In Pittsburgh yesterday, Mitt Romney told a questioner, “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.”
In an e-mail entitled “Romney Flips On Manmade Global Warming,” the Perry campaign seized on the comments. “Mitt Romney’s positions change, often dramatically, depending on the audience or location,” Perry communications director Ray Sullivan said in a statement. “Voters need to consider the fact that Romney, in one week, changed positions on manmade global warming, capping carbon emissions, and Ohio’s efforts to curb union powers.”
“This is ridiculous,” e-mails Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul. “Governor Romney’s view on climate change has not changed. He believes it’s occurring, and that human activity contributes to it, but he doesn’t know to what extent. He opposes cap and trade, and he refused to sign such a plan when he was governor. Maybe the bigger threat is all the hot air coming from career politicians who are desperate to hold on to power.”
ThinkProgress, the liberal website which first reported Romney’s comments, is characterizing them as a “flip.” “Romney reversed his earlier stance on climate change pollution and rejected man-made global warming,” the site wrote. But it’s not clear that Romney rejected human being partially causing climate change in his comment. He’s been careful in past statements to say that he believe human beings contribute somewhat to climate change, but does not know by how much, and believes there are other contributing causes. For instance, in Lebanon, N.H. in August, Romney said about climate change, “Do I think we contribute to it? I don’t know by how much. … So you said it’s all caused by humans or mostly caused by humans. I don’t know if it is or it’s not. And there is a divergence of opinion on that. Do I think humans contribute to it? Yes.”
In June, Romney made similar comments, saying, “I don’t speak for the scientific community, of course, but I believe the world’s getting warmer. … I believe that humans contribute to that. I don’t know how much our contribution is to that.”
So while Romney did not specifically mention that he believed humans are partially responsible for climate change in these comments, he has previously been careful to stress how little is known about what causes climate change and how he himself is uncertain over how much of it is caused by humans. It looks like it would have been more precise for him to have said “we don’t know fully what’s causing climate change …” and noted that he believes humans are playing some role, but this is not the first time Romney has stressed how little is known about what is causing climate change.
In reference to Romney’s remark that “spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us,” the Perry campaign highlighted the fact that Romney made Massachusetts the first state in 2005 to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
ROMNEY ANNOUNCES STRICT NEW CLEAN AIR REGULATIONS TO TAKE EFFECT JANUARY 1
New clean air rules balance environmental and economic goals
Governor Mitt Romney today announced that Massachusetts will take another major step in meeting its commitment to protecting air quality when strict state limitations on carbond ioxide (CO2) emissions from power plants take effect on January 1, 2006.
“Massachusetts continues to be committed to improving air quality for all our citizens.These carbon emission limits will provide real and immediate progress in the battle to improve our environment,” Romney said.
And the result:
Massachusetts’ electrical production it dropped 18% in four years, from over 46 billion megawatt hours to 38 billion.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseEnergy imports went from 697 million megawatt hours in 2006 to almost 5 billion megawatt hours in 2009
I have seen no convincing proof that man contributes to climate change. The climate has been changing with no help from man for most of the planet's existence. This climate change bunk is nothing more than a scam to fleece the public while destroying more of our liberty. So, again, it appears to me Romney is trying to be on every side of the global warming/climate change issue--yes, no, not global warming, but, maybe, climate change, or maybe not, or . . . This is the candidate with a 1000 faces er...1000 positions on almost everything.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseEven if you discount the heat island effect, ignore satellite temperature readings, ignore the sun, and buy into discredited computer models, you're still left with the fact that man is not the primary engine of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The eruption of Mt Pinatubo, for example, launched more CO2 into the upper atmosphere than man has ever produced.
We'd be better off willingly returning to the pre-Industrial Age in order to fund airborne volcano-lancing lasers as Jonah recommended.
It certainly would be easier to do that than convince the Chinese they need to go back to starvation.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuseteflon: why haven't you responded to my replies to you on yesterday's thread re income inequality?
