Gore’s Latest ’24 Hours of Reality’ Promotes Tragic Mistake

by Tom Harris

 
 After each of Al Gore’s prior 24 Hours of Reality broadcasts, climate experts have publicly corrected his many basic science errors. But he pays no attention whatsoever, committing the same blunders year after year. As a consequence, the former vice president’s initiative encourages the continuation of one of the greatest tragedies of all time.

Leading up to the fourth annual Climate Reality marathon starting at noon EDT on Tuesday, Gore is promoting Climate-101, a website dedicated to the science of the issue as he understands it. Like his global warming presentations, Climate-101 is riddled with fundamental mistakes. Especially irksome to anyone with a science background is the statement:

Carbon pollution is warming our planet and creating dirty weather like extreme droughts, flooding, wildfires, and superstorms.

Gore frequently says this sort of thing. During last year’s Climate Reality broadcast he told a worldwide audience of millions:

The Earth’s atmosphere is awfully thin and we are now filling it up with 90 million tons of global warming pollution being spewed into the atmosphere every 24 hours as if the atmosphere is an open sewer.

Scientists have repeatedly explained that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which are Gore’s principal concern, are neither “carbon” nor “pollution.” Reporters on both sides of the debate understand this, of course, but give him a pass on the error. They should no longer do this. Carbon is a naturally occurring, non-toxic element found in all living things. Everything from medicines to trees to oil to our own bodies and those of all other creatures are made of carbon compounds. Pure carbon occurs in nature mainly in only two forms: graphite and diamonds.

Ignoring the oxygen atoms and calling CO2 merely “carbon” makes about as much sense as ignoring the oxygen in water (H2O) and calling it “hydrogen.”

This is not just an academic point. This is part of the way in which Gore distorts language to bolster concerns about human-caused climate change. University of Florida linguist M.J. Hardman explains:

Language is inseparable from humanity and follows us in all our works. Language is the instrument with which we form thought and feeling, mood, aspiration, will and act[ion], the instrument by whose means we influence and are influenced. (Language and War, 2002)

It is not surprising that language has always been a crucially important weapon of war. Gore, President Obama, and their allies use language tricks to justify the unjustifiable in the war of words over global warming and its recent offspring, the “war on coal,” coal being the world’s least expensive and most abundant energy source. Calling the gas “carbon” encourages people to think of CO2 as pollution or something dirty, like graphite or soot.

Calling CO2 by its proper name would help people remember that — regardless of its role in climate change — it is an invisible gas essential to plant photosynthesis and thus all life.

Commercial greenhouse operators routinely run their internal atmospheres at up to 1,500 parts per million (ppm) CO2, more than four times the “safe” limit of 350 ppm that Gore promoted at the 2008 UN Climate Change Conference. Yet there is no hint of any consequent temperature rise, while the plants inside grow far more efficiently than at the 400 ppm in the outside atmosphere. This is not surprising. Grade school students understand that CO2 is plant food.
Interestingly, CO2 concentrations in submarines can reach levels well above 10,000 ppm — thirty times the “safe” limit — with no harmful effects to the crew.

While 90 million tons/day of CO2 emissions sounds like a lot, scientists tell us this is only a small fraction of the amount nature emits on its own. Almost ten times more comes each year from the consumption of terrestrial vegetation by animals and microbes (i.e., rotting). Respiration by vegetation also emits almost ten times that produced by human activities.

Similarly, depending on temperature and rates of phytoplankton photosynthesis, parts of the oceans release over twelve times as much CO2 as we do. Environmental consultant Dr. Tim Ball, former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg, explains that the uncertainty alone in our estimates of CO2 emitted by oceans and decomposition of vegetation is greater than the emissions of all human sources combined.

We are actually near the lowest level of CO2 in Earth’s history.
During a multi-million year period around 440 million years ago, CO2 was about 14 times today’s level, while Earth was stuck in the coldest period of the last half-billion years. The climate models’ assumption that temperature is driven by CO2 is clearly mistaken.

Dr. Ball adds:

The only place CO2 is significantly altering our climate is in the computer models of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They are programmed so that an increase in CO2 causes a temperature increase. But, in every record for any time period, temperature increases before CO2, so Gore’s fundamental assertion is absolutely wrong.

Gore is also wrong about extreme weather events. This is one of the few areas of agreement between the IPCC and the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).
In 2012, the IPCC asserted that a relationship between global warming and wildfires, rainfall, storms, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events has not been demonstrated. The 2013 NIPCC report states that:

In no case has a convincing relationship been established between warming over the past 100 years and increases in any of these extreme events.

