Obama’s global-warming folly

I’m amazed this made it into the Washington Post – Anthony

by Charles Krauthammer

The economy stagnates. Syria burns . Scandals lap at his feet. China and Russia mock him , even as a “29-year-old hacker” revealed his nation’s spy secrets to the world. How does President Obama respond? With a grandiloquent speech on climate change .

Climate change? It lies at the very bottom of a list of Americans’ concerns (last of 21 — Pew poll). Which means that Obama’s declaration of unilateral American war on global warming, whatever the cost — and it will be heavy — is either highly visionary or hopelessly solipsistic. You decide:

Global temperatures have been flat for 16 years — a curious time to unveil a grand, hugely costly, socially disruptive anti-warming program.

Now, this inconvenient finding is not dispositive. It doesn’t mean there is no global warming. But it is something that the very complex global warming models that Obama naively claims represent settled science have trouble explaining. It therefore highlights the president’s presumption in dismissing skeptics as flat-earth know-nothings.

On the contrary. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who refuse to acknowledge the problematic nature of contradictory data. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who cite a recent Alaskan heat wave — a freak event in one place at one time — as presumptive evidence of planetary climate change. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who cite perennial phenomena such as droughts as cosmic retribution for environmental sinfulness.

For the sake of argument, nonetheless, let’s concede that global warming is precisely what Obama thinks it is. Then answer this: What in God’s name is his massive new regulatory and spending program — which begins with a war on coal and ends with billions in more subsidies for new Solyndras — going to do about it?

The United States has already radically cut carbon dioxide emissions — more than any country on earth since 2006, according to the International Energy Agency. Emissions today are back down to 1992 levels.

And yet, at the same time, global emissions have gone up. That’s because — surprise! — we don’t control the energy use of the other 96?percent of humankind.

At the heart of Obama’s program are EPA regulations that will make it impossible to open any new coal plant and will systematically shut down existing plants. “Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal,” explained one of Obama’s climate advisers. “On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.”

Net effect: tens of thousands of jobs killed, entire states impoverished. This at a time of chronically and crushingly high unemployment, slow growth, jittery markets and deep economic uncertainty.

But that’s not the worst of it. This massive self-sacrifice might be worthwhile if it did actually stop global warming and save the planet. What makes the whole idea nuts is that it won’t. This massive self-inflicted economic wound will have no effect on climate change.

The have-nots are rapidly industrializing. As we speak, China and India together are opening one new coal plant every week. We can kill U.S. coal and devastate coal country all we want, but the industrializing Third World will more than make up for it. The net effect of the Obama plan will simply be dismantling the U.S. coal industry for shipping abroad.

To think we will get these countries to cooperate is sheer fantasy. We’ve been negotiating climate treaties for 20 years and gotten exactly nowhere. China, India and the other rising and modernizing countries point out that the West had a 150-year industrial head start that made it rich. They are still poor. And now, just as they are beginning to get rich, we’re telling them to stop dead in their tracks?

Fat chance. Obama imagines he’s going to cajole China into a greenhouse-gas emissions reduction that will slow its economy, increase energy costs, derail industrialization and risk enormous social unrest. This from a president who couldn’t even get China to turn over one Edward Snowden to U.S. custody.

I’m not against a global pact to reduce CO2. Indeed, I favor it. But in the absence of one — and there is no chance of getting one in the foreseeable future — there is no point in America committing economic suicide to no effect on climate change, the reversing of which, after all, is the alleged point of the exercise.

For a president to propose this with such aggressive certainty is incomprehensible. It is the starkest of examples of belief that is impervious to evidence. And the word for that is faith, not science.

Source:  Washington Post

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Gail Combs
July 7, 2013 4:51 pm

Tom Jones says: July 7, 2013 at 1:12 pm
…. It would be interesting to take a poll of the entire population of the United States: How many people don’t believe it to be true?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Belief that humans are to blame for global warming remains near an all-time high, but that doesn’t mean voters are ready to reach into their pockets to fight it.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 46% of Likely U.S. Voters believe global warming is caused primarily by human activity. Thirty-seven percent (37%) blame long-term planetary trends instead. Just six percent (6%) say global warming is caused by something else, but 11% more are undecided….
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/archive/energy_update_archive/41_willing_to_pay_more_to_fight_global_warming_47_are_not

I like Rasmussen because he actually gives a link to the survey questions HERE Note they are questions and not multiple choice or yes/no.

Thinker
July 7, 2013 4:57 pm

Planetary surface temperatures have very little to do with incident radiation. At the base of the theoretical troposphere of Uranus it is about 320K but virtually no Solar radiation reaches down through 350Km of its atmosphere to that altitude.
The Sun cannot heat the surfaces of planets like Earth and Venus to the observed temperatures with direct radiation. So it doesn’t matter how much the atmosphere slows cooling if we can’t explain how the temperature gets to 288K on Earth or 730K on Venus before any such cooling begins.
In fact it is energy from the Sun which does the warming by first heating the atmosphere with incident radiation. That absorbed energy then disturbs the thermodynamic equilibrium and this leads to convective heat transfer down towards the surface. In physics “convective heat transfer” can comprise diffusion as well as advection, but advection is not necessary. We don’t need to explain such heat transfer by imagining air moving up or down. We need to understand the process described in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as in Sections 4 to 9 of the paper “Planetary Core and Surface Temperatures” easily found in a search.

