Senate Turns Focus to Planning for Extreme Global-Warming Events
The first Senate hearing on climate change in years centered around an attempt to tie extreme weather — from the derecho that knocked out power this summer in the D.C. area to the drought ravaging the Midwest — to global warming.
But with such a contentious issue on the table at a hearing chaired by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), senators barely touched on the stated hearing purpose of determining how communities could steel themselves against calamitous acts of Mother Nature.
“Last month at Washington Reagan National Airport, a US Airways regional jet became stuck in on the tarmac when temperatures over 100 degrees melted the asphalt. There was a D.C. Metro train derailment just up the road last month after tracks buckled in the extreme heat,” Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) said at this morning’s Environment and Public Works hearing.
“We need to adapt our water infrastructure, our transportation infrastructure, and our electrical grid” for the coming “consequences of climate change,” Cardin added. “We need to help our farmers to adapt so that our food supply – and that of the world – remains reliable. We need to adapt our coastal regions and prepare for the sea-level rise that is already beginning to threaten some of our coastal communities. We need to improve our public health infrastructure to deal with the heat-related illnesses that result from these extreme temperatures.”
As the hearing came on the heels of Monday sparring on the Senate floor between two committee members over global warming — Ranking Member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — the debate over whether the science supports climate-change models took center stage.
Sanders kicked off the week by taking to the floor to counter Inhofe’s assertion that global warming is a hoax. “Many who take climate science seriously dismiss Sen. Inhofe. I believe that is a huge mistake,” Sanders said. “For better or worse, when Sen. Inhofe speaks, the Republican Party follows. And when the Republican Party follows, it is impossible to get real work done in the Congress.”
“The bottom line,” Sanders said, “is that when Sen. Inhofe says global warming is a hoax, he is just dead wrong, according to the vast majority of climate scientists.”
At today’s hearing, Inhofe predicted that a look back over the three years since the committee last addressed climate change would be “a little painful for my friends on the other side,” after “the global warming movement has completely collapsed and cap-and-trade is dead and gone.”
The Republican noted that there were no federal witnesses before the panel “to testify about the grave dangers of global warming,” mirroring President Obama’s silence on the issue that has rankled many of his supporters.
“It must be very hard for my friends on the left to watch the president who promised he would slow the rise of the oceans posing in front of pipelines in my home state of Oklahoma, pretending to support oil and gas,” Inhofe said. “I imagine they are trying to keep quiet because they know President Obama is still moving forward with his global-warming agenda — he just doesn’t want the American people to know about it.”
Sanders said he and Inhofe have “profound disagreements” but “having honest and straightforward debates on this issue is good for the Senate.”
Comparing scientists who don’t buy global-warming arguments to doctors who don’t believe that smoking causes lung cancer, Boxer presided over the hearing with an iron determination that all present acknowledge that global warming is real.
“The purpose of this hearing is to share with the committee the mountain of scientific evidence that has increased substantially over time: time that we should have used to reduce carbon pollution, the main cause of climate change,” Boxer said.
“We cannot turn away from the mountain of evidence that climate change has already started to impact the planet and will only grow worse without action,” she added, noting throughout the hearing with a certain giddiness that reviving the issue congressionally was “exciting.”
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), pulling out charts to show that the extreme weather being cited wasn’t so extreme when framed in terms of historical averages, said he took offensive to Boxer’s lung-cancer comparison.
“How much can we demand this economy pay to meet and confront a fear that is not being proven by empirical data?” Sessions said.
Alabama State Climatologist John R. Christy testified that the recent “extremes” noted were actually exceeded in previous decades.
“New discoveries explain part of the warming found in traditional surface temperature datasets,” Christy summarized in 22 pages of charts and explanations submitted to the committee. “This partial warming is unrelated to the accumulation of heat due to the extra greenhouse gases, but related to human development around the thermometer stations. This means traditional surface datasets are limited as proxies for greenhouse warming.”
