. This has been accompanied by a rise in temperature of seven or eight tenths of a degree centigrade.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change attributes half this increase to human activity.

Lindzen says: “Claims that the earth has been warming, that there is a Greenhouse Effect, and that man’s activity have contributed to warming are trivially true but essentially meaningless.”

He said our natural body temperature varies by eight tenths of a degree.

He showed a Boston newspaper weather graphic for a day – it had the actual temperature against a background of the highest and lowest recorded temperature for that day. The difference was as much as 60 degrees F.

When you double CO2 there’s a two per cent change in the “radiation budget”. Yet two billion years ago, the sun was 20 to 30 per cent dimmer – and the planet’s temperature was about the same.

The Al Gore graph showing CO2 and temperature rising and falling in tandem showed that the release of CO2 from the oceans was prompted by warming, not vice versa.

He gave us a slide with a series of familiar alarms – melting ice caps, disappearing icebergs, receding glaciers, rising sea levels. It was published by the US Weather Bureau in 1922.

...

How to explain the procession of eminent opinion leaders – some even in our own Royal Society – who advance the tenets of catastrophic global warming? “It is science in the service of politics,” he said.

And the money spent on the advice of “scientists in the service of politics” can be measured in trillions.

Hat tip to Weekend Pundit.

Update:  Here is Professor Lindzen's full presentation.  An excerpt:

Our present approach of dealing with climate as completely specified by a single number, globally averaged surface temperature anomaly, that is forced by another single number, atmospheric CO2 levels, for example, clearly limits real understanding; so does the replacement of theory by model simulation. In point of fact, there has been progress along these lines and none of it demonstrates a prominent role for CO2.

Professor Lindzen concludes:

Perhaps we should stop accepting the term, ‘skeptic.’ Skepticism implies doubts about a plausible proposition. Current global warming alarm hardly represents a plausible proposition. Twenty years of repetition and escalation of claims does not make it more plausible. Quite the contrary, the failure to improve the case over 20 years makes the case even less plausible as does the evidence from climategate and other instances of overt cheating.

In the meantime, while I avoid making forecasts for tenths of a degree change in globally averaged temperature anomaly, I am quite willing to state that unprecedented climate catastrophes are not on the horizon though in several thousand years we may return to an ice age.

Global warming alarm.  Hardly a plausible proposition.

The Gusher of Green Jobs

According to the President's Council of Economic Advisers federal stimulus spending has so far created between 2.2 million and 4.2 million jobs.  But where do they get those numbers?

Jobs have been an important measure influencing distribution of more than $800 billion in stimulus money, which also has included tax breaks and spending on roads, sewers, schools, health and public assistance. Yet the number of jobs created or saved is largely based on formulas, mathematical models and reports by recipients, rather than actual tallies.

Apparently there's a problem with the modeling.  

Alfredo Garcia was among the residents of Webb County, Texas, banking on a windfall from federal stimulus money.

Mr. Garcia expanded his Mexican restaurant from 80 to 120 seats, anticipating a rush of new patrons springing from the nearby Cedro Hill wind farm, a project built with the help of $108 million from U.S. taxpayers.

When construction ended, Cedro Hill had just three employees and Mr. Garcia's restaurant, Aimee's, filed for bankruptcy protection. "Nobody came," said Mr. Garcia, a county judge who closed Aimee's last year, putting 18 people out of work.

The program that was supposed to create all the green jobs is part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.  Under section 1603 of the act companies were given upwards of $10 billion for wind, solar, and other renewable energy projects.

On the basis of computer modeling, we're spending money like it's water in an effort to mitigate the damage that the models say we are wreaking on our climate.  How fitting that we would mathematically model the number jobs created in the mitigation effort.  Too bad we couldn't have modeled some customers for Alfredo Garcia's restaurant.  It's time to model a new president.

In Other Climate Change News

By way of Da Tech Guy, it turns out there is another ClimateGate in the offing.  This one is called FakeGate, perpetrated by one Peter H. Gleick, who heads an organization known as the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security. 

Gleick claimed that he received an anonymous tip, a strategy email from the Heartland Institute that reveals its diabolical conspiracy to undermine the good science of Global Warming.  But then he went on to describe how he misrepresented himself to a Heartland Institute staffer in order to steal some internal documents that he expected would corroborate the anonymous memo.

At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute's climate program strategy. It contained information about their funders and the Institute's apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy. I do not know the source of that original document but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.

Given the potential impact however, I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else's name.

