President Obama talks as
if only he was reelected in 2012. He fails to recall that the entire
House of Representatives was on the ballot with him. And the American
people elected a majority of Republicans to the House, not to be a rubber stamp
on anything Obama wants, but as a check on Obama excesses, which is what they
serve as.
Obama cited as support
for his threatened global warming regulatory jihad, “Yes, it’s true that no
single event makes a trend. But the fact is, the 12 hottest years on record
have all come in the last 15.” The fact is also, however, that years of
decline from a peak in global temperatures, as occurred in 1998 due to the
entirely natural El Nino effect that year, can also be among the warmest on
record. (That global temperature record he is talking about only goes
back about 125 years, most of which has been reflecting recovery of global
temperatures from the “Little Ice Age” occurring roughly from 1350 to 1850.).
That global temperature
record has been flat lining for 16 years now. As the website Climate
Depot reported in response to Obama, “The halt in global temperatures has shown
up in multiple data sets and peer-reviewed literature.” Even NASA’s James
Hansen, the bureaucratic godfather of global warming hysterics, admits that the
global temperature standstill is real, according to the Global Warming Policy Foundation. “The
five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade,” Hansen
said on January 15.
Professor Werner Kirstein
of the Institute for Geography at the University of Leipzig told MDR
German Public Radio that sensational PR claims of the hottest year or hottest
decade on record are just political spin, because they are based on
year-to-year temperature data that differs by only a few hundredths of a
degree. As Hansen told reporters on January 13, “2010 differed from 2005
by less than 2 hundredths of a degree F (that’s 0.018F).” And those are
global averages reflecting a composite of hundreds of local weather station
observations worldwide, a concoction that borders on alchemy.Top Swedish climate scientist Dr. Lennart Bengtsson, who has served on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the official global warming advocacy body, was also quoted publicly on February 3 as saying,
“We are creating great
anxiety without it being justified…there are no indications that the warming is
so severe that we need to panic. The warming we have had the last a 100
years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to
measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all. The Earth appears to have
cooling properties that exceed the previously thought ones, and computer models
are inadequate to try to foretell a chaotic object like the climate, where
actual observations are the only way to go.”
The award winning Bengtsson,
highly decorated by scientific bodies across the globe, also pointed out that
the heating effect of carbon dioxide (CO2) is logarithmic, which means the
higher the concentration is, the smaller the effect of a further
increase. That is why historical proxy data going back millennia show
much greater concentrations of CO2 — 10, 20 or 30 times today’s levels – with
no associated catastrophic global temperatures. That lack of association
between temperature trends and CO2 has continued over the last century, as the
up and down pattern of global temperatures over the past 100 years does not
follow the upward climb of CO2 as the industrial revolution has expanded
globally. It follows instead the pattern of natural causes, such as
sunspot cycles, and ocean temperature cycles.
Bengtsson reported as
well, “The sea level has risen fairly evenly for a hundred years by 2-3
millimeters per year. The pitch has not accelerated.” That is because the
sea level has been rising as the Earth has been recovering from the freezing
period of the Little Ice Age. It is not due to man-caused global warming.
President Obama also told
us in the SOTU, “Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods – all are now more
frequent and intense.” But that is a fairy tale. On the website of
Obama’s own EPA is a chart of a U.S. Annual Heat Wave Index, 1895 to 2008,
which supports this statement, indicating that heat waves were much worse in
the 1930s: “Heat waves occurred with high frequency in the 1930s, and
these remain the most severe heat waves in the U.S. historical record (see
Figure 1). Many years of intense drought (the “Dust Bowl”) contributed to these
heat waves by depleting soil moisture and reducing the moderating effects of
evaporation.” The EPA also acknowledges that there is no trend in the
historical record of heat waves becoming worse.
As Climate Depot also
reports, the temperature records of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network
show that “the 1930s holds a wide lead for all-time daily record
maximums in the U.S. There is zero evidence that ‘climate change’ has increased
the probability of setting temperature records.” That is why the
1930s is actually the hottest decade on record.
As reported on the
website Real Science, forty percent of weather stations in the Historical
Climatology Network set their all-time record maximum temperature during the
1930s. Only one percent of those stations set their all-time record
maximum temperature in the current decade, allegedly the hottest on
record. While NOAA (the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric
Administration) has claimed that 2012 was the hottest year on record, only 3
weather stations (0.3%) set their all time record maximum that year, while 172
(21%) did in 1936. So much for Obama’s heat wave fantasies.