Global warming skeptics as knowledgeable about science as climate change believers, study says By Maxim Lott Published May 28, 2012
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/05/28/global-warming-skeptics-know-more-about-science-new-study-claims/
We should definitely be looking at contingency plans for dealing with the possibility of large-scale climate change. Just as we looked at contingency plans for Civil Defense and other measures in case of nuclear war. Nobody wanted nuclear war. But it was foolhardy to ignore the possibility.
During the Cold War, some liberals used to act as if preparing for the possibility of nuclear war was itself warmongering. They were wrong, and we conservatives used to call them out on that.
And preparing for the possibility of significant climate change does not have to mean that you believe it will happen either. Just that *if* it happens, we need to be prepared.
Just that *if* it happens, we need to be prepared.
There are several indicators that can be monitored to measure the probability of a nuclear strike. With anthropogenic global warming, there are two key differences:
1) It can’t be predicted; by the time it’s happened, it’s too late. This has always been the key selling point of our $100 million ex-VP.
2) If it does happen, you can’t strike back. Well, I guess you could if a sudden wave of glaciation swept the earth.
As to number 1 above, a few years ago the great Al Gore stated that we had maybe six years before the world would reach a tip-in point after which there would be no salvation. At about the same time, objective scientific measurements began showing a global cooling, a wave form scientists are beginning to understand runs over approximate 30 yr cycles, and has for millenia. Thus the global cooling scare in Time magazine in the 1970s, backed by prestigious scientists waving their notebooks in the background.
Not one proof of global warming has ever been shown, only predictive models based on arbitrary variables.
While we have no scientific proof, we do have strong evidence of scientific fraud, such as selective use of historical evidence unmakes in most oft-quoted studies. When EmailGate broke, Sen. Boxer called for an exhaustive investigation into who leaked from East Anglia U. and Penn State, several damning emails and data files used in doom-and-gloom forecasts.
Here’s a hint, Barb: it wasn’t a right wing hacker, it was a few real objective scientists in those two places who were overcome by a spasm of conscience.
Dude, you can seed the atmosphere and strip CO2 easy and cheaply, tommorrow if we wanted to.
There is no contingency plan to make.
What there is, is yahoo doomsday cultists pushing Marxism.
What we need is a contingency plan for stopping Marxists of all flavors, including Enviro-commies.
GLOBAL Climate Change was NAME Changed when the Hocky Stick Hokey turned DOWN so then Gore said SEE We Told you it could get Hotter or Colder- this is the biggest scam since Y2K
Contingency, emergency response and preparedness plans are always based on the risk assessment. Plans are only written for most probable and realistic disaster and can be expanded for all hazards. This admin twists, turns and thrashes on the ground when they have to validate the hazard assessment. The same goes for extremist right terrorist threat assessments while ignoring the real world.
There is no difference between a drought disaster plan and a climate change drought plan. Same goes for a flood versus a climate change flood, a climate change hurricane, a climate change tornado.
Unfortunately, this admin has taken valuable resources and funds away from real disasters to address climate change disasters.
EPA has dropped real cleanups and responses to practice fake narrow scenarios.
FEMA funding for national disasters that all the states (except California) pay into has been raided for climate change. All that was left were training funds….as if certified firefighters needed Fire 101 training.
What is ignored are the rolling brownouts that DC will be having shortly even though they exempted the coal power plant in Alexandria from being closed.
What is ignored are the numbers of people in Ohio that will not have fuel this coming winter because 19 plants have been shut down.
What is ignored are the numbers of people that will no longer have incomes, fuel, food, healthcare in WV because Obama shut down their jobs.
But, this admin cares little for outcomes and being responsible for them. The fad of the day and the Call to the Lemmings is all that counts.
All right, that’s sensible enough, but there is a major difference between a contingency plan in place “just in case,” and what liberals propose which is a plan of theft and impoverishment masquerading as something designed to “save the planet” by stopping something that no one really knows will occur. That’s what a carbon cap and trade scheme really is.
