Wednesday 2 September 2009

Is the Debate Over? No and Yes

The "Too-Hard" Basket is Filling Up

Winston Churchill once joked that he longed to meet a "one-handed" economist. Given the "dismal science's" predilection to couch and qualify every position with a multitude of qualifying permutations and combinations we understand his frustration.

The received wisdom is that science has achieved a consensus on global warming and that the debate is over. This has been a soft way of attempting to silence opponents. But it is failing. Global warming protagonists are complaining about sceptics more than ever before--and with Copenhagen looming near, it's becoming a bit frenzied.

Now, even in the most cheerleading of newspapers, "alternative views" are starting to be expressed. The debate is definitely not over. Rats. Witness this op-ed piece in the Boston Globe:
No climate debate? Yes, there is

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | July 1, 2009

IN HIS WEEKLY address on Saturday, President Obama saluted the House of Representatives for passing Waxman-Markey, the gargantuan energy-rationing bill that would amount to the largest tax increase in the nation’s history. It would do so by making virtually everything that depends on energy - which is virtually everything - more expensive.

The president doesn’t describe the legislation in those terms now, but he made no bones about it last year. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2008, he calmly explained how cap-and-trade - the carbon-dioxide rationing scheme that is at the heart of Waxman-Markey - would work:

“Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket . . . because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, natural gas, you name it . . . Whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money, and they will pass that [cost] on to consumers.’’

In the same interview, Obama suggested that his energy policy would require the ruin of the coal industry. “If somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant, they can,’’ he told the Chronicle. “It’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.’’

The justification for inflicting this financial misery, of course, is the onrushing catastrophe of human-induced global warming - a catastrophe that can be prevented only if we abandon the carbon-based fuels on which most of the prosperity and productivity of modern life depend. But what if that looming catastrophe isn’t real? What if climate change has little or nothing to do with human activity? What if enacting cap-and-trade means incurring excruciating costs in exchange for infinitesimal benefits?

Hush, says Obama. Don’t ask such questions. “There is no longer a debate about whether carbon pollution is placing our planet in jeopardy,’’ he declared Saturday. “It’s happening.’’

No debate? The debate over global warming is more robust than it has been in years, and not only in America. “In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming,’’ Kimberly Strassel noted in The Wall Street Journal the other day. “In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted . . . Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the ‘new religion.’ ’’

Closer to home, the noted physicist Hal Lewis (emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara) e-mails me a copy of a statement he and several fellow scientists, including physicists Will Happer and Robert Austin of Princeton, Laurence Gould of the University of Hartford, and climatologist Richard Lindzen of MIT, have sent to Congress. “The sky is not falling,’’ they write. Far from warming, “the Earth has been cooling for 10 years’’ - a trend that “was not predicted by the alarmists’ computer models.’’

Fortune magazine recently profiled veteran climatologist John Christy, a lead author of the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. With his green credentials, Fortune observed, Christy is the warm-mongers’ “worst nightmare - an accomplished climate scientist with no ties to Big Oil who has produced reams and reams of data that undermine arguments that the earth’s atmosphere is warming at an unusual rate and question whether the remedies being talked about in Congress will actually do any good.’’

No one who cares about the environment or the nation’s economic well-being should take it on faith that climate change is a crisis, or that drastic changes to the economy are essential to “save the planet.’’ Hundreds of scientists reject the alarmist narrative. For non-experts, a steadily-widening shelf of excellent books surveys the data in laymen’s terms and exposes the weaknesses in the doomsday scenario - among others, “Climate Confusion’’ by Roy W. Spencer, “Climate of Fear’’ by Thomas Gale Moore, “Taken by Storm’’ by Christopher Essex and Ross McKitrick, and “Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years’’ by S. Fred Singer and Dennis Avery.

If the case for a war on carbon dioxide were unassailable, no one would have to warn against debating it. The 212 House members who voted against Waxman-Markey last week plainly don’t believe the matter is settled. They’re right.
But Obama's line, at least for the moment, is that the debate is very definitely over. He has either bought the propaganda, or he is willingly complicit in its propagation, or both. His Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA") has been caught out suppressing dissenting views--lest any think the debate is not over--at least,
officially. The tawdry, probably illegal, and increasingly scandalous affair is documented in the Wall Street Journal.
The EPA Silences a Climate Skeptic

By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

Wherever Jim Hansen is right now -- whatever speech the "censored" NASA scientist is giving -- perhaps he'll find time to mention the plight of Alan Carlin. Though don't count on it.

