While climate experts were off at the Copenhagen summit working on their tans (in sunny Copenhagen), the EPA pulled a fast one. As the Washington Post noted in an article that was actually quite good in providing the negatives, the agency formally announced that six gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, pose a danger to the environment and the health of Americans and said it would begin drafting regulations to reduce those emissions.
So if you think the recent poll showing most Americans reject the basis of global warming legislation, plus the scandal over “climategate,” may have derailed the Waxman-Markey legislation you may be right. But you’d be wrong in thinking the crisis has passed. The EPA was explicitly given the power by the Supreme Court to regulate greenhouse gases and could produce a web of regulations far worse than Waxman-Markey. The only recourse of opponents would be in the courts (see previous sentence) or via Congress cutting funding to the agency. And would this Congress really do that?
For more, see this Forbes piece on the issue published before the EPA announcement, and the EPA press release. This is bad news, folks!
Whoa! Did we just have a hurricane season? Doesn’t seem that way. “2009 hurricane season ends quietly with fewest storms since 1997,” declares one headline. “The season featured nine named storms, the fewest since 1997, and for the first time since 2006 no hurricanes made landfall in the United States,” states the article.
That’s quite a change since 2005, when the coincidence of two major hurricanes striking the U.S. and causing lots of damage, Katrina and Rita, led to a storm of allegations that global warming was causing cyclones to rise up in revenge against man. Most notable was far-left science writer Chris Mooney’s Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, which Amazon.com informs us is “bargain-priced” and probably for good reason. Mooney not coincidentally is also author of “The Republican War on Science” and “Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future.” Perhaps it threatens our future, but in the meantime it’s very good for his wallet.
Not that Mooney was alone by any means. In my 2005 Scripps Howard column “Green Hotheads Exploit Hurricane Tragedy,” I provided what in retrospect proves an interesting blast from the past.
“The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name was global warming.” So wrote environmental activist Ross Gelbspan in a Boston Globe op-ed that one commentator aptly described as “almost giddy.” The green group Friends of the Earth linked Katrina to global warming, as did Germany’s Green Party Environment Minister.
Granted, as I’ve written recently there’s been no warming in the last decade. But there’s been no cooling since 2005, either. Same temperatures, far fewer hurricanes.
So as the Kingston Trio might sing, “Where have all the hurricanes gone . . . ? And where are all these blowhards now? Presumably blaming global warming for some sort of disastrous problem caused by a lack of hurricanes.
“Climatologists baffled by Global Warming Time-Out” declares the headline in Germany’s Spiegel online. “Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.”
Whatever the cause, it remains that there’s been no time out in the production of so-called “greenhouse gases.” More are being pumped out worldwide and the atmospheric concentration is higher than ever. Yet even while “The planet’s temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s,” it’s gone nowhere since then.
It what may a poor choice of words, Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, told Spiegel, “”It cannot be denied that this is one of the hottest issues in the scientific community.”
A new poll shows a sharp decline over the last year in the percentage of Americans who see solid evidence that global temperatures are rising. According to the survey by the highly-reputable Pew Research Center, while 44% of respondents saw global warming as a very serious problem in April 2008, that’s down to just 35% now.
Of course, all things are relative. With the economy and unemployment such as it is, despite that miraculous stimulus bill, you can see how a problem that’s not supposed to truly impact us for a while to come might slide down the pecking order.
BUT, the survey also shows that now just 36% of Americans say global temperatures are rising as a result of human activity, down from 47% last year. That’s a scientific belief, independent of the economy right?
I’d argue otherwise. Wild speculation about man-made impact on the environment is a rich man’s game. It’s true that the warming we’ve seen until about a decade ago when it stopped – though exactly why and for how long is debated – either is or isn’t partly man-made, regardless of the economy or regardless of what the public thinks. But when you don’t feel so rich, somehow scientific evidence that seemed so compelling before simply isn’t now.
CEI Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy, Myron Ebell, has been ranked number three on Business Insider’s “The 10 Most Respected Global Warming Skeptics.” See an excerpt below.
Myron Ebell may be enemy #1 to the current climate change community. Ebell works for the free-market thinktank Competitive Enterprise Institute and, according to his own bio, has been called a climate “criminal” and a leading pusher of misleading ideas.
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