John McCain’s delivered a major global-warming speech this afternoon at a windmill factory in Oregon.[Amazingly, he goes to a windmill factory to say that “When we debate energy bills in Washington, it should be more than a competition among industries for special favors, subsidies, and tax breaks.” Is this remarkable cognitive dissonance, or is he saying we don’t need to have these poor windmill folks competing for their pork anymore? Weird.] Being neither in Oregon nor near a TV, I offer the following observations based on the speech’s prepared text, which I had the painful opportunity to read.

I note that his opening joke — that there’s no wind there, so I was invited to give a speech (pause . . . wait for laughter) — is premised on guessing the weather in advance. Just like the agenda he is announcing. The problem is that the premise of McCain’s entire speech is that the rise in earthly temperatures is accelerating, as Al Gore and IPCC head R. K. Pachauri have both recently, if outrageously, repeated — which flies smack in the face of recorded observations.

McCain has big plans for U.S. climate-change legislation, nonetheless. And he is willing to impose these strictures on the U.S. economy unilaterally — without India, Mexico, and China et al. signing on to do the same. But the Arizona senator says he will also negotiate with these countries to persuade them to similar strictures on their own economies (which, I might note, has been tried for a dozen years). And if they don’t agree to go along, well, he’ll start a trade war against them. McCain might want to double-check the express understanding of the Rio and Kyoto treaties: that nations have “common but differentiated responsibilities.” If that remains the regnant understanding – that, roughly, the West must lead the rest — McCain will have a little trouble going after Chinese and Indian goods on the grounds that they’re doing exactly what we’ve asked them to do (i.e., bupkis).

If elected (in late 2008, inaugurated in 2009), McCain says he will begin legislating in what would be record time — particularly for energy taxes in the face of a teetering economic situation — and that his EPA will implement something faster than anything the EPA has ever done before. Which is another way of describing his vow today to give the economy up to two years to bring emissions back down to 2005 levels. Sure, we’re doing better than anyone else in the world — which McCain doesn’t mention, only crisis-talk today, folks — but that’s still a bold prediction. He either knows something really bad about the economy, or isn’t worried about being realistic.

Of course, those specifics would slip dramatically once the politics of actually voting on such a thing began, and this speech really isn’t about specifics. For example, after dismissing the guesswork and computer models we used to rely on for this agenda, in favor of (his, very selective) observations, he then goes rather overboard with claims of our “likely” future, including a greater intensity of storms and forest fires. Those claims are not credibly supported in the literature, they’re just scary. That means, alarmist. Also:

We have many advantages in the fight against global warming, but time is not one of them. Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming, or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters, and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring.

This is nothing short of reckless. McCain is wrong on temperatures, wrong on sea level rise (if the implication is that SLR has accelerated; surely he doesn’t mean we can stop the interglacial SLR), and anecdotal about the rest. And throughout his speech, the anecdotes are either exaggerated, inaccurate, or countered by equal and opposite anecdotal evidence.

McCain says that we are likely to see “changes in crop production.” Well, yes, we probably will. When haven’t we? But is that a clever way — “changes” — to acknowledge that crop yields are higher in a higher-CO2 atmosphere, or is it somehow supposed to sound scary? Is it code for getting rid of the biofuel mandates, or tweaking them? Again, this is just strange. I have said this before about Sen. McCain’s tenure as chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, sometimes in pushing this agenda he seems to insist upon what he, well, just plain knows. There is no need to check facts. This can get quite clumsy. Today he speaks of the “Kyoto Protocols.” Of the Elders of Kyoto, possibly? Sorry, but that’s an entry-level red-flag.

He says that the free-ride granted to most of the world proved the undoing of these “Protocols” — or at least one of them anyway. The fact that none of the parties which promised emission reductions have any clue how to actually reduce emissions, and therefore are not doing so, would seem to me to be a more central feature in Kyoto’s failure.

McCain says that “As a program under the Clean Air Act, the cap-and-trade system achieved enormous success in ridding the air of acid rain.” That’s what Europe said a few years ago when it did what McCain says he wants us to do. There is a dog not barking in this attempt at claiming “see, it works!” The relevant statement should be, “As a program under the Emissions Directive, the cap-and-trade system achieved zero success in reducing CO2.” If the EU’s effort to apply cap-and-trade to CO2 had worked, McCain would surely have mentioned it. After all, he invoked Europe twice . . . just not here.

He says “In a cap-and-trade energy economy, the cost of building new reactors will be less prohibitive.” This is code for “we’re going to make other sources of energy so expensive you’ll have to accept nukes” (who’ll get their ration coupons for free, by the way, and can use the proceeds from their sale to underwrite the massive permit-application process which has proven their most daunting challenge).

The biggest problems with the speech are twofold: First, McCain’s conceit in this speech and in his global-warming views generally are impervious to changing evidence: the problem of man-made climate change is real, bad, and here now, he believes. He proposes to “do something” in order to allow him to say that he “did something” — but which no one anywhere could plausibly claim would accomplish anything for decades, if at all — and even then, only with the rest of the world following suit. But as we’ve seen, the rest of the world — in word or deed — either refuses to do so, or is incapable of doing so. It is a gesture. It is politics, pure and simple. And it is not pretty.

Second, McCain’s ultimate goal for “doing something” about climate is, at best, unclear. He says “The goal in all of this is to assure an energy supply that is safe, secure, diverse, and domestic.” But of course, such a regime only makes our energy supply less secure than at present — unless by “secure,” you mean “expensive” — shifting us away from the energy sources we have in abundance. What is the goal in terms of impact, and at what cost? He proposes what has been clearly assessed as all pain no gain (as Hoffert et al. said in Science in 2002, which remains the pertinent authority for this claim). It has failed in Europe. He tries to elide this fact, but fails.

Isn’t telling the public these two things — here is my environmental goal; here’s how and how much it will cost to get there — critical to allowing the public to decide whether they buy into the plan? The highly questionable politics of the Republican nominee’s embrace of global-warming moonbattery aside, the substance of today’s speech is deeply disappointing.