The Australian has a good piece on flummoxed alarmists who can’t really figure out why the planet hasn’t warmed in 20 years. They refer to the same Economist piece Andrew Stuttaford linked to in the Corner, but have an additional gem from NASA’s James Hansen. Emphasis mine:

In a lengthy article this week, The Economist magazine said if climate scientists were credit-rating agencies, then climate sensitivity – the way climate reacts to changes in carbon-dioxide levels – would be on negative watch but not yet downgraded.

Another paper published by leading climate scientist James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says the lower than expected temperature rise between 2000 and the present could be explained by increased emissions from burning coal.

For Hansen the pause is a fact, but it’s good news that probably won’t last.

International Panel on Climate Change chairman Rajendra Pachauri recently told The Weekend Australian the hiatus would have to last 30 to 40 years “at least” to break the long-term warming trend.

Hilarious. Maybe we need to study how coal can save the planet from devastating global warming? Burn coal, baby, burn coal!

The rest from The Australian here.

And China’s interest in owning Fisker has slowed, too. GigaOM:

Electric car startup Fisker Automotive has put its U.S. workers on furlough, or temporary unpaid leave, this week according to Reuters. The news follows reports last week in the Wall Street Journal that the Chinese auto tech companies that were bidding on an investment or acquisition of Fisker have now stalled.

There’s conflicting reports about why talks with the Chinese auto companies have grown cold. The WSJ says it’s because Fisker wants to try to get the remaining amount of the loan from the Department of Energy that was frozen, and restarting such a loan would mean Fisker’s next car would have to be built in the U.S. The Chinese companies would probably want to build the car in China where it would be lower cost. PluginCars says that the Chinese giants are less interested after looking under the hood of Fisker and realizing the company doesn’t own a lot of the technology in its vehicles.

Why would China invest in Fisker now anyway when Fisker’s value drops every day? They can just wait and buy the pieces they want at a later date.

MPR News:

The planned Southwest LRT between Eden Prairie and downtown Minneapolis could end up costing more than originally proposed.

The line is slated to run between Eden Prairie and downtown Minneapolis and connect to other transit. The light rail project is projected to cost $1.25 billion. But the original cost projection doesn’t include expenses related to placement of the new line in relation to an existing freight rail line.

Mark Fuhrmann, program director for rail projects at Metro Transit, said they are looking into whether there is room for light rail, freight rail and a bike path to fit together through narrow sections of the potential alignment.

Because a bike path in Minneapolis, with its nearly five feet of snow per year, certainly makes a whole lot of sense. And who is the genius who didn’t think to add in the cost of a new line next to the existing line?

Bloomberg Businessweek: 

Poor management has hampered a U.S. program to develop technology to capture carbon-dioxide emissions, the Energy Department inspector general said in a report that raises new questions about a clean-energy initiative backed by the 2009 economic stimulus.

In total, the Energy Department received $1.5 billion in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to invest in technology that responds to climate-change risks. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that most scientists think is making the planet hotter.

Energy officials hadn’t “adequately documented the approval and rationale” in awarding $575 million to 15 recipients, the watchdog found. Three projects won $90 million even though a review process identified significant financial and technical issues with the companies that won the aid, according to the report.

“The issues we identified occurred, in part, because program officials had not always provided effective monitoring and oversight of recipient activities,” the inspector general found.

In response, the Energy Department said it would improve program oversight.

Hmm, improved oversight. Good idea, DOE. And after only $1.5 billion was wasted.

Here’s a roundup of pictures of Earth Hour from their official Flickr site.

Oddly enough, it seems the way to celebrate turning off the electrical lights for an hour is with light. Doesn’t that defeat the entire purpose?

In Bangladesh they use candles. . .

. . . in Grenada it’s a fire-breathing performer. . .

In Peru, they celebrate no lights with actual light bulbs. . .

. . . The light of choice in Barbados is a chemical-light stick. . .

. . . In Jamaica, it’s the popular sky lantern (but don’t use those in California because they’re illegal!)

Chile, at least, honors the spirit of the day by charging batteries via an invention from Gilligan’s Island. . . 

And what’s an Earth Hour to warn against the danger of excessive carbon emissions without a giant bonfire? Kudos to Ivory Coast for the most hypocritical celebration of the “Earth Hour!”

Tomorrow night is “Earth Hour,” where at 8:30 p.m. people around the world are encouraged to turn off their lights to save the planet, of course.