pat
July 7, 2013 5:36 pm

amazed this got in The Australian:
8 July: Australian: Harry Edwards: Protests stop wind farm plan
A LARGE wind farm proposed for near Goulburn in NSW has been shelved after protests from local landholders including Maurice Newman, the former head of the Australian Securities Exchange who has been anointed to chair a new business advisory council if the Coalition wins this year’s federal election…
Mr Newman, who opposes wind farms and has pledged to lobby against subsidies for them, argues that fluctuations in output from renewable energy sources have increased power costs for consumers by requiring the construction of expensive backup generators…
In January Tony Abbott announced that Mr Newman — appointed by the Howard government to chair the ABC — was his choice to head a new business advisory council for a Coalition government…
“The cost of energy was a comparative advantage for Australia, which offset the relatively higher wage rates of our population,” Mr Newman told The Australian yesterday. “That benefit has been squandered and you can’t underestimate the role of renewable energy behind that lack of competitiveness.
“What the present government has done is decide we should make Australia less competitive by lifting the price of electricity.
“Therefore, if there is a change of government, I’m sure that any business council that I chair will be of a mind to restore Australia’s international competitiveness.”
Labor’s Renewable Energy Target aims to have 20 per cent of electricity generated from renewable sources by 2020. The Coalition intends to review the RET next year if it wins the election, and could rely on Mr Newman’s advice to scrap the target…
Local councillor Malcolm Barlow said Wind Prospect CWP was concerned that a Coalition government would make wind farms uneconomic. “I think the reason (the application) has lapsed, given the upcoming election, is the Coalition is going to review the renewable energy target system and carbon tax,” Mr Barlow said.
He said he strongly opposed wind farms because they were uneconomic, relying on a subsidy of up to $3 million a year per turbine.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/protests-stop-wind-farm-plan/story-e6frg6xf-1226675644019
——————————————————————————–

wws
July 7, 2013 6:09 pm

Mike Kelter asks 3 very good questions, and I can tell you that the very same answer applies to all three, as far as this administration is concerned. You may think I’m being flippant, but I guarantee you, this is what this administration thinks and this is the only answer you will ever get.
“1. What provisions in the CAA allow Presidential authority to modify emission standards for existing power generation plants?
2. What processes must the EPA undertake to get new rules approved in a manner that has reasonable Benefit/Cost ratios.
3. What scientific proof must the EPA provide that CO2 must be regulated?”
Eff You, That’s what. That’s the only answer you’ll ever get.

Ryan
July 7, 2013 6:10 pm

I don’t understand how Krauthammer can see right through the nonsense of evolution-rejecters and fall for the equally-dubious claims of climate reality rejecters.

Gail Combs
July 7, 2013 6:17 pm

Gareth Phillips says: July 7, 2013 at 3:42 pm
….Thanks Gail, good analysis of the complexities and how easy it is to slide into these things without Parliamentary or Congressional approval. In comparison Climate issues may waste money, but they don’t waste lives.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You are welcome.
How ever the climate issues DO WASTE LIVES.
The simplest example is the fuel poverty deaths.
28 February 2012 Fuel poverty deaths three times higher than government estimates… Some 7,800 people die during winter because they can’t afford to heat their homes properly….
23 March 2013 UK’s coldest spring since 1963 claims 5,000 lives: Pensioners worst affected – and experts say final toll could be ‘horrendous’: Freezing Britain’s unusually harsh winter could have cost thousands of pensioners their lives….. About 2,000 extra deaths were registered in just the first two weeks of March compared with the average for the same period over the past five years.
What ever the true number of people in the UK who are dying from the cold because they can not afford to heat their homes, you still have:
6 Jul 2011 A quarter of Brits are living in fuel poverty as energy bills rocket: As energy prices go through the roof, shocking figures reveal one in four families has been plunged into fuel poverty.
The death by starvation is a heck of a lot more complicated
It goes all the way back to the World Trade Organization and Dan Amstutz who wrote the Agreement on Agriculture in 1995 and The Freedom to Farm (Fail) act of 1996. Congressional Record March 28, 2000: …family farm income has decreased 43 percent since 1996 and more than 25 percent of the remaining farms may not cover expenses for 2000. Every month more and more family farmers are being forced to give up their life’s work, their homes, and their communities. Amstutz was VP of Cargill (grain traders) and later of Goldman Sachs. He was the architect of a lot of the unwilling transfer of farmland from families and peasants to the corporate elite.
For example Mexico lost 75% of her farmers and Portugal lost 60%. Poland is slated to lose around one million farmers. “The European Union is simply not interested in small farms”
Three decades later we have this from the International Monetary Fund:

…. In many countries the distribution of income has become more unequal, and the top earners’ share of income in particular has risen dramatically. In the United States the share of the top 1 percent has close to tripled over the past three decades, now accounting for about 20 percent of total U.S. income (Alvaredo and others, 2012)….

Transfer the land, the source of most third world wealth from the peasants to the corporations and of course “In many countries the distribution of income has become more unequal…”
Then there is all the other game playing:

How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis
It took the brilliant minds of Goldman Sachs to realize the simple truth that nothing is more valuable than our daily bread. And where there’s value, there’s money to be made….

How Goldman Gambled on Starvation
ADM profits soar 550 percent as ethanol margins improve
Monsanto Profit Up 23% on Corn-Based Ethanol Demand
Monsanto Net Rises 23% on Corn Seeds

Given the politics surrounding CAGW, I have no doubt at all that those in power are well aware that we are headed into a Minimum with the accompanying famines. If they are not aware of it they are very much trying to force a famine in the near future anyway. However you look at it politicians are aware of the prospect of a coming famine and making sure their corporate buddies reap the full benefit: All you have to do is look at the 25x’25 Renewable Energy Initiative
Here is the Media Hype:
25x’25 Vision: By 2025, America’s farms, forests and ranches will provide 25 percent of the total energy consumed in the United States, while continuing to produce safe, abundant, and affordable food, feed and fiber.
The resolution passed both houses. WUWT has the newest iteration here.

