Commentary Magazine

Topic: climate change

Global Warming Alarmism Cools Down

04.02.2013 - 11:28 AM

The Economist – which has long been concerned about the rise in Earth’s temperature and its consequences for civilization — has a significant article in the current issue. It begins this way:

Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”

Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models. If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.

“The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzle in climate science right now,” The Economist adds.

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The Climate and the Constitution

03.05.2013 - 7:35 PM

On Monday, President Obama announced the appointments of Gina McCarthy to run the Environmental Protection Agency and Ernest J. Moniz to take charge of the Department of Energy. In a week when the country is focused on the issue of the debt, the sequester and the budget, these nominations are not generating as much interest as the question of whether the administration is orchestrating government cutbacks to increase pressure on Congress to raise taxes. But their significance should not be underestimated. As the president indicated, he is planning on using these two agencies and their leaders to pursue an aggressive climate change agenda in his second term.

The debate about global warming and the hysteria that has become an integral part of the environmentalist agenda is one thing. But the key issue involved in these appointments and the president’s intentions for the next four years is one that revolves around legal issues as much as it does scientific disputes. It doesn’t matter whether you are in full agreement with the president on this issue or buy into only a part of it or none at all. The question before the nation here is whether the executive branch can or should give itself the power to run roughshod over Congress and unilaterally implement new regulations that will give the force of law to the president’s climate beliefs. If McCarthy and Moniz intend to use their regulating power to redraw the laws concerning fossil fuel emissions or the ability to explore or drill for new energy sources, then the result will be as much of a Constitutional crisis as anything else.

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Jon Huntsman Can’t Get Over Himself

01.16.2013 - 6:20 PM

“Jon Huntsman Can’t Stop Talking About The Republican Party,” proclaims a Buzzfeed headline teasing an interview with the former GOP presidential candidate. And they weren’t kidding: the story was posted first thing in the morning yesterday, and by the end of lunch time they posted a second story on Huntsman’s interview. The glaring question–Does Jon Huntsman really have that much of interest to say?–has an unsurprising answer: Nope. But he assured the Buzzfeed editors that he had bestowed upon them a truly generous gift:

“I haven’t asked anyone for a single interview. I don’t do that,” he said, adding, “I’d say we take about 2 percent of the media requests that come in. Really.”

Having thus flattered his audience that they are more important to a former governor of Utah than 98 percent of the media out there, Huntsman proceeded to do what Huntsman does: speak for long periods of time without saying anything. Indeed, what’s striking about the two stories worth of interviews he did with Buzzfeed is the complete lack of policy ideas. He spent most of the time talking about how Republicans don’t like him, how much he enjoyed the movie Lincoln, and that he still believes in climate change.

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The Times Spots a Squirrel

01.09.2013 - 6:10 PM

The New York Times, the very apotheosis of agenda-driven “journalism,” has a front-page story today that takes up a quarter of that page, above the fold, and half an inside page, entitled, “Not Even Close: 2012 Was the Hottest Ever in U.S.” It covers the recently issued report of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center regarding last year’s weather statistics.

The Times correctly tells its readers what NOAA reported, which fits in perfectly with the Times’s take on global warming. What it does not do is question in any way, shape or form, whether the statistics in the report are accurate.

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Environmental Scientist Bashed for Rediscovering Science

01.08.2013 - 12:15 PM

Who would’ve thought the scientific community could be so hostile to dissent? Just like the reaction to attempts to debate climate change, the environmental community is up in arms over one scientist’s about-face on the dangers of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in farming. Huffington Post reports on the controversy:

Last Thursday, Lynas gave a speech at a conference on farming at Oxford University. The response was immediate and overwhelming. Bloggers blogged, tweeters tweeted and Lynas’s own website crashed under the onslaught.

Had Lynas revealed some dramatic discovery, or unveiled a path-breaking new campaign? No, he simply stated, in measured and scientific terms, that he had changed his mind.

Lynas had been a leading voice against using genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in farming. He was also sounding the alarm over climate change, and had immersed himself in climate science. When he belatedly did the same with GMOs, he found that a careful reading of the scientific evidence revealed that his previous opposition was untenable. At Oxford Lynas said he was, in a word, sorry.