Bjørn Lomborg has a good piece out on why Earth Hour is not only folly, but ignores the 1.3 billion humans who live in “energy poverty” and would like nothing better than to turn a light on:

On the evening of March 23, 1.3 billion people will go without light at 8:30—and at 9:30, and at 10:30, and for the rest of the night—just like every other night of the year. With no access to electricity, darkness after sunset is a constant reality for these people.

At the same time, another 1 billion people will participate in “Earth Hour” by turning off their lights from 8:30-9:30.

The organizers say that they are providing a way to demonstrate one’s desire to “do something” about global warming. But the reality is that Earth Hour teaches all the wrong lessens, and it actually increases CO2 emissions. Its vain symbolism reveals exactly what is wrong with today’s feel-good environmentalism.

Earth Hour teaches us that tackling global warming is easy. Yet, by switching off the lights, all we are doing is making it harder to see.

Notice that you have not been asked to switch off anything really inconvenient, like your heating or air-conditioning, television, computer, mobile phone, or any of the myriad technologies that depend on affordable, plentiful energy electricity and make modern life possible. If switching off the lights for one hour per year really were beneficial, why would we not do it for the other 8,759?

Hypothetically, switching off the lights for an hour would cut CO2 emissions from power plants around the world. But, even if everyone in the entire world cut all residential lighting, and this translated entirely into CO2 reduction, it would be the equivalent of China pausing its CO2 emissions for less than four minutes. In fact, Earth Hour will cause emissions to increase.

The rest here.

And here’s good video produced by the Copenhagen Consensus Center on just how important electricity is to our everyday lives and why we should focus on those without power tomorrow, rather than the stunt that will capture the media’s attention.

Via the Huffington Post:

Here’s a wake-up call for the White House: A new pollfinds that most people who voted for President Obama in November oppose the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.

The numbers are striking, and if this was an election, it’d be a clear mandate. Some 68 percent of Obama voters oppose building the pipeline, 76 percent are concerned about its contribution to climate change, and 57 percent believe approval would break the president’s State of the Union vow to fight climate change.

The national poll was conducted by Public Policy Polling on March 15, 16 and 17. It included 1,122 voters of all kinds and 536 people who voted for Obama in the 2012 election. The poll has a margin of error of + or – 2.9 percent.

The poll of Obama voters also found that 61 percent said they’d feel “disappointed” or “betrayed” if the president approves Keystone and that 69 percent said Obama’s legacy should be about clean-energy innovation and solving climate change rather than expanding oil, gas and natural gas production.

The question now is whether the president will heed the call – and the tens of thousands of people who marched on the White House earlier this year – or give into the oil industry’s wishes.

 

But before Obama makes his Keystone decision, Congress may have its say, possibly as early as this week as the U.S. Senate hammers out the national budget.

The new poll has something for that too: A majority of Americans (53 percent) say they oppose any congressional intervention in the Keystone issue.

The rest here.

How do you immobilize the President of the United States? Put diesel fuel in his tank.

One of the eight-ton, armor-plated Caddy limos — Secret Service codename, “The Beast” –  in our green president’s fleet had to be towed in Israel this week after the vehicle was mistakenly filled with diesel fuel. While the sequester-panicked president’s $300,000-per-vehicle fleet is worthy of ridicule (“It’s embarrassing, our entourage. My wife, Michelle, teases me mercilessly,” Obama told his Israeli host), Americans can feel his pain. Who hasn’t accidentally pulled up to the wrong pump and filled their gas-powered steed with diesel fuel or E85 (15 percent ethanol) fuel? In Israel — where gas is pushing $6 a gallon — mileage-efficient diesel is widely available. More choice, more confusion.

Obama has been scaremongering of late that his generals say oil is a natural-security threat. But now we know the real security threat — the flunkies that put the wrong petroleum product in his car. Now the whole world knows The Beast’s big V-8 can be compromised . . . by diesel.

An excerpt from John Kerry’s remarks at the Ross Sea Conservation reception (emphasis mine):

So climate change is coming back in a sense as a serious international issue because people are experiencing it firsthand. The science is screaming at us, literally, demanding that people in positions of public responsibility at least exercise the so-called “precautionary principle” to balance the equities and not knowing completely the outcomes at least understand what is happening and take steps to prevent potential disaster. I’ve often said to people, “What is the worst that could happen to you if you make a decision to put good energy policy in place and respond to what the science and the facts are telling us?” Well, the worst that can happen to you if you would employ a lot of people in alternative and renewable and clean energy; you would have less hospitalizations, cleaner air, more children with less asthma; and you would create an enormous number of jobs by moving to those new energy possibilities and policies and infrastructure. That’s the worst that can happen to you.