Press Release // 06/07/2006 // BOLD NEW U.S. ENERGY GOAL UNVEILED ON HILL: 25 PERCENT OF ENERGY FROM RENEWABLE SOURCES BY 2025
Bipartisan Proposal has Broad Support from Agriculture and Industry Leaders, Governors, States
A bipartisan group of Senators and Representatives introduced a Congressional resolution today calling for a new national renewable energy goal: 25% of the nation’s energy supply from renewable sources by 2025. The resolution builds on a broad and politically influential coalition including agriculture, industry, and environmental leaders, as well as several governors and state legislatures. http://www.25×25.org/text/xml/2.0//www.infocastinc.com/www.infocastinc.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=34&Itemid=56

Here is the the actual reality of the situation.
In six of the last seven years, total world grain production has fallen short of use. As a result, world carryover stocks of grain have been drawn down to 57 days of consumption, the lowest level in 34 years. Briefing before U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Chair, June 13, 2007
A study published in 2007 by two US scholars, Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer, calculated that biofuel production will cause the doubling of starvation figures in the world: by 2025. They estimate there will be 1.2 billion people starving. In 2008: “We were criticized for being alarmist at the time,” Mr. Runge said. “I think our views, looking back a year, were probably too conservative.”
With one-third of world population lacking food security now, FAO estimates that world food production would have to double to provide food security for the 8 billion people projected as world population in 2025.
About half of the world’s maize (corn) is grown in the United States link yet Congress has signed a resolution requiring 25% of US energy needs to be supplied by our “Working land” (bio-fuels)
An interesting letter to president Bush from Dan Amstutz Grain Trading buddies (They created an award in his honor.)

July 22, 2008
….Recently there have been increased calls for the development of a U.S. or international grain reserve to provide priority access to food supplies for Humanitarian needs. The National Grain and Feed Association (NGFA) and the North American Export Grain Association (NAEGA) strongly advise against this concept and consider it an ill advised response to today’s unprecedented agricultural market situation….
Again, we encourage you to reject calls for the establishment of an international or national grain reserve
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Kendell Keith, President National Grain and Feed Association
Gary C. Martin, President and CEO North American Export Grain Association
http://www.naega.org/images/pdf/grain_reserves_for_food_aid.pdf

And here is the actual reason for the letter:

Food shortfalls predicted (1/04/2008):
….The world is eating more than it produces and food prices may climb for years because of expansion of farming for fuel and climate change, risking social unrest, experts at the International Food Policy Research Institute concluded in a new report issued last month….
In summary, we have record low grain inventories globally as we move into a new crop year. We have demand growing strongly. Which means that going forward even small crop failures are going to drive grain prices to record levels. As an investor, we continue to find these long term trends – and this niche – very attractive…. http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/dancy/2008/0104.html

It also explains the massive land grab now going on. You can start with NAFTA removing about 75% of the farmers in Mexico as setting the precedence.

…Prior to NAFTA, small plots of land were permanently deeded to Mexico’s peasant farmers. In preparation for NAFTA, Mexico was required to change its constitution to allow foreign ownership of this land and allowed these plots to be sold or seized by creditors. In addition, NAFTA opened the door for the dumping of large amounts of subsidized U.S. agricultural goods on the Mexican market –
lowering prices and endangering the livelihood of peasant farmers. For example: Corn is the primary crop in Mexico, but post-NAFTA farmers received 70% less for their harvests…. more than 2 million Mexican farmers have been forced off their land since NAFTA was enacted….
Corporate Rights over People and the Environment
One of the most controversial aspects of NAFTA is found in Chapter 11 – its investor rights chapter. Under Chapter 11, foreign investors who believe their profits are being harmed by environmental or public health regulations can sue governments for cash damages within a secretive trade tribunal system. This occurred when Mexico was sued by the U.S. Metalclad Corporation, a waste-disposal company. Metalclad accused the Mexican government of violating Chapter 11 of NAFTA when the state of San Luis Potosi refused permission to re-open a waste disposal facility. The State Governor ordered the site closed down after a geological audit showed the facility would contaminate the local water supply. The Governor then declared the site part of a 600,000 acre ecological zone. Metalclad claimed that this constituted an act of expropriation and sought millions in compensation. The company won and was awarded $16.5 million (plus interest)
from Mexico….

More info: http://prospectjournal.ucsd.edu/index.php/2010/04/nafta-and-u-s-corn-subsidies-explaining-the-displacement-of-mexicos-corn-farmers/
Study on NAFTA by Tufts Univ. http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/Pubs/rp/NAFTAsUntoldStoriesJune03TW.pdf
The World Trade Organization is NAFTA taken to a worldwide scale. Clinton ratified both treaties. The result was the bankrupting of third world countries’ farmers. 8 million people in India have quit farming, and the spate of farm suicides – the largest sustained wave recorded in history – causes a farmer to suicide every 30 minutes. link

October 23, 2008 ….Former President Clinton told a U.N. gathering Thursday that the global food crisis shows “we all blew it, including me,” by treating food crops “like color TVs” instead of as a vital commodity for the world’s poor.
…Clinton criticized decades of policymaking by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and others, encouraged by the U.S., that pressured Africans in particular into dropping government subsidies for fertilizer, improved seed and other farm inputs as a requirement to get aid. Africa’s food self-sufficiency declined and food imports rose.
Now skyrocketing prices in the international grain trade – on average more than doubling between 2006 and early 2008 – have pushed many in poor countries deeper into poverty… http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008303122_apununfoodcrisis.html.