Mr. Hansen, as everyone in this solar system knows, is the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Starting in 2004, he launched a campaign against the Bush administration, claiming it was censoring his global-warming thoughts and fiddling with the science. It was all a bit of a hoot, given Mr. Hansen was already a world-famous devotee of the theory of man-made global warming, a reputation earned with some 1,400 speeches he'd given, many while working for Mr. Bush. But it gave Democrats a fun talking point, one the Obama team later picked up.

So much so that one of President Barack Obama's first acts was a memo to agencies demanding new transparency in government, and science. The nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lisa Jackson, joined in, exclaiming, "As administrator, I will ensure EPA's efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and program, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency." In case anyone missed the point, Mr. Obama took another shot at his predecessors in April, vowing that "the days of science taking a backseat to ideology are over."

Except, that is, when it comes to Mr. Carlin, a senior analyst in the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics and a 35-year veteran of the agency. In March, the Obama EPA prepared to engage the global-warming debate in an astounding new way, by issuing an "endangerment" finding on carbon. It establishes that carbon is a pollutant, and thereby gives the EPA the authority to regulate it -- even if Congress doesn't act.

Around this time, Mr. Carlin and a colleague presented a 98-page analysis arguing the agency should take another look, as the science behind man-made global warming is inconclusive at best. The analysis noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend. It pointed out problems with climate models. It highlighted new research that contradicts apocalyptic scenarios. "We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA," the report read.

The response to Mr. Carlin was an email from his boss, Al McGartland, forbidding him from "any direct communication" with anyone outside of his office with regard to his analysis. When Mr. Carlin tried again to disseminate his analysis, Mr. McGartland decreed: "The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office." (Emphasis added.)

Mr. McGartland blasted yet another email: "With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don't want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate." Ideology? Nope, not here. Just us science folk. Honest.

The emails were unearthed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Republican officials are calling for an investigation; House Energy Committee ranking member Joe Barton sent a letter with pointed questions to Mrs. Jackson, which she's yet to answer. The EPA has issued defensive statements, claiming Mr. Carlin wasn't ignored. But there is no getting around that the Obama administration has flouted its own promises of transparency.

The Bush administration's great sin, for the record, was daring to issue reports that laid out the administration's official position on global warming. That the reports did not contain the most doomsday predictions led to howls that the Bush politicals were suppressing and ignoring career scientists.

The Carlin dustup falls into a murkier category. Unlike annual reports, the Obama EPA's endangerment finding is a policy act. As such, EPA is required to make public those agency documents that pertain to the decision, to allow for public comment. Court rulings say rulemaking records must include both "the evidence relied upon and the evidence discarded." In refusing to allow Mr. Carlin's study to be circulated, the agency essentially hid it from the docket.

Unable to defend the EPA's actions, the climate-change crew -- , led by anonymous EPA officials -- is doing what it does best: trashing Mr. Carlin as a "denier." He is, we are told, "only" an economist (he in fact holds a degree in physics from CalTech). It wasn't his "job" to look at this issue (he in fact works in an office tasked with "informing important policy decisions with sound economics and other sciences.") His study was full of sham science. (The majority of it in fact references peer-reviewed studies.) Where's Mr. Hansen and his defense of scientific freedom when you really need him?

Mr. Carlin is instead an explanation for why the science debate is little reported in this country. The professional penalty for offering a contrary view to elites like Al Gore is a smear campaign. The global-warming crowd likes to deride skeptics as the equivalent of the Catholic Church refusing to accept the Copernican theory. The irony is that, today, it is those who dare critique the new religion of human-induced climate change who face the Inquisition.
We predict that over the next six months we will see a splenetic outpouring of hype on the imminent threat of global warming. Our expectation is that it will all come to nothing at the end of the day. What will actually happen is very little. The Waxman-Marley bill in the Congress illustrates the point. It is a dog's breakfast that is so full of loopholes and compromises that, if passed in the Senate, will do nothing to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. (It will however do a great deal of damage to the US economy. Lots of pain for zero gain.) But it looking likely that the bill will languish in the Senate. It will die there.

A spokesman for the forthcoming G8 conference in Italy acknowledged that the leading industrial nations are now so deeply in debt that they have no moral or political or economic capital left to pursue climate change policies any further. So window dressing, hand wringing, and "feel good" moves are the best that can be expected.

In New Zealand also we hope to be spared. Sure Nick Smith is currently jumping up and down as the preppy cheerleader. But darker forces are at work. John Key is the cautious pragmatist. He is saying two things: we need to be seen to be part of the international pack on climate change. Secondly, we will also be saying, "After you" to the rest of the world. Which is to say, we will make concurring noises, but will do nothing.

We expect that climate change hysteria will end not with a bang, but a whimper. But it will end--being dumped into the "too hard" basket. And that will be a not-insignificant accomplishment.

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