If you’re wondering how people can get through an entire John Kerry speech, Kerry himself gives the answer. His audience was — literally — drunk:

So I thank you for coming here tonight. I noticed coming in here there were a number of empty wine glasses on the tables, so I know you didn’t waste your time completely before I got here. (Laughter.) 

Via Climate Depot:

BURN IN HELL: NYT Warmist Paul Krugman to those whose ‘deny’ global warming: ‘May you be punished in the afterlife for doing so’ — Calls ‘denial’ an ‘almost inconceivable sin’  

I wonder what Krugman thinks happens to abortionists.

Washington Post:

The Obama administration is leaning toward revising its landmark proposal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants, according to several individuals briefed on the matter, a move that would delay tougher restrictions and anger many environmentalists.

The discussions center on the first greenhouse gas limits for power plants, which were proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency nearly a year ago. Rewriting the proposal would significantly postpone any action and also might allow the agency to set more permissive standards for coal-fired power plants, which are roughly twice as polluting as those fueled by natural gas.

Any retreat on the rules would be a blow to environmental groups and their supporters, who constituted a crucial voting bloc for President Obama and other Democrats in last year’s election.

White House spokesman Clark Stevens said suggestions of any sort of decision by the EPA was incorrect, noting the agency was still in the process of reviewing the 2 million comments it had received on the rule.

The move coincides with Obama’s call on Friday for a new federal fund to research clean energy alternatives for cars and trucks. The creation of an Energy Security Trust, which the president outlined in his State of the Union speech, would invest $2 billion in federal revenue from oil and gas leasing into breakthrough technologies.

“After years of talking about it, we’re finally poised to take control of our energy future,” Obama said.

The contrast between the two policies highlights the delicate balancing act Obama is attempting to strike in his second-term energy and environmental agenda — seeking ways to combat climate change, while avoiding damage to a still-struggling economy.

The rest here.

From the homepage:

Unlock Keystone

By The Editors

Keystone XL is an ambitious project that would send Canadian crude from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico, where the United States’ expansive refining capacity would transform it into gasoline, diesel, and other valuable petroleum commodities. The pipeline itself would be over 1,000 miles long and 36 inches in diameter, capable of moving over 830,000 barrels of oil per day on a route through Montana, South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas. In 2012, the Obama administration delayed an earlier iteration of the proposal, prompting well-earned charges that the president was kowtowing to the environmentalists in an election year. With that election over, and any lingering environmental concerns satisfied, we see no reason why the latest version of the project should not be swiftly approved.

Estimates on the number of jobs expected to be created by Keystone range from 5,000 to 40,000 or more. It has been reported that the president told congressional Republicans in a recent meeting that he believes the actual number will be on the low end. Perhaps it will, which would put it well ahead of some federally subsidized solar startups we can think of.

The rest here.

At the risk of inspiring Nanny Bloomberg to even more despotic fantasies, Hizzoner’s mistake in regulating soda was in not regulating beverage calories like the EPA regulates auto MPG.

New York Judge Milton Tingling struck down Bloomberg’s -ounce soda ban as arbitrary (banning restaurant sodas but leaving convenience store Big Gulps in place, for example) and outside the bounds of his executive reach. “We feel the justice’s decision was strong,” said a spokesman for the American Beverage Association, the chief plaintiff in the case.

But soda companies should be so lucky that the mayor’s edict targets consumer choice — not beverage makers. As a result, the beverage industry has consumer opinion behind it, with 60 percent of New Yorkers objecting to pols ordering their drink choices.

But imagine if the Bloombergs of the world went about this by regulating the beverage industry.

Under perverse government fuel laws, Washington forces auto companies to increase MPG by 40 percent to an average 35.5 MPG by 2015(and to 54.5 by 2025). The government doesn’t force customers to buy 35.5 MPG cars — it forces automakers to make them. The regulations are popular with the public (who doesn’t want more fuel efficiency?) while forcing carmakers to pay millions in lobbying fees in order to queer the rules lest they have nothing but Smart cars left to sell.

What if Coca Cola were forced to make every 16-ounce drink contain only 90 calories (a 50 percent decrease from the current 180)?

The law would surely be popular — customers don’t know soda formulas any more than they do engine technology — even as beverage companies understood that removing that much sugar would crater soda sales. But with public opinion against them, they would take the easy way out — just as auto companies have done. Beverage companies would hire lobbyists to negotiate loopholes and credits in the calorie mandate to ensure that popular, 180-calorie soda would still be sold.