Two years later another Mia Culpa from the world leaders. Note how they think we forgot all about the first time and the fact they had been warned of the coming problems in 2007, well, actually as early as 1974

3/20/2010
….world leaders focused on fixing Haiti are admitting for the first time that loosening trade barriers has only exacerbated hunger in Haiti and elsewhere.
They’re led by former U.S. President Bill Clinton – now U.N. special envoy to Haiti – who publicly apologized this month for championing policies that destroyed Haiti’s rice production. Clinton in the mid-1990s encouraged the impoverished country to dramatically cut tariffs on imported U.S. rice.
“It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake,” Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10. “I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/20/with-cheap-food-imports-h_n_507228.html

After you boot the peasants off the land and brought their governments to near bankruptcy, it is time to move in for the kill….

…..several American universities, including Harvard, Vanderbilt, Spellman, and Iowa universities, are also taking part in or providing funds for the practice that “is resulting in the displacement of small farmers, environmental devastation, water loss and further political instability such as the food riots that preceded the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions,” the reports states.
While the report does not claim the deals break any laws per se, it does strongly insinuate the local population does not reap anything near the promised benefits, whereas the mostly foreign investors in some cases can expect to get up to 25 percent returns….. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20070234-503543.html

…The scale of such land acquisitions has increased greatly. From 2004 to early 2009, at least 2.5 million hectares were transferred in five African countries alone (IFPRI). Recent estimates point to land acquisitions that each encompass millions of hectares of land. Of concern is that the land leased by African governments to foreign interests was previously occupied by poor local and indigenous populations who have little control over such land transfers…. http://www.brookings.edu/articles/2010/0625_africa_land_aryeetey.aspx

First world farmers are not immune to political backstabbing either.
Now the international elite are gunning for US farmland and Congress just passed the weapon, the Food Safety Modernization Act. They even wrote an investment guide An Introduction to Agricultural Land and Farmland as an Alternative Asset Class

…..Over the past few years hedge fund gurus like George Soros, investment powerhouses like BlackRock, and retirement plan giants like TIAA-CREF have begun to plow money into farmland – everywhere from the Midwest to Ukraine to Brazil. Canadian private equity firm AgCapita, which raised $18 million in 2008 to invest in Saskatchewan cropland, estimates that as of the first quarter of 2009, more than $2 billion of private equity money had been raised for farmland investments globally, and another $500 million was planned.
The growing flow of money into farms has persisted despite a major drop in the commodities markets last fall, prompted in part by the global financial crisis. In the spring of 2008 spiking grain prices caused food shortages and rioting in dozens of countries before falling some 50% by December. In fact, that crash has obscured a broader trend. Even after the correction, grain prices remain above their 20-year average, and food stocks around the world are still near 40-year lows….. http://money.cnn.com/2009/06/08/retirement/betting_the_farm.fortune/index.htm

Also see the study: Agriculture and Monopoly Capital
As Henry Kissinger said: “Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”

geran
July 7, 2013 6:28 pm

Ryan says:
July 7, 2013 at 6:10 pm
I don’t understand how Krauthammer can see right through the nonsense of evolution-rejecters and fall for the equally-dubious claims of climate reality rejecters.
>>>>>
It’s probably a conspiracy to confuse the “acceptors” even more, so that they will continue to believe in whatever fairy-tale comes down the pike….

juan slayton
July 7, 2013 6:55 pm

Catcracking:
Juan Williams is also normally on the panel and his role in life is to support the administration regardless of how wrong and lacking facts his opinion happens to be.
I dunno, Cat. If that were true, he’d still be working for NPR.

Gail Combs
July 7, 2013 7:44 pm

Ryan says:
July 7, 2013 at 6:10 pm
I don’t understand how Krauthammer can see right through the nonsense of evolution-rejecters and fall for the equally-dubious claims of climate reality rejecters.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Maybe because he saw this graph and realizes we are at the end of the Holocene. Or maybe he read this recent peer-reviewed paper Can we predict the duration of an interglacial? (links at bottom of explanation)
Maybe he is aware of the fact the climate seems to be bi-stable and the real controversy is at what point does the climate flip to the Ice Box mode and how unstable is the climate when it nears the threshold insolation.
Perhaps more importantly he has read Sole, Turiel and Llebot writing in Physics Letters where they identified three classes of D-O (Dansgaard-Oeshger )oscillations in the Greenland GISP2 ice cores. A (brief), B (medium) and C (long), reflecting the speed at which the warming relaxes back to the cold glacial state:

In this work ice-core CO2 time evolution in the period going from 20 to 60 kyr BP [15] has been qualitatively compared to our temperature cycles, according to the class they belong to. It can be observed in Fig. 6 that class A cycles are completely unrelated to changes in CO2 concentration. We have observed some correlation between B and C cycles and CO2 concentration, but of the opposite sign to the one expected: maxima in atmospheric CO2 concentration tend to correspond to the middle part or the end the cooling period. The role of CO2 in the oscillation phenomena seems to be more related to extend the duration of the cooling phase than to trigger warming. This could explain why cycles not coincident in time with maxima of CO2 (A cycles) rapidly decay back to the cold state…. http://webs2002.uab.es/jellebot/documents/articles/Phis.Lett.A_2007.pdf

It isn’t that CO2 causes warming, it seems it ameliorates the relaxation back to the glacial state. This agrees with the first graph I showed.
Back to when glacial inception may occur:

Determining the natural length of the current interglacial
P. C. Tzedakis, J. E. T. Channell, D. A. Hodell, H. F. Kleiven & L. C. Skinner
…Here we propose that the minimum age of a glacial inception is constrained by the onset of bipolar-seesaw climate variability, which requires ice-sheets large enough to produce iceberg discharges that disrupt the ocean circulation. We identify the bipolar seesaw in ice-core and North Atlantic marine records by the appearance of a distinct phasing of interhemispheric climate and hydrographic changes and ice-rafted debris. The glacial inception during Marine Isotope sub-Stage 19c, a close analogue for the present interglacial, occurred near the summer insolation minimum, suggesting that the interglacial was not prolonged by subdued radiative forcing7. Assuming that ice growth mainly responds to insolation and CO2 forcing, this analogy suggests that the end of the current interglacial would occur within the next 1500 years, if atmospheric CO2 concentrations did not exceed 240±5 ppmv.