University of Ottawa Earth Sciences Professor Ian Clark:

The idea that we are responsible for extreme weather, let alone that we can change weather patterns, is preposterous. Extreme weather is not new, it is natural. For any extreme event we have now, there is precedence in the recent past or distant past. The only difference between past events and now is our greatly expanded population and development of infrastructure that increases impact of extreme weather. The recent events Gore calls dirty weather come at a time when the planet has stopped warming. Only the rhetoric is increasing.

Besides 24 Hours of Reality, we will be bombarded with even more climate rhetoric than usual in late September:

• Working with television weather presenters and national broadcasters from around the world, the UN World Meteorological Organization is releasing “weather reports from the future,” a sensationalist series of films depicting what they claim are realistic scenarios for the year 2050 if we do not dramatically cut back on CO₂ emissions.
• The People’s Climate March, a massive rally to be held in New York on September 21, will involve 950 organizations with 63 other events in North America, six in South America, 54 in Europe, 10 in South Asia, and 32 in Australia.
• The last three of Leonardo DiCaprio’s four-film series, Green World Rising, are about to be released.

Like Gore’s event, all of these are designed to influence the UN’s Climate Summit 2014 in New York City on September 23. Hosted by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, the Climate Summit is intended “to mobilize political will for a meaningful universal agreement at the climate negotiations in Paris in 2015.” Inevitably, the summit will result in pronouncements from governments about new taxes, regulations, and agreements to “save the climate,” paid for by the citizens of developed countries, of course.

The real tragedy in all of this is clear: because of the unfounded belief that humanity is the master controller of our planet’s climate, the focus is always on mitigation: trying to stop climate change in the distant future instead of helping vulnerable people adapt to climate change today. Consequently, of the almost $1 billion per day spent on climate finance across the world, only 6% of it goes to adaptation. The rest is wasted trying to control what might happen someday.

Allocating more importance to the unpredictable problems of people yet to be born than to the serious issues faced by those suffering in the present is immoral. Denying poor nations — many of whose citizens lack adequate sanitation, schooling, clean water, and health services — the finances to build inexpensive hydrocarbon-fired power stations is immoral.

Africa, for example, has plenty of coal, oil, and natural gas. But they often cannot develop these resources because governments and financial institutions insist the focus be on “climate-friendly” energy sources that are too expensive even for wealthy countries.

India has long appreciated the immorality of the current approach. In its June 2008 National Action Plan on Climate Change, the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change explained that India would not cut growth to reduce CO2 emissions since it would rather save its people from poverty than global warming. Disputing the link between CO2 emissions and climate problems, the report declared:

It is obvious that India needs to substantially increase its per capita energy consumption to provide a minimally acceptable level of well-being to its people.

Although the UN pushed for a 50:50 division of funding between mitigation and adaptation, it did not happen. Mitigation projects are far more attractive to players who have motivations other than environmental protection, such as: energy companies, environmental groups, carbon traders seeking to maximize revenue, media executives in search of exciting headlines to boost circulation, politicians wanting to increase taxes and control over their citizens, and, of course, one-world government advocates. The “boots on the ground” approach typically required by adaptation initiatives do not so nearly fulfill the ulterior motives of these groups. Al Gore is right, in one respect. The way the world handles climate change is a moral issue. Sadly, our current approach is a tragic blunder that his 24 Hours of Reality is helping to prolong.

PJ Media

Climate Science vs Politics: The Road Ahead

December 27, 2012
By S. Fred Singer

There is good news and bad news about climate. The good news is that science evidence has made it quite clear that the human contribution to a possible global warming is minor; in fact it cannot even be identified in the data record.  The bad news is that the media and politicians pay no attention whatsoever to the science and are marching ahead full-speed with efforts to control CO2 emissions -- thereby hurting the economy, destroying jobs,  and stunting economic growth.  They are under the illusion that there is a nearly complete scientific consensus in support of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW).

First, the good news

As one of the many official "expert reviewers" of the UN-IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), I have had a chance to examine the so-called evidence to back up the IPCC conclusion (with claimed >95% certainty!!) that a reported global warming of the 1980s and 1990s is anthropogenic and that models can be used to predict a future temperature increase of around 2-3 degrees by 2100.  I found that IPCC uses the same flimsy evidence in its fifth assessment report (AR5), due in 2013,  as they did in AR4 (Assessment Report #4, published in 2007); except that there they only claimed 90% certainty. 