Example? GM gets credit against the 35.5 MPG law by selling plug-in Chevy Volts — so that it can keep on selling popular, gas-guzzling Chevy Tahoes. Imagine similar soda regs where Coke Zero gives Coca Cola credits against the 90 calorie law — to keep selling popular, sugary Coke. And government would grow ever more powerful. And pols would get ever more lobbying money from Big Business.

Let’s just hope the nanny-staters don’t figure this one out.

Via the National Legal and Policy Center:

In the end, even Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, Justin Bieber, Jay Leno, former Chrysler andGeneral Motors execs, billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalists, generous California government incentive givers, Delawaresubsidizers, and President Obama’sDepartment of Energy investment arm couldn’t overcome the dud that was the $102,000-plus Fisker Karma.

And now as the company desperately seeks for cash and/or a rescuer – probably in China – a disagreement arose between Fisker’s founder and its top management. So the man for whom the company was named, Henrik Fisker, quit. The Los Angeles Times and dozens of other outlets reported yesterday that Mr. Fisker left over disputes about “direction” for the company, citing “several major disagreements.”

But Automotive News seemed to have the inside track on the Danish designer’s thinking, after it was able to obtain an email interview.

“I’m proud of having brought the first luxury plug-in hybrid to market under my leadership,” Mr. Fisker told the industry publication. “Despite the difficulties, and setbacks, more than many big car companies have to face, Fisker Automotive tackled the issues head on and managed to sell more than 2,000 cars to date.”

“I have driven many luxury cars on a day to day basis. I still find the Fisker Karma the best day-to-day car I have ever had,” he added.

Unfortunately the land is littered with the failed carcasses of former business start-up executives who were “proud” of what they accomplished and the fact that they faced problems “head-on.” They leave out the fact that the problems are the windshields and they are the bugs.

The rest here.

From the New York Times:

Japan said Tuesday that it had extracted gas from offshore deposits of methane hydrate — sometimes called “flammable ice” — a breakthrough that officials and experts said could be a step toward tapping a promising but still little-understood energy source.

The gas, whose extraction from the undersea hydrate reservoir was thought to be a world first, could provide an alternative source of energy to known oil and gas reserves. That could be crucial especially for Japan, which is the world’s biggest importer of liquefied natural gas and is engaged in a public debate about whether to resume the country’s heavy reliance on nuclear power.

Experts estimate that the carbon found in gas hydrates worldwide totals at least twice the amount of carbon in all of the earth’s other fossil fuels, making it a potential game-changer for energy-poor countries like Japan. Researchers had previously successfully extracted gas from on-shore methane hydrate reservoirs, but not from beneath the seabed, where much of the world’s deposits are thought to lie.

The exact properties of undersea hydrates and how they might affect the environment are still poorly understood, however, as is the potential for making extraction commercially viable.

Japan has invested hundreds of millions of dollars since the early 2000s to explore offshore methane hydrate reserves in both the Pacific and the Sea of Japan. That task has become all the more pressing after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis, which has all but halted Japan’s nuclear energy program and caused a sharp increase in the country’s fossil fuel imports.

The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said a team aboard the scientific drilling ship Chikyu had started a trial extraction of gas from a layer of methane hydrates about 300 meters, or 1,000 feet, below the seabed Tuesday morning. The ship has been drilling since January in an area of the Pacific about 1,000 meters deep and 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, south of the Atsumi Peninsula in central Japan.

The rest here.

Robert Zubrin recently wrote a piece for NRO on the Left’s “green anti-humanism.” Robert’s piece is a rebuttal to “Colorado State University philosophy professor Philip Cafaro [who] advanced the argument that immigration needs to be sharply cut, because otherwise people from Third World nations will come to the United States and become prosperous, thereby adding to global warming.”

How nice.

Well now a debate has been set between Robert and Cafaro for April 15 in Lakewood, Colorado. Details here:

Philip Cafaro, a professor of philosophy at Colorado State University, recently warned in print that immigrants to America will endanger the planet by partaking of our country’s carbon-based prosperity. Robert Zubrin, an entrepreneur and space scientist, rebutted by insisting that population growth and carbon energy are both good things. To contend otherwise, he charged, is “anti-humanity.” 

Centennial Institute presents a debate on this clash of visions. “Resolved: To help slow global climate change, the U.S. should reduce immigration and stabilize our population, as part of efforts to cut back sharply on greenhouse gas emissions.” That’s the proposition Cafaro will affirm and Zubrin (pictured) will negate.