Lesson from the past: present insolation minimum holds potential for glacial inception (2007)
“….Because the intensities of the 397 ka BP and present insolation minima are very similar, we conclude that under natural boundary conditions the present insolation minimum holds the potential to terminate the Holocene interglacial. Our findings support the Ruddiman hypothesis [Ruddiman, W., 2003. The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era began thousands of years ago. Climate Change 61, 261–293], which proposes that early anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission prevented the inception of a glacial that would otherwise already have started….”
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379107002715

….the June 21 insolation minimum at 65N during MIS 11 is only 489 W/m2, much less pronounced than the present minimum of 474 W/m2. In addition, current insolation values are not predicted to return to the high values of late MIS 11 for another 65 kyr. We propose that this effectively precludes a ‘double precession-cycle’ interglacial [e.g., Raymo, 1997] in the Holocene without human influence….
http://lorraine-lisiecki.com/LisieckiRaymo2005.pdf

Evidence of Abrupt Climate Change
Briefly, the data indicate that cooling into the Younger Dryas occurred in a few prominent decade(s)-long steps, whereas warming at the end of it occurred primarily in one especially large step (Figure 1.2) of about 8°C in about 10 years and was accompanied by a doubling of snow accumulation in 3 years; most of the accumulation-rate change occurred in 1 year. (This matches well the change in wind-driven upwelling in the Cariaco Basin, offshore Venezuela, which occurred in 10 years or less [Hughen et al., 1996].)”

Abrupt Temperature Changes in the Western Mediterranean over the Past 250,000 Years
Predictable orbital variations led to insolation changes, which triggered less frequent but very intense oscillations. Accordingly, the last glacial inception (substage 5d) has been attributed to a connection between orbital forcing and thermohaline circulation beyond a freshwater threshold within the ocean-atmosphere-sea-ice system…
http://www.sandiego.edu/~sgray/MARS350/pleist2.pdf

Last December, snow cover in the northern hemisphere was at the highest level since record keeping began in 1966. The UK experienced the coldest March of the last fifty years and there was snow in the UK on Easter. More worrying the oldest temperature record in England (CET) is showing a temperature drop of 1.5degC in the winter season (December to February inclusive) since 2000. This March northeastern Germany is the coldest in 130 years, and could be the coldest since records began. In northern Germany, the winter that broke all records for its lack of sunshine — with just 91.2 hours of sunshine, total, from the beginning of December to the end of February. (A listing of cold events not seen in the MSM: http://iceagenow.info/ )
Even Woods Hole Observatory warned about wide temperature swings a few years ago and that politicians maybe barking up the wrong tree.

Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried?
….Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earth vs climate can shift gears within a decade, establishing new and different patterns that can persist for decades to centuries….
This new paradigm of abrupt climate change has been well established over the last decade by research of ocean, earth and atmosphere scientists at many institutions worldwide. But the concept remains little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of scientists, economists, policy makers, and world political and business leaders. Thus, world leaders may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur….

So new research shows the violent weather swings that occur during the descent into an ice age can occur within a decade. This is weather that could happen NOW not thousands of years from now.

Holocene temperature history at the western Greenland Ice Sheet margin reconstructed from lake sediments – Axford et al. (2012)
….As summer insolation declined through the late Holocene, summer temperatures cooled and the local ice sheet margin expanded. Gradual, insolation-driven millennial-scale temperature trends in the study area were punctuated by several abrupt climate changes, including a major transient event recorded in all five lakes between 4.3 and 3.2 ka, which overlaps in timing with abrupt climate changes previously documented around the North Atlantic region and farther afield at ∼4.2 ka…..
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379112004209

Owen in GA
July 7, 2013 7:56 pm

Gail Combs:
I don’t know if you noticed, but the Shah was in IRAN not IRAQ. So had no impact on past US conflicts unless one follows the trail from FALL of SHAH –> RISE of CLERICS –> IRAN-IRAQ WAR –> KUWAIT ASKS US HELP –> WAR ENDS –> IRAQ INVADES KUWAIT –> GULF WAR, which is quite a convoluted path worthy of the old Connections TV series.

Catcracking
July 7, 2013 8:32 pm

juan slayton says:
July 7, 2013 at 6:55 pm
Catcracking:
Juan Williams is also normally on the panel and his role in life is to support the administration regardless of how wrong and lacking facts his opinion happens to be.
I dunno, Cat. If that were true, he’d still be working for NPR.
Juan,
He did work for NPR, but got fired because he made one mistake of not towing their propaganda 100% during a weak moment when he said:
“Williams responded: “Look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130712737

Bill Parsons
July 7, 2013 8:58 pm

Sigh.

I’m not against a global pact to reduce CO2. Indeed, I favor it.

Why bother to whip up such a rhetorical firestorm if you are just going to extinguish it? All of Krauthammer’s comments come down to this contradiction. In one breath he says, “This massive self-inflicted economic wound will have no effect on climate change.” and in the next, he adds, “I’m not against a global pact to reduce CO2. Indeed I favor it.” He does not explain why.
This isn’t smart rhetoric. Maybe it hedges his bets against vituperative readers and commercial sponsors. But he loses in the last paragraphs whatever respect he earned in the first several. If he has to perform such kowtowing for anyone else, this is just a wash.