Ignoring what you can't respond to and moving on to provide startling insight to other issues like climate change?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhy haven't you responded the post where I proved that not only is it possible to make new land, men have been doing it for thousands of years?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThat Mt. Pinatubo (or any volcano) put more CO2 in the atmosphere than man has ever produced is wildly false. Were it true the CO2 content of the atmosphere would have jumped over 200ppm. The actual CO2 measurements show no discernible impact of major eruptions. The annual estimate of all volcanic CO2 emission is about 1% that of burning fossil fuels.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseStay focused. I think the poster you responded to meant SO2 and not CO2. Mt Pinutumbo spewed as much sulfuric dioxide in 2 days as did all of humans can in one year. And the end results was a dramatic drop in global temps between 1992-1994.
But that is not the point. The point is that global temps and CO2 concentrations do not statistically corrleate. The trends of the last 15 years bear this out. The GCMs, no matter how much they are tweaked consistently overstate the effect of CO2 on global temps (ie they are far too warm). However, track ENSO, the PDO, and AMO and a 10th grader can see how temps correlate to these teleconnections.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWe've got to do better than this.
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We're not going to have any credibility at all if we try to say that increasing CO2 has *no* effect on climate. I think the best conclusion is that it has very little effect -- it's a barely-there trace gas with a pretty wussy IR absorption spectrum, but it *does* absorb IR at a couple of frequencies, and when it re-radiates that energy, not all of it goes immediately straight up to space.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"So while Romney did not specifically mention that he believed humans are partially responsible for climate change in these comments, he has previously been careful to stress how little is known about what causes climate change and how he himself is uncertain over how much of it is caused by humans. It looks like it would have been more precise for him to have said “we don’t know fully what’s causing climate change …” and noted that he believes humans are playing some role, but this is not the first time Romney has stressed how little is known about what is causing climate change."
Nice attempt at damage control. There was a time when I would expect to see that from the candidate's PR team and not an NRO contributor. The slide away from conservatism into establishment continues for a once great publication.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMan, this whole crop of Republican candidates is like trick or treating and getting nothing but candy corn and Mary Janes (the awful peanut butter candy, not the illicit drug). They're just really disappointing and mediocre and horiffically boring, and all of them have very serious flaws, to the point where you question whether they're capable of carrying out their basic mission. I know the operating principle is that the worst of the 9 dwarves would be better than the current POTUS, but that sort of relative improvement only gets you so far. With that attitude we're talking about hoping to stop the worsening, or in other words consolidate Dem gains, for 4 years. We don't need to stop the Obama disaster, we need to reverse it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI made the mistake of reading this post, not realizing it is yet another back and forth jibe-fest. So some stupid smug campaign ad thinks it's funny to say, "the problem is the hot air coming from the politicians"
Grow up, morons. this intraparty juvenile battle of attempts at cute turns of phrase are just nauseating. It seems like the same lame staffer for Romney comes up with the same stupid little barbs. They are not funny, and don't persuade. I have actually been reconciling myself to Romney, but his own staff's repeated little snippy jokes reinforce that he seems phony.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAwww...how cute. Katrina "Jennifer Rubin" Trinko dedicates yet another graf, unsolicited, to give Mittens cover. Precious.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI'm in agreement with most of the commentors here, so much so I am thinking maybe the best strategy is to accept Romney as the nominee, then ignore him and focus completely on the house and senate races. Conservatives need to make their control of both houses as tight as possible. Indeed, given the possibility of a Romney presidency, here's my nightmare. A president Romney comes into office just as the whole business starts to collapse. He starts reaching across the aisle every which way he can, doing all the half-way measures he can come up with, with the net result that he and the republicans get all the blame. Come 2016, the democrats come back into power with huge majorities and the country is finished. On the other hand, if Obama is re-elected but with a congress totally opposed to him, by then his blame-the-republicans schtick will have worn out its usefullness and conservatives can really start fighting back.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWell, it's a hope. Is it ideal? Hardly, but the thought of a Romney presidency, when it is obvious the man is not up to it, fills me with dread.
A skeptical agnosticism is, in fact, the most appropriate approach to the global warming "consensus."
