We’re getting burned by phony science and authoritarian
power grabs
By Paul Driessen and David R. Legates
During
this hot, wet summer, a “national climate expert” recently told Delawareans
that they can expect even hotter summers – with a climate like Savannah,
Georgia’s – by the end of the century.
The culprit, naturally: runaway global warming.
Savannah
residents are long accustomed to their climate and, thanks to air conditioning
and other modern technologies, are better able to deal with the heat and
humidity. Nevertheless, the impact on Delaware
will be disastrous, Dr. Katherine Hayhoe claims. Nonsense.
Her
forthcoming report promises to be no different than other proclamations that persistently
predict dire consequences from climate change – and then present taxpayers with
a hefty bill. In this scenario, the State’s Department of Natural Resources and
Environmental Control (DNREC) paid $46,000 for her report, presumably to
suggest that “independent scholars” support the state’s positions.
The
preliminary release of her report reads like the script from a bad disaster
movie – think The Day After Tomorrow
and An Inconvenient Truth. Like them,
it also plays fast and loose with the facts.
It
fails to mention the extreme cold that many places around the globe experienced
recently. Europe and Russia in
particular suffered through bitter cold the past two winters. The report likewise
ignores the fact that average global temperatures have not risen at all over
the last sixteen years; in fact, Earth has actually cooled slightly during the past decade.
For
its really scary worst-case scenario, Dr. Hayhoe says Delaware’s temperatures will rise astronomically
in coming decades: with more than two full months of endless days above 95°F and
a hundred-fold increase in days with temperatures at or above 100°F by
2100. “Trends to more extreme highs and
fewer extreme lows already are apparent,” Dr. Hayhoe asserts. Except they are
not.
Data
from 970 weather stations across the United States reveal that more
record daily maximum air temperatures were set in the 1930s than in any recent
decade, and no increase in frequency of higher temperatures has been observed
since 1955. The Delaware State Climatologist examined New
Castle County Airport records in Wilmington and found no long-term trend in
either the total number of days or the number of consecutive days with maximum
air temperature above 90°F.
The
same can be said for days where temperatures remain below freezing.
Globally,
daytime high temperatures do not show significant warming – and most of the
warming that has been observed is confined to nighttime low temperatures.
Nighttime lows are driven by turbulence (or lack thereof) near the surface, not
by the accumulation of energy related to CO2 warming of the deep
atmosphere.
By
contrast, maximum daily temperature is a measure of the energy content of the
deep atmosphere, and is thus a much better measure of the warming due to
greenhouse gases. The lack of a signal in maximum temperature suggests that the
rate of warming due to CO2 is relatively small – and certainly much
smaller than climate models suggest.
As
for precipitation, Dr. Hayhoe claims that both floods and droughts will
increase, with “more rain arriving as heavy downpours, and more dry periods in between.” This assertion was dispelled in a recent
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on extreme events, released
last summer.
The
IPCC report concluded that “in some regions droughts have become less frequent,
less intense or shorter; for example in central North
America.” Similarly, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration
has produced plots that show which parts of the United States are classified as
moderate to extreme for dryness and wetness. While both conditions show
considerable variability, neither exhibits a significant trend. NOAA also
concludes that snowfall records show no long-term trend, and recent record
snowfalls are the result of natural variability.
Why
should Delaware’s
or the nation’s future be any different than the past fifty years of increasing
carbon dioxide concentrations? Dr.
Hayhoe’s bases her extreme scenarios on climate models – the same models that
have predicted major temperature trends that have not materialized; greatly exaggerated
short-term trends in rainfall, droughts and violent storms; and failed to predict
the lack of warming since 1998. So why
should we believe them now?
The
real reason behind this report is to provide the State with the justification
to enact draconian measures to control Delawareans’ energy use and provide
major subsidies for “alternative” and “renewable” energy projects. Delaware Secretary of the Environment and
Energy Collin O’Mara says, “We need to make sure we have good science driving
our decision-making in the years to come.” Apparently, $46,000 has bought the
State precisely the “science” he wanted to hear.
O’Mara
came to Delaware
in 2009, as part of Governor Markell’s administration. Billed as “the youngest state cabinet
official in the nation,” O’Mara is a self-proclaimed climate-change and energy
“entrepreneur.” During his tenure in Delaware,
he has spearheaded the administration’s efforts on “climate change mitigation,”
renewable energy subsidies and “sustainable development.”
During
the last 4-1/2 years, the Markell Administration has “invested” in Fisker
Automotive, leaving the State’s citizens on the hook to pay for an automobile
assembly plant that has created zero new jobs and produced zero cars.
Bloom
Energy, which hails from the same town as O’Mara (San Jose, CA),
has also been the happy beneficiary of enormous State subsidies and exceptions
from environmental regulations. Delaware
now labels natural gas as a renewable resource, for example – but only if it is
burned in a Bloom fuel cell. This enables the State to funnel taxpayer and
ratepayer money from renewable energy credits to Bloom. To top it off, if the
State ever decides to renege on the deal, the legislation requires that the
State immediately pay Bloom twenty years worth of profits.
O’Mara
has also been busy with rule-making by executive fiat. Without any public
discussion or debate, and without any vote by the State legislature, O’Mara
signed into law new “green” energy standards that make the First State’s
emission rules even more stringent than Federal regulations, via a clever
process known as prospective
incorporation. Through this, all
provisions from the California Code of Regulations are automatically “updated,”
to ensure that Delaware’s Code is consistent
with California’s.
That
means any changes to the California Code implemented by the most
environmentally dogmatic, job-killing and bankrupt state in the Union are
immediately and completely binding via Delaware
regulations. With no presentation to the
people, no discussion or vote by the General Assembly, and not even any
case-by-case intervention by Delaware’s executive
branch, California regulations are
automatically the law in Delaware.
With the stroke of the pen, Delaware has surrendered
its sovereignty to California.
Armed
with this new “scientific” report, what draconian measures might Mr. O’Mara and
the Markell Administration have in store for the citizens of Delaware? Time alone will tell. However,
given their track record thus far, Delawareans are going to get burned – and
not by global warming.
Even
worse, the same sneaky shenanigans are being played out in other states, in Washington, and all over
the world, through the UN, EU and environmentalist pressure groups – in the
name of saving the planet from computer model and horror movie disasters. These
are bigger power grabs than anything King George III tried. We the People need
to take notice, and take action.
The multiple light colored lines track projections of mean
global temperature for the lower Troposphere by 44 climate models. The dark
black line is the 44-computer-model average, which is what the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses as its best estimate of
predicted “catastrophic manmade global warming.” The two brightly colored lines
represent the actual satellite temperature records measured by the University
of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH – blue) and Remote Sensing System (RSS – red). These
two lines demonstrate that actual planetary temperatures are far below what
IPCC models predict. http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/04/global-warming-slowdown-the-view-from-space/
Paul
Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee
For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power, black death (Merril Press, 2012).
David Legates is a Professor of
Climatology at the University
of Delaware and has
studied climate change for thirty years.
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