Frank Nova
July 7, 2013 10:13 pm

The United States is a corporation, it might as well has been named “The Big Peanut Butter Sandwich” or “the defense corporation of America”. It is not a country, it is a corporation which has been granted land, and it draws it’s legitimacy from an alleged need to defend the unites states of America in times of war. And there there are no wars, they make some up, like the war on drugs, and now, the war on climate.

Kajajuk
July 7, 2013 10:44 pm

ha ha ha the American Presidents…A War on…
Drugs: privatize the prisons and bloat a diversified police presence,
Terrorism: privatize and bloat a diversified military presence,
Climate: ?

Brian H
July 7, 2013 10:53 pm

Krauthammer is pretty good, but has residual brain damage from his education as a psychiatrist.

Kajajuk
July 7, 2013 11:24 pm

Blade says:
July 7, 2013 at 3:57 pm
” like us in the USA on why our Socialist neo-Communist masters are so good for ‘the many’ at the expense of ‘the few’ ”
————————————-
Really? Well your “socialist neo-Communist masters” are totally incompetent at effecting socialist paradigms:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-17/corporate-profits-soar-as-executives-attack-obama-policy.html
Let alone communist ideals…

True unemployment figures at around 16.8 % (likely higher, look around does it seem like 93% of your neighbors are employed?) with youth unemployment at around 25%. Perhaps you need to be reminded that communism strives for FULL employment.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/economy-watch/2009/09/actual_unemployment_rate_hits.html
Then there is the growing “lifestyle camping trips” so many americans are enjoying…
http://www.povertyliving.com/2013/03/homeless-statistics-in-the-united-states/

Maybe you should go back to school and learn some of these terms, err, maybe not…
never mind.

Kajajuk
July 7, 2013 11:41 pm

You must be a sharp blade, because on reflection this so and so (please insert derisive label here) i do recall driving through Michigan, Milwaukee, New Jersey, and Louisiana and thinking to myself, “wow what a communist/socialist utopia the Americans have constructed; albeit i never got out of, or stopped the car.

July 8, 2013 1:41 am

The view of MEP Holger Krahmer is in this context relevant. See the German website http://www.achgut.com/dadgdx/index.php/dadgd/article/obamas_grosser_klima_bluff.
The U.S. president is back in climate policy. The American CO2 emissions are to be reduced by 2030 by about half. (…) A closer look at the U.S. energy reality soon makes it clear: Obama’s challenge is a bluff. Because the announced efforts are in truth no efforts and the reduction of CO2 emissions for the United States can be achieved at no extra cost. The American CO2 emissions are reducing for years without the assistance of the government – since low-priced gas from unconventional reservoirs (shale gas) replaced coal as an energy source. (…)
As a consequence, the US CO2 emissions are reducing. A look at the numbers underpins this: The share of coal in the energy mix in the U.S. has been falling steadily from 48.9% in 2007 to 37.4% in 2012. In contrast, the share of gas rose from 21.7% to 30.4% over the same period. For the sake of completeness it should be mentioned that the share of renewable energies in the same period has risen from 2.6 percent to 6.7 percent but remained insignificant.
The U.S. CO2 emissions have fallen by 13.5 percent in the same period. (…) In other words, CO2 emissions are based on the luck of the availability of new, huge gas resources and costs the U.S. nothing.
European politicians, (…) applauded Obama prematurely. Instead, they should not fall for this bluff. The U.S. has such huge gas resources that the question of whether to export the gas in the near future is less relevant than the question of what the U.S. do with the coal that they themselves need no longer. The answer is obvious: the coal is exported. In 2012, the U.S. exported 125.7 million tons of coal. In 2007 the export amounted to 59.1 million tons. The U.S. has thus experienced a doubling of its coal exports within five years. Thankfully buyers of U.S. coal is of all the self-proclaimed climate stronghold Europe, where half of the total U.S. coal exports have gone in 2012.

So, Obama allots him self a green aureole as a consequence of economical reasons while other countries are giving more weight to the inexpensive coal. The contradiction between the inland bluff and the reality in foreign countries cannot be more flagrant.

Jon
July 8, 2013 1:44 am

“The war on climate is a diversion away from the concerns of most Americans. You could say it’s deliberate. The problem is most American don’t care about slight warmth, the greening of the biosphere.”
Maybee Obama has so many problems now that he needs a war to distract the U.S.A.?
A war on highly hypothetical catastrophic global warming?
The next IPCC report might be the last one and they will do anything to get their birth of the Global Government trough a climate treaty? Or international Marxism as I see it.