The Issue Monday debate will take place on Monday, April 15, from 7-8:30 p.m. at the CCU Beckman Center. Admission is free and all are welcome, but reservations are required. Complete the RSVP form below or call 303-963-3424 to reserve your space. The CCU Beckman Center is located at 180 S. Garrison Street, Lakewood CO 80226.

Get the popcorn, it should be a good one.

Oh, how a run for Senate changes a woman. In 2010, Judd infamously opined on the coal industry — vital to her home state of Kentucky — with this gem on mountaintop-removal mining, calling it “the state-sanctioned, federal government-supported, coal industry-operated rape of Appalachia.”

Yet on March 8, when asked about her thoughts on coal via Twitter, responded:

God created the people that created NARAL and Judd supports NARAL, I guess that makes NARAL and abortion inherently good, too?

But, oddly, coal seems to be inherently good only if it’s left in the ground, whereas there’s no consideration from Judd of leaving a baby in the womb.

Or, maybe Judd is for coal mining except in cases of rape or incest? It’s all very confusing and I’m sure we’ll get some more clarification if Judd does decide to run for Senate in Kentucky.

What sequester cuts? Via Lynn Sweet:

A long post from “Dot Earth” blogger Andrew Revkin on a new study from researchers at Oregon State University and Harvard claiming:

The last century stands out as the anomaly in this record of global temperature since the end of the last ice age…. This research shows that we’ve experienced almost the same range of temperature change since the beginning of the industrial revolution as over the previous 11,000 years of Earth history – but this change happened a lot more quickly.

Revkin writes:

In sum, the work reveals a fresh, and very long, climate “hockey stick.”

The hockey stick climate analogy arose from a variety of studies of the last millennium or two of temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, Arctic and planet. There’s a general pattern of a sharp warming from the 20th century onward. The shaft of the “stick” has a lot of wiggles and warps and still comes with substantial uncertainty, but the general pattern is well established. The Wikipedia entry is a reasonable starting point for reviewing varied views of this body of science.

This work is complicated, involving lots of statistical methods in extrapolating from scattered sites to a global picture, which means that there’s abundant uncertainty — and that there will be abundant interpretations. 

Revkin includes an e-mail exchange with Berkeley’s Robert Rhode who does caution on reading too much into the certainty of the findings (although he agrees with the broader picture). An excerpt:

Because the analysis method and sparse data used in this study will tend to blur out most century-scale changes, we can’t use the analysis of Marcott et al. to draw any firm conclusions about how unique the rapid changes of the twentieth century are compared to the previous 10,000 years. The 20th century may have had uniquely rapid warming, but we would need higher resolution data to draw that conclusion with any certainty. Similarly, one should be careful in comparing recent decades to early parts of their reconstruction, as one can easily fall into the trap of comparing a single year or decade to what is essentially an average of centuries. To their credit Marcott et al. do recognize and address the issue of suppressed high frequency variability at a number of places in their paper.

And Anthony Watts weighs in with a nice debunking of the “unprecedented” warming:

I had to chuckle at the cacophony of Twitfests going on today over this new study from Marcott et al. I especially liked the Mother Jones headline being Tweeted: “The Scariest Climate Change Graph Just Got Scarier”.

It rather reminds me of some people being fearful of certain religious icons.

Yes, be afraid, very afraid, of that “unprecedented” (there’s that word again in the abstract) 0.7C temperature rise is the message I suppose. While the MSM will trumpet this I’m sure, we’ll get down to finding out just how good the science is. One potential problem is that the pollen data median sampling of 120 years, which is 4x the 30 year climate normals periods used today. That’s pretty low resolution for a study that is focusing on 2000 years and leaves lots of opportunity to miss data. Further, when they say the last 100 years was the warmest (with higher resolution data) they really aren’t comparing similar data sets when the other data has a 120 year median sampling.

Watts’s entire piece here.

Carl Levin’s retirement announcement today was delicious.

The millionaire Michigan senator who gifted himself a $7,500 tax break to buy his $40,000 2012 Chevy Volt said his Number One priority in his last two years in office is cleaning up fat-cat tax breaks.

“(My wife and I) decided that I can best serve my state and nation by concentrating in the next two years on the challenging issues before us,” said Michigan’s longest serving senator on his website today. “Years of bipartisan work by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that I chair have shed light on tax avoidance schemes that are a major drain on our treasury. They add to the tax burden of ordinary Americans who have to pick up the slack and accelerate the economic inequality in our country.”

Present company excluded, of course. Levin meant corporate tax breaks. We’re not making this up.