Category Archives: EPA

Drain The EPA Swamp-Part 1- Social Cost of Carbon


3swamp-1The Trump administration has formed a team charged with making recommendations for changes to the EPA. This action is needed because gone are the days when the EPA followed the legislation written by Congress.  Good things were accomplished by the EPA.  But now the EPA has over stepped it authority. The EPA task is to administer the law, not make it. For example, it has developed criteria to justify their own efforts, often invites “friendly lawsuits to expand their activities, and uses “secret science” to justify their regulations:

The following are some of the areas that the team need to address, in my opinion:

  • Social Cost of Carbon
  • Secret Science
  • Peer Reviewed Studies
  • Friendly Law Suits
  • The Endangerment Finding
  • Research Grants
  • Last Minute Regulations

 

Social Cost of Carbon

The Federal Departments are charged with providing the benefit that results from their regulations. The EPA’s decided that their benefit would be a calculation that they call the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC). Their SCC calculates the economic damage per ton of CO2 emissions. They form the SCC by considering all the bad things they say are going to happen if atmospheric CO2 continues to increase.  Sea level rise, terrible weather, crop failures, mass migrations.  These outcomes are predictions made by their computer models.   One thing we know about the computer model’s predictions is that they have consistently overstated the temperature rise and the sea level rise.  These two drive the cost side of the equation.  Thus, all their regulatory schemes are supposed to prevent these costs.   But the EPA fails to include the benefits of additional atmospheric CO2. One thing we know for sure is the increased atmospheric CO2 has resulted in a profound greening of the globe.  Food crop production has increased dramatically as CO2 is the primary food for plants.  The gentle global warming that has taken place has been beneficial as well.

Another problem with the SCC is the discount rate used by the EPA is unrealistic in the view of many economists.  The Federal Government’s Office of Management and Budget(OMB) believes a in different discount rate. When using OMB discount rate, the EPA cost estimates are reduced by 80% and is some cases cause the cost to be negative. And where the calculation goes negative, the increased atmospheric CO2 results in a benefit, not a cost.

 

Using these flawed computer predictions makes this calculation unsuitable for policy making.  Further, the benefits that are actually known (not computer predicted) are not included thus making the calculation even more useless. And lastly the discount rate chosen by the EPA would not likely be used by most economist.

Social Cost of Carbon calculation currently used by the EPA should be drained from the swamp.

Unfortunately, many new regulatory rules have been enacted based upon the social cost of carbon.  One survey found that between May 2008 and August 2014, some 68 major rules were sanctioned by the SCC.   This is an issue the new team should address.

cbdakota

NYTimes Tries To Spin President Elect Donald Trump’s View On Global Warming.


This afternoon, I received an email from the  Heartland  Institute saying about what I said in my  yesterday’s posting.    It also  clears up the misinformation put out by the New York Times.   The Heartland email:

Can the media greenwash Trump?

Charles,

President-elect Trump met with the New York Times and the media quickly unleashed an interesting spin.

The “breaking” (fake) news story was that Trump had somehow changed his views on global warming.

This would seem a major flip flop after Trump repeatedly said during the campaign he would withdraw the U.S. from the UN’s Paris climate agreement and vowed to set the U.S. back on a pro-energy course.

CFACT’s friend Joe Bast, head of the Heartland Institute, publicized a more detailed transcript of Trump’s meeting with the Times and, lo and behold, what Trump actually said is right in keeping with his campaign pledges.  

Marc Morano posted a detailed analysis at Climate Depot, picked up today by the Drudge Report, to help clear the record about this exchange. As Marc explains:

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WikiLeaks Exposes Podesta’s Plot To Damage Scientist Roger Pielke’s Reputation


Roger Pielke, Jr is a professor at Colorado University.  He would probably would call himself a “lukewarmer” a label for those who believe that man has contributed to global warming but not necessarily leading to catastrophic climate in the near future.  He is for a carbon tax which most of we skeptics do not think necessary.

Pielke has said that there is no apparent connection between the rise of atmospheric CO2 and hurricanes, tornados, droughts, or other “weather extremes”’.  The IPCC ( the bible of the catastrophic global warming crowd) has said the same thing—although the warmers don’t like to spread that around.  Pielke has said that the increased cost of weather damage is the result of escalating cost of buildings, houses and the like and the increase of people siting facilities on the coastlines.  Insurance organizations have finally come to that same realization.  So why is it that he has been the subject of scurrilous attacks by people paid to do so by John Podesta’s Center for American Progress (CAP)?    Because he was publishing on sites where people were reading what he said.  He also has testified at Congressional hearings where he discussed his points about “extreme weather”.   Pielke was so severely attacked, including being investigated by a member of Congress, he quit doing his studies about climate. 