The repercussions of Gleick's confession appear to be huge.  All the more so because former Heartland board member Ross Kaminsky published an article in the American Spectator identifying Gleick as the likely thief, even before he made his confession.

One obvious suspect in the Heartland document theft -- and this is just my speculation -- is Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security and a true enemy of the Heartland Institute. Gleick is a committed alarmist rent-seeker who seems quite bitter that he shares Forbes magazine’s pages with Heartland’s James Taylor.

Mr. Kaminsky didn't leave it at that.  He went on the describe the original anonymous memo comparing to Dan Rather's broadcast of the phony Texas Air National Guard memos that on the eve of the 2004 election falsely accused then President George W. Bush of being AWOL and insubordinate during his Air National Guard career.

The document which the alarmists have been trying to make the most of is called “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy.” It appears to be of a similar nature to the forged “Rathergate” documents which ended Dan Rather’s long career promoting leftist views disguised as news.

First, the Heartland document is written in a way which makes it appear unlikely to be genuine. As a commenter on a Forbes.com article about this mini-scandal notes, “It uses the term ‘anti-climate’ to refer to Heartland’s own position — a derogatory term which climate skeptic outfits never use to describe their positions (and…) it is written in the first person, yet there’s no indication of who wrote it. (Have you ever seen a memo like that?)”

Downloading the document, I find that the document properties list no author and say it was created on Monday by a scanner.

...

Furthermore, as others have noted on the web, the data shows that the file was created on a computer set to the Pacific time zone (signified by the -08:00 in the timestamps), where Gleick is based but where Heartland does not have an office. The stolen documents show their creation in the Central time zone.

In other words, all evidence so far supports Heartland’s emphatic assertion that the document is a forgery.

Interestingly, Gleick, who would normally be preening and prancing in glee at this sort of attention to the Heartland Institute has so far been utterly silent at his Forbes blog and on his Twitter feed.

It boggles the mind.  Here is the "anti-climate" wording that Mr. Kaminsky mentioned in the excerpt above.  My emphasis below.

Heartland plays an important role in climate communications, especially through our in-house experts (e.g., Taylor) through his Forbes blog and related high profile outlets, our conferences, and through coordination with external networks (such as WUWT and other groups capable of rapidly mobilizing responses to new scientific findings, news stories, or unfavorable blog posts).  Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high-profile climate scientists (such as Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own.  This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.

It's an odd phrase, "reliably anti-climate," for a think tank to use in describing an audience receptive to its ideas.  And the part about how important it is to "keep opposing voices out."  How characteristic of the Global Warmist crowd.

With the Gleicks of the world there is a higher truth, one not constrained by mundane facts.  If they indulge in a bit of literary license to save the world, won't we all be the better for it?  They'd like you to think so.

Indulgences

It's the perfect analogy: Indulgences.

The indulgence is among the less noticed and less disputed traditions to be restored. But with a thousand-year history and volumes of church law devoted to its intricacies, it is one of the most complicated to explain.

According to church teaching, even after sinners are absolved in the confessional and say their Our Fathers or Hail Marys as penance, they still face punishment after death, in Purgatory, before they can enter heaven. In exchange for certain prayers, devotions or pilgrimages in special years, a Catholic can receive an indulgence, which reduces or erases that punishment instantly, with no formal ceremony or sacrament.

There are partial indulgences, which reduce purgatorial time by a certain number of days or years, and plenary indulgences, which eliminate all of it, until another sin is committed. You can get one for yourself, or for someone who is dead. You cannot buy one — the church outlawed the sale of indulgences in 1567 — but charitable contributions, combined with other acts, can help you earn one.

Michael Barone draws a parallel to the new faith.

All the trappings of religion are there. Original sin: Mankind is responsible for these prophesied disasters, especially those slobs who live on suburban cul-de-sacs and drive their SUVs to strip malls and tacky chain restaurants.

The need for atonement and repentance: We must impose a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, which will increase the cost of everything and stunt economic growth.

Ritual, from the annual Earth Day to weekly recycling.

Indulgences, like those Martin Luther railed against: private jet-fliers like Al Gore and sitcom heiress Laurie David can buy carbon offsets to compensate for their carbon-emitting sins.

Corporate elitists, like General Electric's Jeff Immelt, profess to share this faith, just as cynical Venetian merchants and prim Victorian bankers gave lip service to the religious enthusiasms of their days. Bad for business not to. And if you're clever, you can figure out how to make money off it.

In fact clever people have figured out how to make a lot of money.

