|
by Phil Brennan, Lincoln Heritage Insitute Trustee
and Editor of Wednesday on the Web
Senator John McCain has confirmed his dedication to the holy crusade against global warming, now known to the initiates as climate change. He’s told the world that nobody is more determined than he to take steps to stop Mother Nature’s alleged plan to deep fry the planet.
His views on global – oops – climate change have been no secret, but his latest pledge to take strong action to stop the planet from heating up dangerously puts him squarely in the ranks of Al Gore’s cohort of climate change alarmists, a group known for their fanaticism.
McCain, the skeptic and maverick, a fanatic? Well, if you listen to his daughter Meghan, he’s gone bonkers on climate change.
As reported by John Carney writing in Dealbreaker, Meghan McCain says her dad’s totally freaking out over global warming.
“My dad was tortured in prison; he doesn’t overreact to things. So if he starts freaking out, you know it’s time to freak out,” Miss McCain told the editors of GQ last month. “And I think he’s freaking out about the environment. He’s like, ‘I’m genuinely worried about climate change; it’s happening right now.’ ”
Notes Carney, “With a slowing economy, escalating food prices, and energy prices climbing ever higher, you might think that Republican presidential candidate John McCain would be hesitant to endorse a European Union-style carbon emission trading scheme that seems likely to result in less economic growth, higher energy prices, and higher food prices from increased biofuel demand. But that’s because you don’t know him as well as his daughter….”
Nor should it surprise anyone who understands that his closest pal in the Senate is his colleague and advisor Joe Lieberman, co-author of the Lieberman/Warner “America’s Climate Security Act of 2007” (S.2191), a dandy little piece of legislation that would devastate our economy and reduce the average American to a state of beggary.
According to “The Economic Costs of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Change Legislation” by Heritage Foundation scholars William Beach, David Kreutzer, Ben Lieberman and Nick Loris, S.2191 “promises extraordinary perils for the American economy. Arbitrary restrictions predicated on multiple, untested, and undeveloped technologies will lead to severe restrictions on energy use and large increases in energy costs. In addition to the direct impact on consumers’ budgets, these higher energy costs will spread through the economy and inject unnecessary inefficiencies at virtually every stage of production and consumption – all of which will add yet more financial burdens that must be borne by American taxpayers.”
According to their study:
- Cumulative gross domestic product (GDP) losses are at least $1.7 trillion and could reach $4.8 trillion by 2030 (in inflation-adjusted 2006 dollars).
- Single-year GDP losses hit at least $155 billion and realistically could exceed $500 billion (in inflation-adjusted 2006 dollars).
- Annual job losses exceed 500,000 before 2030 and could approach 1,000,000.
- The annual cost of emission permits to energy users will be at least $100 billion by 2020 and could exceed $300 billion by 2030 (in inflation-adjusted 2006 dollars).
- The average household will pay $467 more each year for its natural gas and electricity (in inflation-adjusted 2006 dollars). That means that the average household will spend an additional $8,870 to purchase household energy over the period 2012 through 2030.
All of this to stop global warming. What global warming? The planet stopped warming back in 1998. Since then Mother Earth has been cooling and new studies say it will keep getting colder for the next 30 years or so.
Not to worry, the climate change crowd assures us. It may be temporarily cooling but science tells us that the planet is heading towards catastrophic warming. How do they know? Well, that’s what their computer models tell them. Their computers can’t tell them what the weather will be next week but they insist that computer modeling can predict the climate 30 years from now.
Their computer models lack those factors that influence climate of which they are not aware. If a computer model that includes every known factor about a football team predicts that the New England Patriots will win next year’s Superbowl, there are unknowns which cannot be included in the model. The model can’t predict what will happen should quarterback Tom Brady break his leg in game five and is out for the season, or if some of their star running backs and pass receivers suffer injuries that keep them from playing, thus costing them a Superbowl appearance. Las Vegas odds makers know this. The IPCC doesn’t – or won’t.
According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (2000), “Scenarios are images of the future or alternative futures. They are neither predictions nor forecasts.…The possibility that any single emissions path will occur as described in the scenario is highly uncertain.…No judgment is offered in this Report as to the preference for any of the scenarios and they are not assigned probabilities of occurrence, neither must they be interpreted as policy recommendations.”
Forecasting future societal conditions and energy use often amount to little more than unconvincing guesses. Jesse Ausebel at Rockefeller University once observed, “…40 energy scenarios, with decarbonization, or carbonization, sloping every which way and no probabilities attached.…It is a confession that collectively they know nothing, that no science underlies their craft, and that politics strongly bias their projections.”
As far back as May 24, 1994, Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT, testified to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, “The claims about catastrophic consequences of significant global warming, should it occur at all, are almost completely speculative. Not only are they without any theoretical foundations, but they frequently involved assuming the opposite of what appears to happen.”
The output of computer simulations remains questionable thanks to the extraordinary complexity of the natural world. Thus, on May 1, 2001, Lindzen testified to the Senate Commerce Committee about the long-standing inability of computer simulations to deliver results that resemble reality, even in the cases where good measurements are available:
“For example, there is widespread agreement [among climate scientists]…that large computer climate models are unable to even simulate major features of past climate such as the 100 thousand year cycles of ice ages that have dominated climate for the past 700 thousand years, and the very warm climates of the Miocene [23 to 5 million years ago], Eocene [57 to 35 million years ago], and Cretaceous [146 to 65 million years ago]. Neither do they do well at accounting for shorter period and less dramatic phenomena like El Niños, quasi-biennial oscillations, or intraseasonal oscillations – all of which are well documented in the data, and important contributors to natural variability.”
Eight years ago Lindzen explained the failure of computer simulations.
“The point I am making is that it is a fallacious assumption that the models have everything in them, and will display it, and somehow the rest is just technical uncertainty. There are things they literally don’t have.”
Finally, isn’t it odd that none of those computer models predicted the current cooling trend which is now embarrassing the warming fanatics?
Calm down, Senator. Freaking out will get you nowhere.
|