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Study Says CO2 Not Statistically Significant In Global Temperature Change


This might be the most important report written in 2016 and perhaps in this century. In my simple understanding of things global warming, it seems that any honest scientist that reads this must be able to show this report to be wrong or, if not already, join us as a skeptic. By zeroing out natural causes, this report shows why man-made CO2 does not have a statistically significant impact on global warming. It validates other studies, especially ice cores,that show that CO2 is a lagging variable, not a leading variable.

A new report “ On the Existence of a “Tropical Hot Spot “& The Validity of EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding” demonstrates that CO2 has only minimal effect on the global warming. The authors of the report challenge critics of these finding by saying :

“Moreover, on an all-other-things-equal basis, there is no statistically valid proof that past increases in Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have caused the reported rising, even claimed record setting temperatures. To validate their claim will require mathematically credible, publically available, simultaneous equation parameter estimation work. Where is it?”

Some background. The damage to the US economy caused by the EPA claiming that CO2 emissions will eventually lead to catastrophic increases in Global temperatures was first permitted as a result of the US Supreme Court telling the EPA to determine if CO2 was hazardous. So if the EPA could make an endangerment  determination, then the Court would allow CO2 (and several other minor greenhouse gases) be added to the Clean Air Act (CAA). CO2 was considered in detail by Congress when they passed the CAA and Congress rejected its inclusion. Once again the Supreme Court, fully aware of Congress’ rejection, decided to legislate –not their prerogative– by including CO2 if the EPA said it was hazardous.

To no one’s surprise, the EPA did conclude it was hazardous and began sending out regulations of all kinds based upon their catastrophic global warming theory. The EPA in their CO2 Endangerment Finding said they had found 3 lines of evidence that demonstrates their Finding: They are:

“The assumption of the existence of a “Tropical Hot Spot (THS)” is critical to all Three Lines of Evidence in EPA’s GHG/CO2 Endangerment Finding. Stated simply, first, the THS is claimed to be a fingerprint or signature of atmospheric and Global Average Surface Temperatures (GAST) warming caused by increasing GHG/CO2 concentrations1. (The new report scientist are challenging this by saying that the proper test for the existence of the THS in the real world is very simple. Are the slopes of the three temperature trend lines [upper & lower troposphere and surface] all statistically significant and do they have the proper top down rank order?)

Second, higher atmospheric CO2 and other GHGs concentrations are claimed to have been the primary cause of the claimed record setting GAST over the past 50 plus years.

Third, the THS assumption is imbedded in all of the climate models that EPA still relies upon in its policy analysis supporting, for example, its Clean Power Plan–recently put on hold by a Supreme Court Stay. These climate models are also critical to EPA’s Social Cost of Carbon estimates used to justify a multitude of regulations across many U.S. Government agencies.

The scientists that issued the report: On the Existence of a “Tropical Hot Spot “& The Validity of EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding” have set out in detail their methodology and data used to arrive at their conclusions. These can be examined by clicking on the link above.

In summary, the scientists looked at natural causes for increases and decreases in global temperature as well as man-made causes. CO2 produced by burning of fossil fuels is a man-made source. There were three natural factors—an increase or decrease in Solar radiation, volcanic activity, and ENSO (El NINO Southern Oscillation) . Natural factors can not be the result of human actions.

ENSO is a three part phenomenon.. ElNino, LaNina and Neutral

make_enso_plot_v2-r-enso

El Ninos and La Ninas are irregular in their size and frequency. While this chart goes back to the fifties when ENSO was first recognized, Scripps Institute of Oceanography says:

There have been many El Niños observed in the past. Theres every reason to think that they have been happening for many thousands of years”

Obviously, fossil fuel produced CO2 is not a issue here.

These scientists removed from 13 temperature records the effect of natural causes of temperature changes leaving only the man-made causes. The temperature records were from balloons, satellite, ground and ocean temperature readings.

From the scientists report, here is what they did and found:

“These analysis results would appear to leave very, very little doubt that EPA’s claim of a Tropical Hot Spot, caused by rising atmospheric CO2 levels, simply does not exist in the real world. Also critically important, even on an all-other things-equal basis, this analysis failed to find that the steadily rising Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 13 temperature time series analyzed.