CO2 does absorb and re-emit infrared energy at certain frequencies, and that does tend to raise the radiative equilibrium temperature of a surface surrounded by an atmosphere that contains CO2. All things being equal, you should expect more CO2 to mean a warmer surface temperature. As Richard Lindzen (usually classed as a skeptic) points out, we can measure this pretty accurately -- about .5 degrees C for each doubling of warming.
Where the global warming alarmists stop being scientists is in their assuming -- against all the evidence, which is that the feedbacks that operate on greenhouse warming are net negative -- that *this* additional small bit of warming, will suddenly change all that, and the feedbacks will all become overwhelmingly positive, magnifying the small amount of warming that CO2 alone is able to force.
This strikes me as a pretty big leap of logic.
However long it's taken Romney to get to the right answer, he's there now: The case for catastrophic global warming is not sound enough to justify adopting potentially equally catastrophic countermeasures. And that's a better and more conservative position (because, unlike postmodernism-riddled liberalism, objective reason has gotten to be an exclusively conservative value) than denying the potential for any warming whatsoever.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDuck: in the recent thread re income inequality, you claimed to be to busy to answer because you were helping your grandaughter with a science project, yet you have time to chime in here?
Do you really think you're credible?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGiven you've said that abortion providers to set their own standards, and that they shouldn't, I think you have little room to talk on 'credibility'.
Pesky thing, the ability to point to your own contradictions. Though when called out, I can't blame you for running from your own words.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGiven the fact that you didn't know that man has been creating new land for thousands of years, what makes you think you have any credility anywhere?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseRegardless of Romney's previous positions, the one he relies on today is the only correct one. The planet is warming, and has been doing so for 180,000 years. There is no doubt about that. The greenhouse effect is one cause of that warming; without the greenhouse effect the planet would be colder by about 30 degrees C. There is no doubt about the greenhouse effect. CO2 is the third greatest contributor to the greenhouse effect, behind water vapor and clouds. There is no doubt about that. Adding CO2 to the system through the combustion of fossil fuels increases the greenhouse effect. There is no doubt about that. How much this additional, anthropogenic CO2 has increased the global temperature is *not* known. But it is known that the amount of the contribution has been, and is, greater than zero. Now that we have hit a CO2 concentration of more than 350 parts per million, some say that additional anthropogenic CO2 will not have as great an effect on the global temperature as the first 100 ppm that human activity has already added. Others disagree. But the final thing that *is* known -- and this is the *only* important thing, for political purposes -- is that no practicable amount of regulation of human activity can have any measurable effect on the global temperature.
I have used quite a few more words than Mitt Romney, or Katrina Trinko, to state this position. But this *is* what Romney is saying. And he is 100% correct. You can fault him for flip-flopping, and in particular for any regulation of AGHG that he put in place in Massachusetts. But it is better to have been wrong and now to be right, than to be consistent and continue to be wrong.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"...without the greenhouse effect the planet would be colder by about 30 degrees C"
You have most certainly lost track of decimal points. 30 degrees Celsius is 54 degrees Fahrenheit. You're telling me that without global warming I could have expected fall temperatures in Philly to consistently be 10 below 0.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHey, thanks for missing the point in such an enlightening manner. And TheProudDuck's embrace of "skeptical agnosticism" was deliciously ironic. The point of the article, and most of the posts, is not whether Romney has arrived at the "right" answer, but whether he would ever really recognize, embrace and act on the "right" answer if it hit him squarely in the face. The growing consensus is that Romney may not have a single solitary core principle in his entire being other than wanting to fulfill his father's legacy. OK, so perhaps that is somewhat hyperbolic, but not by that much. Skeptical agnosticism is a perfect description of Romney's adherence to conservative principle. The Greek etymology of "a-gnosis" is literally translated "without knowledge", and that describes Romney's view of every significant issue in the pantheon of conservative thought. Just as theological agnostics are functionally atheists without the courage of their convictions, ideological (political) agnostics & moderates suffer from the same problem. You can believe that Romney has somehow arrived at the right answer, but his history argues otherwise. Someone with a core conviction so pliable that people can read just about anything they want into their statements, are not worth the risk. I am not an agnostic on that point!
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