Gareth Phillips
July 8, 2013 2:18 am

Blade says:
July 7, 2013 at 3:57 pm
Gareth Phillips [July 7, 2013 at 9:53 am] says:
Syria? If he keeps you guys out of another Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam he will have been one of your best Presidents ever and will have saved countless lives of young Americans.
ckb [July 7, 2013 at 10:21 am] says:
Gareth: If Chamberlain were alive today he could well have written your post.
Indeed. Gareth is one of the last remaining members of Hussein’s Iraqi Republican Guard, reduced to the silly crying girl saying ‘You should’a left Saddam alone, he wasn’t hurting anybody except Arabs‘. How shocking to hear such pompousness from westerners blogging from their comfortable chairs on their iPads and laptops. Does he not know that they have much more free elections and independent news media now ( quite possibly freer and more independent than ours here in the USA )? Clearly there is nothing stopping him now from going to Baghdad and leading a movement to return the nation to the good old days of Ba’ath tyranny. He could lead a march, a demonstration, and carry signs or something.
He rarely mentions it but Gareth is a comfortable UK resident lecturing others from afar, like us in the USA on why our Socialist neo-Communist masters are so good for ‘the many’ at the expense of ‘the few’ ( quite curious definition of ‘few’ btw ). So in the spirit of reciprocation let’s all return the favor and suggest our UK brothers and sisters dump the pound, accept the Euro, dissolve parliament and relocate to Brussels, and while they’re at it toss English and adopt French and German as official languages. Wait, what? He might not reject any of those proposals?! Right then, support UKIP, ban all things Euro and outlaw the Socialists. 🙂
————————————————————————
Garethman
Thanks Blade for your detailed analysis. Personally I was pleased to see the back of Saddam, he was a psychopathic little fascist dictator that we kept in power and sold arms to for far to long. I was probably demonstrating against him when you were supporting him in the Iran/Iraq war. My problem is that we went to war on the basis of a pack of lies. There was no real reason to declare war on Iraq, any more so than we declare war on any of the other nasty regimes we support around the world because it suits our purposes. As a result we have lost thousands of our you people, 100s of thousands have been killed and the palce is a complete dogs dinner with internecine wars between Sunni and Shi’ite. I hope we learned the lesson, but I suspect many in the US are just itching to get in Syria and do it all again.
As regard to blogging from armchairs, I took much more extensive action both in the Middle East and at home to protest against Saddam than you would ever realise. I’m not sure what UKIP has to do with the debate, but you sound as if you have far right political beliefs so I would imagine they and their little Englander isolation politics would be rather attractive. Who are our “Communist” masters by the way? Perhaps you could direct me to the State Farms, Collectives, Work camps and all the other dark symptoms of Communist totalitarian governments? To compare the EU to say North Korea is just bonkers.
With regard to language, English is rapidly displacing all other languages in Europe as our Lingua Franca, mainly due to it being the language of the US and international trade. In my work I travel extensively and most people have English as a second language ( including myself), but it’s much less common to meet English speakers who also speak other European languages as well as English. You may like to think you are behind a fortress where you need to protect English values but you will be pleased to know that it is in fact the opposite, Europe often needs protection from the free loaders and parasites that make up people like UKIP and take substantial sums from the EU for very little work.( They have the highest costs for the least work in the European Parliament) In reality, we may be thrown out of the EU long before we could ever vote to leave in a referendum.
I am pleased to see that the US is dictated by the politics of reason rather than the Tea bag party, by caution in starting more wars rather than belligerence by John Mc.Cain, we could use some of that common sense on this side of the Atlantic. However, the Tea Baggers and UKIP no doubt serve the same purpose as the Communists and fascists in the European parliament, they define the dark edges where no right minded person would not wish to travel, and in that they are harmless, as long as they stay on the fringes. I don’t entirely agree with Obama’s climate change policy, but my point is that it could be so much worse.

StephenP
July 8, 2013 2:22 am

The UK government’s ‘cunning plan’ to prevent power outages is now becoming clear. They are proposing a whole army of diesel generators spread across the country to provide backup for when the wind doesn’t blow. The electricity to be charged at a much higher rate than conventional, ie coal and gas, generation, and will be produced with CO2 emissions that negate the savings from wind generation. It will probably make the National Grid’s operations a nightmare dealing with a multitude of additional gererators dotted all over the UK. In addition investors are getting in on the act as they will be getting a good return on their capital. Pity the poor consumer who has to stump up the cost.
http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=84095

William Astley
July 8, 2013 2:35 am

In reply to:
Steve Oregon says:
July 7, 2013 at 10:24 am
I see no mystery here.
It’s worse than faith or superstition. If the perpetrators were merely pretending it was their faith it would be less offensive and not so dastardly.
However we are witness political chicanery of the worst kind commingled with and exacerbated by the many interests and causes benefiting directly and indirectly from institutionalized advocacy by and for government influence, revenue and control .
Obama is mendaciously attempting to firm up this mega global warming mission in order to stabilize and preserve the countless other parasitic causes, influence and revenue streams.
Even from cold blooded party interests the Democrats cannot afford the calamitous embarrassment and systemic implosion from a AGW collapse.
If AGW collapses they and many other interdependent groups will not be able to avoid being branded as fraudsters and shamed by millions. They will lose their credibility, their donors and their votes.
There is no level of massive self-inflicted economic wound they will NOT view as preferable to their own demise.
This is the most expansive and corrupted self interest story in the history of human kind.
It has infected government and academia at every level in every location. …
William:
I fully support your above comments. The democrats and those companies, NGOs, and individuals who benefit from the green scams have hitched their wagon to the warmists’ agenda. The warmists’ agenda is the ‘green’ parties agenda. Each Western country now has a ‘green’ fraction in one or more political party that push job killing green scams.
The problem with hitching ones political future and academic career to the AGW band wagon is it appears the planet is about to significantly cool. It is curious that Obama’s scientific advisers have not noticed that there has been a significant slowdown to the solar magnetic cycle and it appears the sun is head towards a Maunder like minimum. There have been nine (9) warming periods during the current interglacial period that correlate with nine solar cycle grand maximums. The nine (9) warming periods where followed by nine (9) cooling periods, at which the time the planet cooled for 50 to 150 years.
Fortunately or unfortunately propaganda does not change the physical world. The warmists can hand wave away a lack of warming for 16 years and can ignore the fact that there is no tropical troposphere hot spot, it is difficult, however, to even imagine how they would try to explain global cooling and distract the public from the fact that the sun is entering a Maunder like minimum, concurrent with the cooling. (i.e. Global cooling requires a change to explain.)
Greenland ice temperature, last 11,000 years determined from ice core analysis, Richard Alley’s paper.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
http://www.climate4you.com/
http://www.solen.info/solar/images/comparison_recent_cycles.png
https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/74103.pdf
The Sun-Climate Connection by John A. Eddy, National Solar Observatory
Solar Influence on North Atlantic Climate during the Holocene
A more recent oceanographic study, based on reconstructions of the North Atlantic climate during the Holocene epoch, has found what may be the most compelling link between climate and the changing Sun: in this case an apparent regional climatic response to a series of prolonged episodes of suppressed solar activity, like the Maunder Minimum, each lasting from 50 to 150 years8.
Ocean has experienced nine distinctive expansions of cooler water in the past 11,000 years, occurring roughly every 1000 to 2000 years, with a mean spacing of about 1350 years. … ….Each of these cooling events coincides in time with strong, distinctive minima in solar activity, based on contemporaneous records of the production of 14C from tree-ring records and 10Be from deep-sea cores. For reasons cited above, these features, found in both 14C and 10Be records, are of likely solar origin, since the two records are subject to quite different non-solar internal sources of variability. The North Atlantic finding suggests that solar variability exerts a strong effect on climate on centennial to millennial time scales, perhaps through changes in ocean thermohaline circulation that in turn amplify the direct effects of smaller variations in solar irradiance.
William: The sun exerts a strong effect climate on centennial to millennial time scale by modulating the amount of planetary cloud cover rather than small variations in total solar irradiance (TSI).

