The same ethical advice for doctors also makes sense for Congress as it considers several pending global warming bills – first do no harm. Given serious questions about global warming science as well as the efficacy of costly proposals to address it, the best choice for Washington is none of the above. With economy-wide cap and trade stalled in the Senate, a number of slightly scaled back variants have been proposed, including measures targeting selected industries or a carbon tax. All threaten to do more harm than good.
If the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change credibility has been taking hit after hit as several flaws were recently revealed in its 2007 report – the same report our politicians use to justify urgent action on climate change. The IPCC’s statement of principles reads, “IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy, but its claims that the Himalayan glaciers would be melted by 2035 were admittedly based on political action. Dr Murari Lal, the lead author on the IPCC report’s chapter on Asia, said, We thought that if we …
Utah’s House Legislature took a strong stance against cap and trade as well as the alleged scientific consensus by passing a nonbinding resolution yesterday 56-17. Specifically, the resolution “urges the United States Environmental Protection Agency to halt its carbon dioxide reduction policies and programs and with its “Endangerment Finding” and related regulations until a full and independent investigation of the climate data conspiracy and global warming science can be substantiated. Most state representatives are not only questioning the scientific consensus but also the economic implications of cap and trade or …
Not in the small island nation of Vanuatu even though its government lists addressing global warming as a top priority. Take one of Vanuatu’s residents, Torethy Frank, who asked a researcher for the Copenhagen Consensus Center, “What is global warming?” Her bigger concerns? Torethy and her family of six live in a small house made of concrete and brick with no running water. As a toilet, they use a hole dug in the ground. They have no shower and there is no fixed electricity supply. Torethy’s family was given a …
Is it possible that we may know less about the climate and temperature change than previously thought? Maybe so, says a new study published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience. The report found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery. “In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record,” says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, …
Dr. Craig Idso, is the founder and chairman of the Center for Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. He addresses concerns about global warming and marine life, including the death of the coral reefs and other underwater ecosystems. Neither increases in temperature nor increases in carbon or both of them together, have had any lasting ill effects on the calcifications and growth in marine organisms. The Center’s work on ocean acidification can be found here. His general advice for politicians: pay attention more to real world observations than theoretical …
Dr. Roy Spencer, a meteorologist at the University of Alabama and someone who works frequently with NASA’s science team, is the keynote speaker at lunch. He blogs here and explains very well why the IPCC model predicts too much warming; in fact, his latest post “A Layman’s Explanation of Why Global Warming Predictions by Climate Models are Wrong” is worth taking a look. His talk discusses why we cannot trust the IPCC climate models for global warming predictions. But he notes first that global warming skeptics have many different theories. …
The first panel at the Heartland Institute today brings together four of the world’s best scientists when it comes to climate change study. The first speaker is Anthony Watts, creator of the website SufaceStations.org, “created in response to the realization that very little physical site survey data exists for the entire United States Historical Climatological Network (USHCN) and Global Historical Climatological Network (GHCN) surface station records worldwide.” SufaceStations.org is a project that monitors the quality of data at America’s 1,221 weather stations. Once a believer that manmade carbon dioxide had …
The Chicago-based Heartland Institute is hosting its Third International Conference on Climate Change and its second this year. The event, taking place in Washington DC, has a lot of the same players as the second conference but all of them are worth hearing again. It’s a group of climatologists, scientists, economists and a few politicians. Kicking off the event is Dr. Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He argues there are three reasons why purported climate science typically supports global warming alarmism. The first …
When it comes global warming, two debates are currently taking place. At the forefront is the political debate. Current legislation introduced by House Democrats Ed Markey and Henry Waxman includes a cap-and-trade plan to attempt to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. But the debate unfortunately (and like most political debates) has largely evolved into each party talking past each other. In fact, even Democrats have been talking past each other, which forced Chairman Waxman to bypass subcommittee markup and moving to full committee to keep the bill moving …
