FReepmail me to get on or off
Ping me if you find one I've missed.
Posted on 07/20/2009 6:01:52 PM PDT by neverdem
The Environmental Protection Agency is pushing the greatest regulatory intervention in US history, seeking to declare that carbon dioxide poses an “endangerment” under the Clean Air Act, threatening human health and the environment. To hear the EPA tell it, CO2 – which nonetheless remains indispensible to life on earth and without which plants die, more of which produces higher crop yields, etc. – will kill us all.
This proposal is a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s attempt to bring the energy sector of the economy under state control just as it seeks to do with health care, essentially ruining something in order to take it over in the name of cleaning up capitalism’s mess. It’s an old play, which the statists have run for decades, certain that every now and then it will break for a big gain. But an inconvenient EPA career professional just doing his job assessed the premise and informed his superiors, in the sole substantive report presented in the Agency’s internal deliberations, that upon scrutiny CO2 clearly does not drive temperatures or climate but oddly enough, the sun and oceans do. His boss told him to shut up, that nothing good could come to their office by injecting this analysis into the process, as the decision had been made.
One problem with that, of course, is that the decision is not allowed to be made before the process has run its course. That is the entire purpose of an internal debate which, internal documents now prove, was truncated and in fact illusory.
For his troubles, this physics graduate of Cal Tech and MIT PhD economist – which are why he had his job – was subjected to the ritual smear job as unqualified by the thugs running the global warming industry. The nicest thing said about him was “He’s not a climate scientist!” shrieked by legions of non-scientists nonetheless cocksure of their own wisdom, insight and informed judgment on the matter.
Left unmentioned were the scientific credentials of the EPA administrator, President Obama, and the 535 members of Congress who are tasked with deciding the issue. “He’s just an economist!” the non-scientists’ line continued, ignoring that whole physics-degree thing and that, ah, well, the UN’s “chief climate scientist” is “just an economist.” Again, as the whistleblower Dr. Alan Carlin learned, facts have little weight in this debate. Still, one key truth that Carlin brought to the fore exposes how – assuming that sanity prevails in the Senate and Congress is unable to impose “cap-and-trade” energy rationing – his exposé will carry the day in court.
This is man-made warming theory’s missing link. The global warming industry and its political enablers have been getting away with an amazing stunt of backing out from the equation inconvenient things which your lying eyes might tell you. Amid the cries of “warming proceeding even faster than predicted” – an actual, common claim among alarmists, politicians and the media – observations reveal that the recent cooling has brought us to the average of the entire 30-year history of the satellite temperature record.
Climate changes and temperatures go up and down, that’s what they do, so it is surely an amusing coincidence of statistics to see no temperature change following a three-decade-long cooling spell that ended with the coldest decade of the century (the 1970s). To see this as “global warming” hysteria hijacks the policymaking process of a major economic power is staggering.
The crux of what Carlin revealed is that the alarmist campaign has, through indignant repetition and an absurdly flawed syllogism, substituted man-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as a proxy for temperatures. The disfavored human activity somehow now equates with the weather, a bizarre apples-and-stethoscopes comparison.
To grasp this we need a quick history of the campaign. By the late 1980s “global cooling” had given way to warming as a vehicle for various types to rally the public around their agenda (the Club of Rome admitted this in its 1991 book “The First Global Revolution”). This global warming industry coalesced to demand fealty to a strange premise: Mankind would agree to employ the gentle ministrations of national and, preferably, supranational bureaucrats to keep the earth’s temperature from rising more than two degrees Celsius higher than “pre-industrial” temperatures.
Now, “pre-industrial” is code for the most cynical statistical cherry-picking of our time, given the approximation with the end of a geophysical phenomenon known as the Little Ice Age, a miserable, cold and cloudy period of crop failure, infant mortality and disease.
This “two degree solution” didn’t last long, thanks to what I can only guess was a nagging fear that the public are aware that temperatures go up and down. It soon gave way to a metric of keeping atmospheric GHG concentrations below a “dangerous” level, though the UN scientists (economists, whatever) tasked with asserting what that level is refused to do so.
This was never about climate anyway but population, lifestyle, energy use and, above all else, control, so such obstacles were ignored and the industry moved right on to a metric even more convenient for them, GHG emissions. This is the tortured path bringing about the oddity of alarmists citing emissions going up faster than predicted as proving that global warming is proceeding faster than predicted, while temperatures are flat and even cooling. To date, it’s worked.
EPA’s “endangerment finding” is rife with this absurd non sequitor: CO2 concentrations are going up, Man’s CO2 is surely behind this, therefore man is causing climate change. In its “finding” the EPA, like the UN’s IPCC, fail to establish the missing link, that CO2 drives climate. Instead, EPA just points to the IPCC, which in turn simply proclaims the relationship, having itself also never having cited any authority establishing (rather than assuming) that CO2 drives temperature or climate, in the past or now.