Any contingency plan should be based on adapting to possible changes both warmer and colder because any sensible and knowledgeable person knows that our climate has always changed and it will change again, and it could get either colder or warmer. So we should prepare for it to go either way. But making the populace poorer and weaker will not enable it to adapt better to either condition.
“…an extremely ambitious climate policy…would entail enormous costs but save very few lives. Inexpensive policy changes, however, could virtually eliminate pollution-related deaths, which are so much more numerous than global warming-related ones.”– Bjorn Lomborg nails it. Also, as he notes, it would be much cheaper to cope with unknown consequences of global warming as they occur than to try and prevent the warming. Reducing CO2 surely is of little importance compared with other corrrectives the world needs.
That “no regrets” policy certainly sounds like a more politically savvy expression of the increasingly notorious precautionary principle. Obama’s education policies are still another tool to create a centrally reorganized politically-driven economy centered around the chimera of Green Growth and Sustainability.
AGW was always a ruse to try to get voluntary changes and submissions to government suzerainty all over the West. Now that the extent of the IPCC manipulations and the real temperature record is coming out, the political class and the Big Business boosters of a planned economy do not want to give up that sought for power and govt guaranteed stream of revenue. They love the idea of govt rigging education policy in K-12 and higher ed to make the chance of genuine innovation and the resulting creative destruction virtually nil.
Plus when the federal government isn’t offering to have technology companies in charge of managing all the data needed to try to plan an economy around sutainability to get everyone to change their behaviors, it is offering to be the primary funder of future research. Ludicrous but that’s the Industrial Policy vision just laid out in yet another NRC report. This time it was called “Continuing Innovation in Information Technology.”
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/if-reality-is-ignored-or-disregarded-when-do-we-become-a-state-against-its-people/ was my latest on just how far our federal government is now going in its determination to reject economic freedom, capitalism except for the collusive kind, and dictate what US citizens are to feel and believe and how they are to behave.
If we do not quickly appreciate what is going on. the extent of the servitude won’t stay invisible for long. And our political class is unlikely to recognize when a parasite’s behavior will kill the host. We have to both see it and stop it.
Great – I knew the global elites and their puppets in the govt would turn their attention back on Global Warming, Climate Change, Global Cooling or whatever the radicals call it today after a lousy summer. Its called WEATHER! It has nothing to do with Co2 and man.
Look for some big green company that gives to the Democratic party to get a HUGE some of money for MORE STUDY. Here comes Cap n Trade again! I am sure that will get rammed down our throats in a matter days.
I have never seen in all my adult life so many of my constitutional and Bill of Rights get stomped on in such a short period of time. Drones, suspension of due process thanks to the NDAA, Homeland security purchases 500 million rounds of ammunition, a socialist healthcare system which brings the end of freedom of religion. On and On it goes, where it stops, no one knows!
They get a couple days of hot weather in DC, and go fruit loops. Meanwhile in London, it was cold and wet. Global. Right.
And South America is having record crop harvests while the US has drought.
The local weather also said the local record for today was 103F, set in 1956. Today was only 86. I guess they actually had hot weather back in the old days.
And the Blizzard of 1888 was caused by too few SUVs.
I see a boondoggle in the making. Hundreds of millions of taxpayer’s money going to line politician’s pockets as well as their friends. We’re gonna get screwed again!
“If I wanted America to fail”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ-4gnNz0vc
Carbon and Life
-It is hard to overstate the importance of carbon; its unique capacity for forming multiple bonds and chains at low energies makes life as we know it possible, and justifies an entire major branch of chemistry – organic chemistry – dedicated to its compounds. In fact, most of the compounds known to science are carbon compounds, often called organic compounds because it was in the context of biochemistry that they were first studied in depth.
-What makes carbon so special is that every carbon atom is eager to bond with as many as four other atoms. This makes it possible for long chains and rings to be formed out of them, together with other atoms – almost always hydrogen, often oxygen, sometimes nitrogen, sulfur or halides. The study of these is the basis of organic chemistry; the compounds carbon forms with metals are generally considered inorganic. Chains and rings are fundamental to the way carbon-based life forms – that is, all known life-forms – build themselves.