If there is to be an IPCC-AR6, it will surely claim 99%, based on the same flimsy "evidence" - a comparison of uncertain model results with even less certain global surface temperature data.  In AR5, this comparison involves just one graph in a chapter on "Attribution."  Yet the IPCC studiously avoids discussing the several striking examples where observations disagree with climate models:  no global warming during at least the past decade -- in spite of rapidly rising CO2 levels; Antarctic is cooling -- not warming;  absence of the model-predicted "hot spot" in the tropical atmosphere, and others. 

All of this is detailed in peer-reviewed publications and summarized in the reports of NIPCC (Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change), which directly contradict the results of the IPCC.  Since NIPCC's founding in 2007, its voluminous reports have been published by the Heartland Institute www.NIPCCreport.org .  During 2013, NIPCC will publish a final summary report at about the same time as the IPCC-AR5.  Important news: The Chinese Academy of Sciences has translated these NIPCC reports for publication in 2013 -- the first national academy to do so. 

The other good news is that the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which has been slowly dying since the UN conference in Copenhagen in Dec. 2009, is finally going to be officially buried this month, in December 2012.  Judging from the latest UN gabfest in Doha, Qatar, it is unlikely that another international control regime will be constituted by 2015 as planned, because of opposition to such international agreements from China, India, and other rapidly developing countries.  Among the poorer countries, there is growing talk about the need for "climate reparations" to reimburse them for some claimed damage caused by CO2 emissions in the past, mainly from the United States.  We should keep in mind, of course, that the major effect of the increase in CO2 has been to improve agricultural performance.  Perhaps these countries should be thankful to China and India for rapidly increasing CO2 emissions, thereby greening the planet.

The bad news

While the international control effort may be dead, we aren't getting rid of the national efforts to control emissions.  The situation in the EU is sort of ludicrous with unrealistic future targets of 20%, 50%, and even up to 80% reduction being bandied about.  But the future is coming closer - and so is some degree of realism.  In some nations, particularly Britain, there has been serious rethinking on the matter of CO2 emissions targets, with U-turns being announced frequently.

It is particularly disturbing that the World Bank has commissioned a thoroughly alarmist report on Global Warming - and that this report could lead to a substantial misallocation of multi-billions of development funds.  Poor countries badly need reliable low-cost electric power; they may instead be forced into dubious windmill and solar projects that claim "sustainability" and zero-CO2 emissions -- but are uneconomic, intermittent, and not suitable for industrial development

In the United States, there has been a determined effort by the EPA to abolish the use of abundant domestic coal in power plants.  This is in line with the president's promise to make electricity prices "skyrocket" and his plan to make climate-change policy a centerpiece in his second term.

His efforts to push through cap and trade legislation failed in 2009, after barely passing the House.  But the EPA has been issuing regulation after regulation that impinge on the use of coal, such as requiring Best Available Control Technology (BACT) to control mercury emissions.  This is a hopeless task as most mercury is now emitted by China into the global atmosphere where it'll spread worldwide.

What has saved the situation in the US is the bonanza of cheap natural gas, which is rapidly replacing coal as the fuel for power plants.  But we don't know if the price of natural gas will remain at the current low level once EPA issues more regulations concerning fracking technology.

EPA Endangerment Finding (EF)

The basic driver of EPA efforts to control CO2 emissions is their proposed Endangerment Finding (EF).  It was issued on Dec 7, 2009 (another "day that shall live in infamy") in response to the 2007 decision of the US Supreme Court, declaring CO2 a pollutant subject to regulation under the 1970 Clean Air Act (CAA) -- provided EPA can demonstrate by independent analysis that it has a harmful impact on human health and welfare.

The EF was challenged immediately since it used flawed IPCC science to claim a deleterious impact on climate.  Unfortunately, we lost our lawsuit in the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia.  In June 2012, the Court's 3-judge panel ruled in favor of the EPA; it said in essence "we're not scientists, we cannot decide between EPA's scientific claims and those of the plaintiff, and therefore we give deference to the administrative agency."  In Dec. 2012, the same Court rejected our request for an en banc hearing - but with two important dissents.

Fortunately, we have resourceful lawyers.  They have pointed out that EPA did not do the "independent analysis" required by the Supreme Court; they should be required to go back to the drawing board and then submit their findings to their Scientific Advisory Board.  I think this will simply delay another challengeable EF, but such a delay might be useful in educating the media and the public, particularly once EPA regulations start to raise energy prices.