Thus, the analysis results invalidate each of the Three Lines of Evidence in the EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding. Once EPA’s THS assumption is invalidated, it is obvious why the climate models they claim can be relied upon, are also invalid. And, these results clearly demonstrate–13 times in fact–that once just the ENSO impacts on temperature data are accounted for, there is no “record setting” warming to be concerned about. In fact, there is no ENSO-Adjusted Warming at all. These natural ENSO impacts involve both changes in solar activity and the 1977 Pacific Shift.

Moreover, on an all-other-things-equal basis, there is no statistically valid proof that past increases in Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations have caused the officially reported rising, even claimed record setting temperatures. To validate their (critic’s) claim will require mathematically credible, publically available, simultaneous equation parameter estimation work. Where is it?

I reviewed a website that had discussed these findings that there is no significant statistical evidence of CO2 causing global warming. Not a single challenge using data and facts. All of critics were saying that “97%” could not be wrong or using ad hominem attacks on the author.

So as the authors of the report say about having a factual disagreement, “Where is it?

cbdakota

Make The Climate Change Radicals Walk The Walk, Not Just Talk The Talk


Glenn Reynolds, a Tennessee University Law Professor posted in USAToday, where he frequently contributes opinion columns, “ Ban AC for DC “ with the subtitle being “If our rulers think global warming is a crisis, let them be a good example for the rest of us”

goreandhairdryer

 

 

 

Reynolds says:

“In this, I’m inspired by Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Tex., who noticed something peculiar recently. It seems that EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, who spends a lot of time telling Americans that they need to drive less, fly less, and in general reduce their consumption of fossil fuels, also flies home to see her family in Boston “almost every weekend“; the head of the Clean Air Division, Janet McCabe, does the same, but she heads to Indianapolis. In air mileage alone, the Daily Caller News Foundation estimates that McCarthy surpasses the carbon footprint of an ordinary American.

Smith has introduced a bill that wouldn’t target the EPA honchos’ personal travel, though: It provides, simply, that “None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to pay the cost of any officer or employee of the Environmental Protection Agency for official travel by airplane.”

This makes sense to me. We’re constantly told by the administration that “climate change” is a bigger threat than terrorism.  And as even President Obama has noted, there’s a great power in setting an example: “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.”

Reynolds thinks expanding Representative Smith’s proposed legislation would useful as he notes in the following:

  1. Extend Smith’s bill to cover the entire federal government. We have Skype now, and Facetime. There’s no reason to fly to meetings. I’d let the President keep Air Force One for official travel, but subject to a requirement that absolutely no campaign activity or fundraisers take place on any trips in which the president travels officially.
  2. Obama makes a great point about setting the thermostat at 72 degrees. We should ban air conditioning in federal buildings. We won two world wars without air conditioning our federal employees. Nothing in their performance over the last 50 or 60 years suggests that A/C has improved things. Besides, The Washington Post informs us that A/C is sexist, and that Europeans think it’s stupid.
  3. In fact, we should probably ban air conditioning in the entire District of Columbia, to ensure that members of Congress, etc. won’t congregate in lobbyists’ air-conditioned offices.
  4. Speaking of which, members of Congress shouldn’t be allowed to fly home on the weekends. Not only does this produce halfhearted attention to their jobs — the so-called “Tuesday to Thursday Club” — but, again, it produces too much of a carbon footprint. Even if they pay for the travel out of campaign funds, instead of their own budgets, they need to set an example for the rest of us — and for those skeptical foreigners that Obama mentioned.

Reynolds takes a swipe at Leonardo DiCapprio as well. And what about Michelle Obama’s vacations!!!

The full posting is a good read, ( somewhat tongue-in-cheek in some parts.)

Do you think the warmers really believe in this catastrophic global warming stuff? Does not look like it. I think it demonstrates that they are using this to increase the size of the government through regulations (and thus their power.) That was the motivation of the founders of this movement.

cbdakota

Hysteria and DDT


The Pacific Research Institute has released a video entitled “Hysteria’s History: Why is Alarmism so Dangerous?-Part 4“. The video’s purpose is to expose people to the historical progression of environmental alarmism that has often resulted in poor and contradictory policy proposals” This video discusses the ban on DDT. DDT had been very successful in nearly eradicating malaria around the world. Following the ban, malaria deaths skyrocketed.

DDT sprayed indoors, where it can keep  mosquitos in check and have no effect on the local wild life is a responsible action.   But it took skeptics to point this out over and over again before the green movement reeled in their efforts to keep DDT banned.