Al Gore could become world's first carbon billionaire

Al Gore, the former US vice president, could become the world's first carbon billionaire after investing heavily in green energy companies.

7:00AM GMT 03 Nov 2009

Last year Mr Gore's venture capital firm loaned a small California firm $75m to develop energy-saving technology.

The company, Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient.

The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants, the New York Times reports. Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts.

The move means that venture capital company Kleiner Perkins and its partners, including Mr Gore, could recoup their investment many times over in coming years.

Now there's a familiar name — Kleiner Perkins.  Where have we heard that name before?  Oh, right.  That's one of the outfits that backed Fisker, the company that got a half a billion dollar federal loan guarantee from the Obama administration to build electric cars — in Finland. 

The Unlikeliest Solution

Mark Williams of the Associated Press recently wrote an article about an unlikely source of energy that could solve the global warming crisis.

An unlikely source of energy has emerged to meet international demands that the United States do more to fight global warming: It's cleaner than coal, cheaper than oil and a 90-year supply is under our feet.

It's natural gas, the same fossil fuel that was in such short supply a decade ago that it was deemed unreliable. It's now being uncovered at such a rapid pace that its price is near a seven-year low. Long used to heat half the nation's homes, it's becoming the fuel of choice when building new power plants. Someday, it may win wider acceptance as a replacement for gasoline in our cars and trucks.

I'm not sure why Mr. Williams thinks natural gas is such an unlikely solution.  People have been talking about it for years, converting cars to run on it.  For transportation purposes what has been lacking is a reliable distribution system.  When's the last time you saw the natural gas option when you pulled up to the pump to fill your tank?

But natural gas is one of the pillars in the T. Boone Pickens energy plan, which was so highly touted not so long ago.

The Pickens Plan.

There are several pillars to the Pickens Plan:

• Create millions of new jobs by building out the capacity to generate up to 22 percent of our electricity from wind. And adding to that with additional solar generation capacity;
• Building a 21st century backbone electrical transmission grid;
• Providing incentives for homeowners and the owners of commercial buildings to upgrade their insulation and other energy saving options; and
• Using America's natural gas to replace imported oil as a transportation fuel in addition to its other uses in power generation, chemicals, etc.  [my emphasis]

I can tell you why I think natural gas is such an unlikely solution.  I anticipate significant barriers to the development and distribution of our natural gas energy resources.  OPEC will resist and drop prices accordingly.  But more importantly there is the political resistance that will rise up to oppose increased US development and production.  

The political resistance comes in two flavors.  Primarily there is ideological resistance.  You might be tempted to think that global warming science seeks to reduce global temperatures, but you would be mistaken if you did.  In reality, Anthropogenic Global Warming is a justification for redistributive social justice. 

Delegates, NGOs Respond
Just as climate talks hit their lowest point, Hillary Clinton descended on Copenhagen like a deus ex machina, putting on the table a $100 billion-per year package of worldwide climate aid starting in 2020, provided that a deal can be reached with China... "I understand the talks have been difficult," said Clinton, who was heading into talks with the Chinese prime minister. "There is a way forward."

That's what everybody in Copenhagen was waiting for.  Show them the money.  Hillary's pledge of $100 billion a year brought immense relief on the left and turned the failed conference into at least a partial success. 

So, for the sake of argument let's pretend that the damaging emails that were leaked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia had never been written.  Could we still believe that Anthropogenic Global Warming might actually be real?  I'd be willing to bet, no. 

If wholesale conversion to natural gas were undertaken, and it reduced US emissions of CO2 by 80% lefty ideologues would still oppose it.  The point of Copenhagen was to make developed nations, the US in particular, pay lefty dictators restitution for the sin of wealth.  A unilateral reduction in so called greenhouse gas emissions by the US would simply defeat that purpose.  

And then for another impetus for resisting natural gas development, there is the good old profit motive.  Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit, was said to have raked in roughly $22 million in grants on its behalf from 1991 to the present.  The amount of money devoted to its study is directly related to the perceived severity of the global warming crisis.  The more severe the crisis the more money it deserves. 

As it turns out there are other individuals and organizations making millions on Anthropogenic Global Warming as well.  For them, yet another goal of the Copenhagen climate summit was achieved.  Keep the cap and trade gravy train rolling.

The amount of money involved isn’t trivial. According to Richard North at the Daily Mail, the carbon trading market last year was worth about £129 million (or about $205 million U.S.) and was heading toward trillions of dollars by 2020. So it’s probably not a coincidence that, for all the discord in Copenhagen, the one thing to which all the parties did agree was to extend the Kyoto cap and trade system. The market in carbon offsets or CER would continue.