-Silicon is capable of forming the same sorts of bonds and structures, but opinion is divided on whether silicon-based life forms are a realistic prospect – in part because it needs higher energies to form them, and in part because whereas carbon dioxide (one of the main by-products of respiration, a process essential to all known life) is a gas and therefore easy to remove from the body, its counterpart silicon dioxide (silica) has an inconveniently high melting point, posing a serious waste disposal problem for any would-be silicon-based life form.
Good post.
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Keep in mind that the whole Global Warming thing was kicked off by, or at least taken over by, globalists. When they realized their message wasn’t winning in the marketplace of ideas, they decided to use terror to scare people toward their goal. Global Warming was perfect for that. Not only would it scare people into accepting big government but it would scare them into rolling back their lifestyles to the 1970′s levels called for in global treaties. Of course, most of the people who fall for that didn’t live in the 1970′s and don’t understand how different of a standard of living that would be.
That said, climate is going to change, hotter or colder. I think that instead of planning to tear ourselves down in case it gets hot, we should split the difference and work on new energy sources like 4th and 5th generation nuclear power which is safer and less polluting than the first and second generation plants we have now and using methanol instead of ethanol. Those are just for starters.
But no, the greens just want to wreck the US down to the global average of poverty with the UN stomping on its face just because.
The good Senators should define “our friends” in the climate change debate. Senator Boxer could shut down all carbon combustion in America, destroy our economy, and not stop CO2 emissions. Asia is beginning to dwarf our releases, as their giant populations demand more energy, particularly from burning cheap coal. India lost electricity to 680 million people as the Senators left their air conditioned homes to ride to the air conditioned conference room in air conditioned limousines.
When Senator Biden lives like an untouchable, he will earn my respect. Hot air is a real problem in Washington D. C. but some folks are just blowing smoke.
Please Muslims, come put us out of our misery. We don’t deserve to live.
Just reading Boxer’s comments is scary. To the left, “facts”, true or not, support the narrative. If it doesn’t support the narrative, it’s clearly not a real “fact”. Her insistence on her version of “what is” is not even rational.
How do you even talk to people who think like that, much less deal with them effectively in government.
Bridget Johnson does a brilliant job as a reporter. Just sayin.
Hear! Hear!
Barbara Boxer proves Peter Singer’s point, a pig can be more intelligent than a human.
The Sun was very hot today. I blame the Sun on heating Texas to hotter than hell.
The world system can turn this global weather s%%% storm that is happening, and getting worse around. Repent, and ask G-d for forgivness in Christ’s name.
Somehow, I doubt those who worship the creation will do so. I’m thinking large Ammo dump stocked with wine, and MRE’s. It stays 68 degrees all year.
What would be the effect of this Global Warming fraud and coercion, if successful? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth. Al Gore and the Global Warming fraudsters converted simple changes in the weather into an engine for enslaving mankind to filch wealth and power to themselves. They, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Scientists.
Even the SF Chronicle noted that Boxer “lacks the intellectual firepower for the job.” The idea of her holding court on this matter of articficial construct is a double absurdity.
The concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are equivalent to 4 seats in a 10,000 seat stadium – nearly all of the remaining seats are occupied by water vapour. Regarding the actual impact of CO2, here is what Dr. Tim Ball says:
“There’s a problem even if you accept the assumption that an increase in CO2 will cause a temperature increase. The atmosphere is almost saturated with respect to CO2′s capacity to delay heat escape. A good analogy is the objective of blocking light coming through a window. A single coat of paint will block almost all the light, and is like the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Second and third coats block very little more light, just as doubling or tripling CO2 will cause very little temperature increase This creates a dilemma for the theory that a human increase in CO2 would create significant warming.