Hopefully, we skeptics,  showing that the catastrophic global warming movement is more hysteria than facts, will eventually cause the greens to concede in this case as well.

cbdakota

 

 

 

 

Making It Criminal To Be A Skeptic—The First Amendment Is Under Siege


Senator Whitehouse (D-RI) is calling for RICO investigations of skeptics and fossil fuel companies. California legislators writing a bill allowing for the prosecution of climate change dissent—fortunately it died this past  Thursday. Seventeen  State Attorney Generals investigating Exxon. Calls to silence skeptical views are becoming more frequent. A number of major US newspapers are prohibiting discussion of Skeptical views.  This theme parallels the Social Justice Warriors efforts to impose their view of politically correct and thus allowable speech. The First Amendment to the Constitution is under siege by the media and the government itself. The Amendment was designed to prevent the Government from squashing dissenting views and is often considered the medias first line of defense from the government crackdowns such as are common in socialist, communist and dictatorial governments (e.g. Venezuela, China and Iran.)

From an earlier Climate Change Sanity blog:

”Climate science acts like it is fighting a holy war. There are only those who are just and those who must be silenced and stopped at all costs. Anyone who mounts reasonable logical, empirical, or skeptical challenges to the orthodoxy must be ruined, not by counterfactual evidence, but by vicious attack”.

Obviously the warmers are not winning the hearts and minds of free people. One reason for this is that the disinformation primarily comes from the warmers. The predictions of catastrophe are many and they have not come true. And you do not need to be a climate scientist to understand how the warmers continue to get it wrong. The mainstream media is complicit in the distribution of this disinformation.

 

Look at these postings where you can get some idea of how poor their predictions are:

CAGW Predictions –Zombie And Others

Quotes from the Founders Of the Global Warming Movement

More Green Predictions Are Way Off Base

5 IPCC Assessments Don’t Show Correlation Of Temperature and Severe Weather

How Reliable Are Climate Models?

And some stories of manipulation of Data to get the results they want

Can We Trust the EPA Secrete Science

Doctor Brown and Temperature Tampering

Research Papers Show IPCC Climate Sensitivity Are Too High

And Bjon Lomborg shows how just a fraction of the money wasted on these erroneous green studies could really make a difference in people’s lives:

Bjorn Lomborg Say Global Warming Poor Place to Spend Money

These are just a few of postings on Climate Change Sanity that show you need to be a skeptic.

And please contact you legislators and tell them to protect the public from those who want to take away our First Amendment rights.

cbdakota

Denying the Climate Catastrophe: 1. Introduction (Warren Meyers Essay)


Warren Meyers is posting on his website, Coyoteblog.com an essay on Global Warming (aka global climate change). Meyers is quite good as an explainer of issues because he can do it without making them too complex for most people to understand. The following, is the first of perhaps 6 parts. I plan on rebloging them all.

cbdakota

click to enlarge

I suppose the first question I need to answer is:  why should you bother reading this?  We are told the the science is “settled” and that there is a 97% consensus among scientists on …. something.  Aren’t you the reader just giving excess credence to someone who is “anti-science” just by reading this?

Well, this notion that the “debate is over” is one of those statements that is both true and not true.  There is something approaching scientific consensus for certain parts of anthropogenic global warming theory — for example, the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that concentrations of it in the atmosphere have a warming effect on the Earth is pretty much undisputed in all but the furthest reaches of the scientific community.

But it turns out that other propositions that are important to the debate on man-made global warming are far less understood scientifically, and the near certainty on a few issues (like the existence of the greenhouse gas effect) is often used to mask real questions about these other propositions.  So before we go any further , it is critical for us to get very clear what exact proposition we are discussing.

At this point I have to tell a story from over thirty years ago when I saw Any Rand speak at Northeastern University (it’s hard to imagine any university today actually allowing Rand on campus, but that is another story).  In the Q&A period at the end, a woman asked Rand, “Why don’t you believe in housewives?” and Rand answered, in a very snarky fashion, “I did not know housewives were a matter of belief.”   What the woman likely meant to ask was “Why don’t you believe that being a housewife is a valid occupation for a woman?”  But Rand was a bear for precision in language and was not going to agree or disagree with a poorly worded proposition.

I am always reminded of this story when someone calls me a climate denier.  I want to respond, in Rand’s Russian accent, “I did not know that climate was a matter of belief?”

But rather than being snarky here, let’s try to reword the “climate denier” label and see if we can get to a proposition with which I can agree or disagree.