A 2012 study published in
the journal Nature “suggests that there has been little change in drought
over the past 60 years…The major 2012 drought obscures the fact
that U.S. has seen a decline in drought over the past century.” Since
1950, wildfires have decreased globally by 15%, and the National Academy of
Sciences expects that declining trend to continue for another 40 years. A
2011 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
concludes that wildfires in the western United States are now at their lowest levels in 3,000
years. University of Colorado Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. reports on
another 2011 study, published in the Hydrological Sciences Journal showing that flooding has
not increased in the United States over the last 85 to 127 years.
Steven Goddard summarizes
at the website Real Science, “We know that hurricanes have declined, tornadoes
have declined, floods have declined, and droughts have declined. That is why
history has been redefined to start in the 1970s,” by the global warming
alarmists.
But Obama persisted in
error at the SOTU, adding, “We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and
the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have
ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the
overwhelming judgment of science – and act before it’s too late.”
But as Pielke explained
in the Denver Post on October 12, 2012,
“Remarkably, the U.S. is currently experiencing the longest-ever recorded
period with no strikes of a Category 3 or stronger hurricane. The major 2012
drought obscures the fact that the U.S. has seen a decline in drought over the
past century.” He added, “Sandy was terrible, but we’re currently in a
relative hurricane drought.”
Steven Goddard again
reported the facts on Real Science: “According to NOAA, hurricanes have been on
the decline in the US since the beginning of records in the 19th century.
The worst decade for major (category 3,4,5) hurricanes was the 1940s.”
Carrying out his threat,
Obama’s EPA is already in the process of imposing restrictive regulation of
carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions under the Clean Air Act. The impact of
EPA’s CO2 regulation will be to sharply raise the cost of traditional energy
sources — oil, natural gas, and coal — which will sharply raise the prices of
electricity and gasoline. These are the energy sources that have powered
the industrial revolution. Those price increases will effectively be yet
another major tax increase on the economy of trillions over the years.
That will only further destroy jobs, depress wages, increase poverty, and contract
economic growth. Particularly devastated will be energy intensive
manufacturing that Obama also touted in his 2013 SOTU.
Recent energy production
breakthroughs have opened vast new vistas of booming, low cost energy
prosperity for America. Such a vastly expanded energy industry would
directly create hundreds of thousands of good paying additional jobs in the
expanded energy industry itself. The Keystone pipeline would contribute
the similarly booming resources of Canada to America, more than a
million barrels a day, more than is imported from Saudi Arabia or
Venezuela. That would create still more jobs, another quarter of a
million in the energy industry alone, and the potential for freeing America
from the cost of energy imports from the Middle East, and other hostile
sources. Moreover, the resulting dramatically increased supply of energy
would also lower the cost of energy for the American economy, effectively
constituting a major tax cut for the economy that would help fuel booming
growth. But if President Obama and his EPA have their way, all of
this will be lost to America.
The notion that foregoing the enormous effective tax cut and job creation involved in developing America’s enormous natural energy resources, and instead imposing an enormous effective tax increase on the economy through soaring traditional energy prices, can drive strong economic growth, as Obama said in the SOTU, cannot be taken seriously. No rational person could believe such a gross self-contradiction. That is just boob bait to seduce the most gullible and credulous.
All of the costs of
Obama’s global warming regulation will be for zero benefits in any event.
The formerly third world countries with rapidly emerging economies, such as
China, India, Brazil, joined by Russia, and other growing countries, have made
clear in power grabbing United Nations confabs that there is no way they are
going to compromise their growth over the politically correct Lysenkoism of
potentially catastrophic, man-caused, global warming. But even wild-eyed
global warming hysterics admit that strict CO2 emission restrictions in America
alone are not going to have any more than a negligible effect on future global
temperatures. So Obama’s global warming regulatory crusade would suffer
the most upside down cost benefit ratio in world history.The notion that foregoing the enormous effective tax cut and job creation involved in developing America’s enormous natural energy resources, and instead imposing an enormous effective tax increase on the economy through soaring traditional energy prices, can drive strong economic growth, as Obama said in the SOTU, cannot be taken seriously. No rational person could believe such a gross self-contradiction. That is just boob bait to seduce the most gullible and credulous.
One more quarter of
negative economic growth, and we will be in the 2013 double dip recession I
predicted back in 2011 as a result of Obamanomics. (See: “Obama and the
Crash of 2013,” published by Encounter books). With Obama persisting in
his global warming delusion contributing to that, the double dip recession may
provide the political foundation to impeach Obama for abuse of office.
Source: Forbes, by Peter
Ferrara, 5/28/13
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