This was supposedly resolved by claiming an increase in CO2 will cause a temperature increase that will cause increased evaporation by putting more water vapor in the atmosphere. The most important greenhouse gas they essentially ignored received attention. Temperature increases projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) depend totally on increased water vapor and what is known as a positive feedback. This notion is at the center of the debate of climate sensitivity. Evidence shows the positive feedback is wrong and climate sensitivity is overestimated. (http://drtimball.com/2011/why-is-water-vapour-the-most-important-greenhouse-gas-ignored/)”
Tim Ball then provides the diagram presented by Richard Lindzen at the Third International Conference on Climate Change (June 2009). comparing model predictions with real world data. The models all show an increase while the actual data shows a decrease. Dr. Lindzen’s conclusion: “In a normal field (of study) these results would pretty much wrap things up, but global warming/climate change has developed so much momentum that it has a life of its own – quite removed from science.”
psssssttt. . . it’s the sun. . .
http://www.c3headlines.com/2012/07/nasa-ipcc-climate-models-latest-global-temperature-data-confirm-computer-simulations-lack-of-predict.html
Gamma emmissions from solar flares create CO2 and warm the upper atmosphere, which causes thermodynamic reactions in lower heat transfer belts from the jet streams even to the ocean currents themselves.
We’re at the end of the longest solar minimum since Gallileo. It must have had a lot to do with Gore’s hokey stick turning down. When the sun begins to burp again really big time, it’ll turn back up.
The would-be tyrants of the Left have got their hysterical mobs calling for us to put out the sun!
It would be a little easier to believe the sincerity of a Senate claiming to want to “do something” about the world becoming 1.8 degrees warmer 100 years from now if they had been serious enough about their jobs to pass a federal budget, as required by law, in any of the past three years.
Global warming is real enough. One way or another the temps have risen since the little ice age LIA. Skepticism is about a) attribution, and b) what to do.
Re (a) the signal correlates best with natural recovery from the LIA. If this were solely about human emission, the signal would wiggle up and down with population increases, wars, widespread adoption of internal combuston, etc. It doesn’t do this. It’s a slow, steady rise.
Do human emissions affect the climate? Of course. Soot emission causes ice melt in the arctic; CO2 emission pretty much works as per Arrhenius’ back of the envelope calculations in the late 1800′s.
But… so what.
Human change of the landscape also affects the climate via carbon sinks and albedo and so on. It’s probably more of a factor than CO2. Meanwhile all of the imagined feedbacks tossed out by the chicken little crowd are *still* imagined; climate modelers have no better grasp of the natural world than the rest of us (and likely less in some cases.) i.e. the doom from CO2 increase hasn’t materialised as predicted yet and isn’t likely to.
Does this mean there’s no problem, ever? No. It means only that we adapt and pay attention.
Re (b) the wannabe totalitarians ignore everything other than CO2 and want to use CO2 emission as a club with which to beat all of us into line. These miserable wretches are malthusians who all seem to think that humans are a cancer on the planet. Scratch the skin of someone who read robopocalypse and thinks it’s the bomb, you find a socialist willing to kill 90% of the population and wishing that the book was true.
The (a) part is about science; the (b) part is where the totalitarians want to abuse science to obtain power. Me, I’m not that much of a skeptic re the truth that man affects the environment one way or another; this is true by definition. But affecting the environment enough to allow (b)? Hell no, and we all need to once and for all put an end to this absurdity. Let’s put a republican in the white house and pay close attention to the technical savvy and energy policy statements by the congressional hopefuls and elect the people who can quash the totalitarians and put paid to this nonsense.
Why are we having a hot summer? We’re having a hot summer because our weather is sort of stagnant. Usually we get lots of weather systems moving and more importantly moving the jet stream. This hasn’t happened. Instead, we have big high pressure systems that just sort of sit over the country and very, very slowly slide off to the east. The result is that the air underneath gets hotter and hotter all the time. In other years, those air masses get shifted before they can get too hot and bake everyone and everything underneath like they have this year. It’s not Global Warming; it’s just the weather. We had the same thing happen when I was a little girl. It happened that one summer in France when they had all those heat deaths.
This too shall pass.