Am I, perhaps, a “climate change denier?”  Well, no.  I don’t know anyone who is.  The world has had warm periods and ice ages.  The climate changes.

OK, am I a “man-made climate change denier?”  No again.  I know very few people, except perhaps for a few skeptics of the talkshow host variety, that totally deny any impact of man’s actions on climate.  Every prominent skeptic I can think of acknowledges multiple vectors of impact by man on climate, from greenhouse gas emissions to land use.

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Atmospheric CO2 Is Causing Significant New Greening Of Something Between 25% And 50% Of The Earth’s Vegetated Land


A recent study shows that the Earth is greening as the CO2 in the atmosphere rises. In fact the rise greatly exceeds their “vaunted” climate model projections. The BBC posted “Rise in CO2 has greened Planet Earth” that relates the studies findings and quotes several of the authors as to what the study tells them:

It is called Greening of the Earth and its Drivers, and it is based on data from the Modis and AVHRR instruments which have been carried on American satellites over the past 33 years. The sensors show significant greening of something between 25% and 50% of the Earth’s vegetated land, which in turn is slowing the pace of climate change as the plants are drawing CO2 from the atmosphere.”

A new study says that if the extra green leaves prompted by rising CO2 levels were laid in a carpet, it would cover twice the continental USA.”

The scientists say several factors play a part in the plant boom, including climate change (8%), more nitrogen in the environment (9%), and shifts in land management (4%).

But the main factor, they say, is plants using extra CO2 from human society to fertilise their growth (70%).”

The BBC posting lets the authors take their required bow to the IPCC saying that this is only temporary and besides while CO2 brought about the greening, it will also bring about floods, winds, high temps and ocean acidification.

Once again,we are being asked to believe in the undocumented climate models that can’t forecast global temperatures accurately, nor the sea levels accurately and now we know they did not forecast the greening accurately.

To their credit, the BBC did allow some skeptic voices to enter the discussion as follows:

“Nic Lewis, an independent scientist often critical of the IPCC, told BBC News: “The magnitude of the increase in vegetation appears to be considerably larger than suggested by previous studies.

“This suggests that projected atmospheric CO2 levels in IPCC scenarios are significantly too high, which implies that global temperature rises projected by IPCC models are also too high, even if the climate is as sensitive to CO2 increases as the models imply.”

And Prof Judith Curry, the former chair of Earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, added: “It is inappropriate to dismiss the arguments of the so-called contrarians, since their disagreement with the consensus reflects conflicts of values and a preference for the empirical (i.e. what has been observed) versus the hypothetical (i.e. what is projected from climate models).

“These disagreements are at the heart of the public debate on climate change, and these issues should be debated, not dismissed.”

Curry’s comments are really relevant since there is a serious effort underway by our Government to ban skeptics from speaking about this issue.

Furthermore,  the EPA  uses what they call the  “social cost of carbon” to justify their regulations. Everything they use for this calculation echoes the catastrophic outcome predicted by the climate models.   They refuse to consider any benefit from global warming.  Skeptics have demonstrated that the benefits exceed  the EPA negatives and much of that is accomplished by greening–bigger and better crop growth, for example.  This study is the anathema of the social cost of carbon BS.

cbdakota

EPA Says “No” To Logic—- Just Wants To Show Leadership?


It is hard to imagine that there is a more out of control unit of the Federal Government than the EPA. The EPA Administrator, Gina McCarthy seems impervious to logic. It has been repeatedly pointed out to her that the Clean Power Plan (shutting down numerous coal-based electrical generation facilities) will have no measurable effect on Global temperature. She does not disagree with the statement. But she says there isn’t any reason to measure it anyway. Then she shifts her defense saying that the important things is that the EPA is showing domestic leadership and that it will lead the US population to buy into the Paris agreement. No concern over loss of employment or the effect on the economy.

Two YouTube videos of McCarthy’s testimony before Congress have Congressman McKinley of WVA and Senator Daines of Montana relate the loss of jobs and the impact on the economy resulting from the Clean Power Plan are shown below:

I can cut the Administrator some slack because she is just doing what President Obama said he was going to do. And that was to kill the coal industry. However, she took the job to carry out Obama’s plan so it is hard to have much sympathy for her.

And especially when the EPA blew-out a shut in mine in Colorado and and caused a release of millions of gallons of water loaded with heavy metals in to a river that supplies water for the people downstream of the release. What did McCarthy do about the EPA people that caused that? Were they fired? Were they fined? No they were not. What do you think might have happen to a private company if they would have been responsible for the blowout?

cbdakota