Who benefits from this?

An interesting question. Of course, it’s well known that Al Gore is heavily involved in the carbon offset market and in other environmental ventures. There is speculation that Gore could be the world’s first green billionaire.

Another beneficiary is the UN itself. All of these international processes happen under the supervision and control of the UN and UN-chartered nongovernmental organizations.

There is huge money to be made, and global warmists are not about to let such a lucrative crisis go to waste without putting up a fight.  Even if by developing and converting to natural gas the US could eliminate global warming, expect environmentalists to fight it tooth and nail.  And that, in itself, will be revealing.  Environmentalist opposition to US natural gas development will be as convincing testimony as you'll want that Anthropogenic Global Warming is not about the weather and not about the climate.  It's about redistributive social justice.  In other words, they just want the money.

Wait! It Gets Worse!

From James Delingpole of the Telegraph.co.uk.

What the Russians are suggesting here, in other words, is that the entire global temperature record used by the IPCC to inform world government policy is a crock.

It's more than a suggestion.

Taking The Long View

Howard Bloom, author of "The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism" and founder of The Space Development Steering Committee, takes a different perspective on the subject of climate change.  He takes the very long view.

Climate change is not the fault of man. It's Mother Nature's way. And sucking greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is too limited a solution. We have to be prepared for fire or ice, for fry or freeze. We have to be prepared for change.

We've been deceived by a stroke of luck. In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis, man the inventor of the city, we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. And in the 120,000 years since we emerged in our current physiological shape as Homo sapiens, we've lived through 20 sudden global warmings. In most of those, temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees within a mere 20 years.

All this took place without smokestacks and tailpipes. All this took place without the desecration of nature by modern man.

Environmental Shakedown (updated)

Charles Krauthammer recognizes environmentalism for what it is -- corruption.  Socialism has failed as a economic model.  When choice is available it is routinely rejected by the very people it is purported to help.  No problem for socialists.  The holy grail of environmentalism is the new mandate for keeping the governing elite governing in the name of sharing the wealth.

The raid on the Western treasuries is on again, but today with a new rationale to fit current ideological fashion. With socialism dead, the gigantic heist is now proposed as a sacred service of the newest religion: environmentalism.

The left leaning Obama administration is doing its part with the EPA's "endangerment finding."  On the eve of the Copenhagen climate conference, a power hungry Obama administration went ahead with it in order to demonstrate that it has the upper hand over a congress that is reluctant to pass cap and trade legislation to regulate CO2 emissions.  Since congress wouldn't give Obama the bona fides of a cap and trade to take with him to the conference, he simply made up his own by having the Environmental Protection Agency declare CO2 a hazard to human health and giving itself power to regulate it.  It's a power grab.

Not since the creation of the Internal Revenue Service has a federal agency been given more intrusive power over every aspect of economic life.

This naked assertion of vast executive power in the name of the environment is the perfect fulfillment of the prediction of Czech President (and economist) Vaclav Klaus that environmentalism is becoming the new socialism, i.e., the totemic ideal in the name of which government seizes the commanding heights of the economy and society.

Kim Strassel has the good news.  She doesn't think it's going to work out.  The threat to regulate CO2 emissions through the Clean Air Act is not likely to encourage congress to move forward on cap and trade, nor is it likely that the EPA will have any success exercising its new regulatory muscle.

No one can say Washington isn't doing something; the EPA has it under control. The agency's move gives Congress a further excuse not to act.

"The Obama administration now owns this political hot potato," says one industry source. "If I'm [Nebraska Senator] Ben Nelson or [North Dakota Senator] Kent Conrad, why would I ever want to take it back?"

All the more so, in Congress's view, because the EPA "command and control" threat may yet prove hollow. Now that the endangerment finding has become reality, the litigation is also about to become real. Green groups pioneered the art of environmental lawsuits. It turns out the business community took careful notes.

So there's the upside for Democrats.  The heat is off on cap and trade.  The upside for the rest of us is potentially huge. 

Industry groups are gearing up for a legal onslaught; and don't underestimate their prospects. The leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit in England alone are a gold mine for those who want to challenge the science underlying the theory of manmade global warming.

Anthropogenic Global Warming may be headed for its moment of truth in court.  Which is not to say the fact or fiction of it will be decided there, but possibly enough sunlight will shine in to curtail the hysteria and scour out some of the corruption.