While never the subject of a US court’s scrutiny, this premise for the entire enterprise will by necessity be a principal focus of any challenge to EPA. It seems highly doubtful that EPA could support such a line of, for lack of a better word, reasoning, particularly in light of Carlin’s stifled analysis and recent peer-reviewed literature. This will only occur by avoiding the panic-stricken acceptance by industry holdouts of some (they hope) a less-bad deal in the Senate for fear of EPA.
Upon scrutiny, covered industry has no option for long-term survival but to pursue victory. This begins in the Senate, which still lacks the votes to pass climate legislation. Neither peace nor concern is for sale, and industry should not cut a deal. The alarmist industry has never been forced to make its case. The EPA can be forced to make it, and it is unlikely that they can.
Those pesky Whistleblower Laws can come back and bite you in the ass, can’t they?
Agreed. Very well put.
some of the coldest weather ever in the upper Midwest too. I live in Kansas and the last two weeks of July and first two weeks of August is the hottest month of the summer, usually hot and muggy. This year lots of rain cool nights mid 80’s low 90’s during the day. This is the coolest summer I can remember in 30 years now in 1978 we had over 45 days of over 100 degree weather it was the hottest summer on record.
When Hillary approached India about participating in the Global Warming Hoax, in so many words they told her to go and fly a kite. It is always encouraging to see that not every one is as dumb as the US.
This is my take Saint Germaine
Thanks for the ping.
Tagable.
Any crop failures reported yet?
I saw Hillary lecturing the Indians on carbon foot prints and greenhouse gasses and climate change.
She made fool of herself because it was suite obvious she had no clue about what she was speaking. Like her boss, she was merely reading talking points.
Don't put it past them. Remember, AGW is the bludgeon the left is using to advance its entire agenda. Those yahoos who want population control would love to disguise their goal through the imposition of a punishing carbon tax on every baby that is brought into the world (based on the kiddo's projected carbon footprint over an average lifetime). Can't afford the tax? Abort, then "volunteer" for sterilization.
Nope the first round of wheat crops were above average and the second round is looking good.
During the Little Ice Age (from 1315 to 1750), growers were very slow to adjust their crops to the new norms in Europe and England of wetter and cooler summers.
The spring fields were too muddy to plant so planting was delayed, the low lying clouds blocked solar energy and decreased the amount of protein that was stored in the cereal heads, and the unusual late summer rains beat down the heavy heads of the grain into the wet ground where they rotted.
After a fair amount of famine they learned to plant oats rather than wheat in some places, to plant more potatoes, and to plant a late crop of turnips to use for winter fodder for their animals.
They learned to drain fields and turn it into pasture.
They also learned to shift to more animal food, enclosing land for larger pastures for animals to graze.
If this solar minimum is prolonged into several decades, then the sooner some farmers shift their crops, the better.
One scientist said that the best measure of the weather over the last millenium was the price of wheat.
Your reply was interesting - but my favorite part was comment above. Thanks for sharing.
By Mike Caggeso
Staff Writer, Money Morning
“The doubling of wheat’s price in the past year – combined with recent forecasts for price declines – have turned wheat’s wholesome image into a volatile one. And depending on where you live, you’ll hear a different story.
“In Australia, the world’s second-largest wheat exporter, droughts have cramped the yearly harvest so much that its Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics said the country would produce 31% less wheat (15.5 million tons) than it estimated back in June.
“Some of the estimates I’ve seen suggest if it doesn’t rain by harvest time the crop could be as low as 12 million tons,” Justin Smirk, a senior economist at Westpac Banking Corp., told Bloomberg News. “We have got a serious problem unfolding in the wheat regions in New South Wales.”
“Drought also took a chunk from the harvests of Canada (the world’s largest wheat producer) and also the Ukraine. In Syria, the Middle East’s lone grain exporter, drought swiped 4 million tons from this year’s harvest. Meanwhile, its neighboring importers (and Japan) want to import more than 1.1 million tons of wheat.
“In the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is expected to estimate our biggest wheat harvest in three years, even though excessive rain damaged a portion of the harvest. Wheat’s $7.7 billion annual value ranks it fourth among crops produced in the United States – behind corn, soybeans and hay. And half of the wheat grown in the U.S. market is exported, according to the USDA.
“But taken together, global inventories of wheat are at a 26-year low. And that’s why wheat prices peaked Wednesday at $9.1725 a bushel.”
“We can not rule out $10 for wheat,” Takaki Shigemoto, an analyst at Okachi & Co. in Tokyo who has been researching grain markets for 25 years, told Bloomberg. “Exporters are reducing the amount to curb domestic food prices, while importers are trying to secure as much grain as possible.”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.