Gail Combs
July 8, 2013 3:20 am

Owen in GA says:
July 7, 2013 at 7:56 pm
Gail Combs:
I don’t know if you noticed, but the Shah was in IRAN not IRAQ. …
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You are correct but the situation was similar except the Shahs of IRAQ were murdered while the Shah of Iran ousted. It all started with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and the UK putting puppets on the throne.

On 7 March 1920, Faisal was proclaimed King of the Arab Kingdom of Syria (Greater Syria) by the Syrian National Congress government of Hashim al-Atassi. In April 1920, the San Remo conference gave France the mandate for Syria, which led to the Franco-Syrian War. In the Battle of Maysalun on 24 July 1920, the French were victorious and Faisal was expelled from Syria. He went to live in the United Kingdom in August of that year…..
The British government, mandate holders in Iraq, were concerned at the unrest in the colony. They decided to step back from direct administration and create a monarchy to head Iraq while they maintained the mandate. Following a plebiscite showing 96% in favour, which was not really accurate, but created by a British council of ministers who wanted to put Faisal in power, Faisal agreed to become king. In August 1921 he was made king of Iraq…..
He encouraged an influx of Syrian exiles and office-seekers to cultivate better Iraqi-Syrian relations. In order to improve education in the country Faisal employed doctors and teachers and in the civil service and appointed Sati’ al-Husri, the ex-Minister of Education in Damascus, as his director of the Ministry of Education. This influx resulted in much native resentment towards Syrians and Lebanese in Iraq….
King Faisal died on 8 September 1933, at the age of 48. The official cause of death was a heart attack while he was staying in Bern, Switzerland, for his general medical checkup. He was succeeded on the throne by his oldest son Ghazi. Many questions arose from his sudden death, as Swiss doctors assured that he was healthy and nothing serious was with him. His private nurse also reported signs of arsenic poison before his death. Many of his companions noticed that day that he was suffering from pain in the abdomen (sign of poisoning) and not chest (a typical sign of heart attack). His body was quickly mummified before performing a proper autopsy to find the exact result of death, a normal procedure in such situations.[9]
A square is named in his honour at the end of Haifa Street, Baghdad, where an equestrian statue of him stands. The statue was knocked down following the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958…..
WIKI
And then came the puppets:
As Ghazi was the only son of Faisal I, he was left to take care of his grandfather, Hussein bin Ali, the Grand Sharif of Mecca, while his father was busy in his campaigns and travels. He therefore grew up, unlike his worldly father, a shy and inexperienced young man….
Ghazi died in 1939 in a mysterious accident involving a sports car he was driving.[4] Some believe he was killed on the orders of Nuri as-Said.
Faisal, Ghazi’s only son, succeeded him as King Faisal II…. Faisal was under age.
WIKI

Faisal II (2 May 1935 – 14 July 1958) was the last King of Iraq. He reigned from 4 April 1939 until July 1958, when he was murdered during the 14 July Revolution together with numerous members of his family. This regicide marked the end of the thirty-seven-year-old Hashemite monarchy in Iraq….
His father was killed in a mysterious car crash when Faisal was three years old; Faisal’s uncle ‘Abd al-Ilah served as regent until he came of age in 1953…..
WIKI

Gail Combs
July 8, 2013 3:27 am

Kajajuk says: July 7, 2013 at 11:24 pm
….True unemployment figures at around 16.8 % (likely higher, look around does it seem like 93% of your neighbors are employed?) ….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Actually the unemployment figures are 22% and rising and have been since Clinton changed the counting method to hide the results of the effects of NAFTA and the World Trade Organization on US employment. See: “GOVERNMENT ECONOMIC REPORTS: THINGS YOU’VE
SUSPECTED BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK!”

Gail Combs
July 8, 2013 3:56 am

Kajajuk says: July 7, 2013 at 11:24 pm
…. Really? Well your “socialist neo-Communist masters” are totally incompetent at effecting socialist paradigms.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
They are following the London School of Economics/‘Third Way’ Just search Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Pascal Lamy (Director General of WTO) Anthony Giddens ( Director of the London School of Economics 1997–2003 and inventor of the Third Way) and Democracy Corps-Third Way. Another word for the ‘Third Way’ is Communitarianism.
Oh and toss in Global Governance while you are at it.