Another promising approach to fighting the EPA on this issue is to go back to the 1970 Clean Air Act, the basic law.  After all, the purpose of emission controls is to achieve an ambient air quality that will not harm human health and welfare.  The CAA (Section 108) therefore requires the EPA to set National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for "criteria pollutants."  We need to challenge the EPA to set such a standard for CO2, to justify it by "independent analysis," and to demonstrate how their proposed CO2-control regulations will achieve such a NAAQS standard.  I would imagine that this would be an impossible task for the EPA; bearing in mind that they have no control over China or other rapidly developing countries.

As Marlo Lewis (Competitive Enterprise Institute) has reminded us, the activist Center for Biological Diversity and 350.Org petitioned the EPA more than two years ago to establish a NAAQS for CO2 at 350 parts per million (roughly 50 parts per million below current concentrations) -- and for other GH gases at pre-industrial levels.  Yet the EPA has not responded; Perhaps they realize that any level selected may be considered "arbitrary and capricious" - or unobtainable.

Finally, there is the remedy of last resort.  Congress can simply amend the Clean Air Act and forbid the EPA from regulating CO2.  The next election is in November 2014, and there is a possibility that both House and Senate would vote for such an amendment in 2015. 

But then again, with Obama still in the White House, such an amendment can be vetoed.  However, there is always the possibility that a veto can be overridden, so that some sort of political accommodation between the Congress and the President may result.

Whatever the outcome of this legal maneuvering, the science says fairly clearly that CO2 is not a significant climate driver but a boon to global agriculture.  It is hoped that this message can be spread in the media and to the public -- and produce a desirable political impact.

S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project.  His specialty is atmospheric and space physics.   An expert in remote sensing and satellites, he served as the founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service and, more recently, as vice chair of the US National Advisory Committee on Oceans & Atmosphere.  He is a Senior Fellow of the Heartland Institute and the Independent Institute.  He co-authored NY Times best-seller "Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 years."  In 2007, he founded and has chaired the NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change), which has released several scientific reports [See www.NIPCCreport.org].  For recent writings see http://www.americanthinker.com/s_fred_singer/ and also Google Scholar.

American Thinker

Obama's Next Move: the Global Warming Tax

November 28, 2012
By Brian Sussman

This week the United Nations begins two weeks of climate talks in Doha, Qatar. The primary goal of these meetings is to draw President Obama into accepting a redistribution plan designed extract money from the U.S. economy in the form of a global warming tax and doling out the cash to Third World nations.

"There will be expectations from countries to hear a new voice from the United States," said Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate and energy program at the World Resources Institute in Washington.

The meeting in Qatar's capital will focus on ramping up what is described as "climate financing for poor nations." American leadership is considered crucial to these plans.

 "We need the U.S. to engage even more," said European Union Climate Commissioner
Connie Hedegaard. 

"Because that can change the dynamic of the talks."

And carrying the water in support of this global scheme are the media, selecting their talking points from a recent World Bank report claiming global temperatures are likely to increase by more than 6 degrees, leading to "extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise."

Given that since 1850 the earth's temperature has only warmed 1.2 degrees (with 88 percent of that warming occurring before 1940), and that the global average temperature has not risen since 1998, a six-degree hike flies in the face scientific sanity.

The lame duck Obama administration will likely be all over this UN plan. As a U.S. senator in 2008, Obama sponsored a bill known as the "Global Poverty Act." The bill would have made levels of U.S. foreign aid spending subservient to the dictates of the United Nations.

Joe Biden, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was a vocal supporter of the legislation which would commit the U.S. to spending 0.7 percent of gross national product on foreign aid, which amounts to a phenomenal 13-year total of $845 billion over and above what the U.S. already spends.

A release from the Obama Senate office about the bill declared, "In 2000, the U.S. joined more than 180 countries at the United Nations Millennium Summit and vowed to reduce global poverty by 2015... it is time the United States makes it a priority of our foreign policy to meet this goal and help those who are struggling day to day."

Obama's bill would have required the president "to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, [and] the elimination of extreme global poverty..."

The primary vehicle for such a redistribution plan would be a tax or fee on businesses that produce carbon dioxide as a byproduct of their activities. This could include power plants, refineries, cement manufacturers, and dairy farmers. Those increased costs of production would be passed along to the consumer in the form of higher prices.

A tax on carbon dioxide would also be seen by politicians as a way to offset our severe budget deficit and staggering national debt. It would be sold to the American public in the name of saving the planet.
Obama may be another step closer to realizing his 2008 dream of massive global wealth redistribution.

American Thinker