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Crisis and Conservatism

12.18.2012 - 1:55 PM

On the morning of October 1, 1997, 16-year-old Luke Woodham of Pearl, Mississippi slit his mother’s throat, grabbed a rifle, loaded his pockets with ammo, and drove his dead mom’s car to Pearl High School. There he opened fire, killing two kids and injuring seven others. Woodham then got back in the car with the intention of heading to nearby Pearl Junior High, where he planned on becoming his own copycat. But he never got there. Woodham crashed his car when he saw another gun trained on him through the windshield. That gun belonged to Pearl High’s vice principal Joel Myrtle, who had got his Colt .45 out of his truck at the first sound of shots fired. Myrtle managed to subdue Woodham until police showed up. 

The similarities between the Pearl High School shooting and Friday’s massacre at Sandy Hook are strong. Depraved minds are rarely original. But the central difference between the two tragedies is important. Woodham, unlike Adam Lanza, was stopped mid-rampage by a law-abiding citizen with a gun. We can’t know how many innocent young lives the quick-thinking vice principal saved. While this doesn’t constitute an air-tight case for the availability of guns as defense against gun violence, it does remind us that such a case exists. It is a thoughtful case for saving lives, not ending them. Its defenders can adduce mounds of supporting data. And it is a case grounded in constitutional rights.

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Bloomberg Endorsement All About Mike

11.01.2012 - 5:40 PM

What to make of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s decision to wait until there were five days left before the election before endorsing President Obama’s re-election? The ostensible motivation for the move, announced in an op-ed published today in Bloomberg’s own news website, is the mayor’s reaction to Hurricane Sandy, which he says he believes was the result of climate change. Since Obama buys into the same global warming agenda, which calls for major government interventions into the economy in order to stave off the perceived danger, Bloomberg says that is enough to convince him to back the president even though he disdains his economic agenda and thinks him a weak leader.

Fair enough. If Bloomberg really believes his climate agenda is the No. 1 issue facing the country, rather than the economy or even foreign policy, that is his choice. But it’s hard to see how Bloomberg’s decision will do the president much good. Had the billionaire mayor/mogul backed the president earlier in the process, his financial help via the super PAC he created might have done the president some real good. But even in an age when celebrity/political endorsements are seen as inconsequential, Bloomberg’s will carry even less weight than most. The unpopular mayor won’t impact the outcome in deep blue New York or anywhere else. Nor is it likely that independents who are flocking to Romney because of Obama’s economic failures will change their minds because the former Democrat/Republican wrote an equivocal endorsement on the website named after him. The move is strictly about Bloomberg’s desire for attention.

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Warren’s Mistake: Nationalizing the Race

09.21.2012 - 2:50 PM

A poll of Massachusetts voters gave Scott Brown the win over Elizabeth Warren in last night’s Senate debate by ten points. Though I think Brown probably did win the debate, I thought Warren kept it very close—much closer than that poll suggests—and helped herself in a few ways. But I think two exchanges make up for the difference in perception between the poll results and the way it looked to those outside Massachusetts.

As I wrote on Wednesday, one major advantage Brown has over Warren is the fact that voters consider him to have a much stronger connection to the state than Warren, who is from Oklahoma. That discrepancy is magnified in a debate, where Brown’s accent, and Warren’s lack of one, drive the point home. But there are other ways to reinforce the local-vs.-outsider dynamic, and I think the two candidates did so clearly during their answers to a question about whether climate change is real and what can be done about it. Here is how Brown ended his answer:

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RE: The Free Market is Crushing CO2 Emissions

08.19.2012 - 8:30 AM

As an addendum to Abe’s excellent post, it would be interesting  to see a poll that asked people where American CO2 emissions are today relative to where they were when Bill Clinton was elected president. I’m confident that most people would think they are higher or much higher, when in fact they are about the same, thanks to a steep fall beginning in 2007. Good environmental news, especially if it’s due to the free market instead of bureaucrats, just doesn’t fit the narrative. The New York Times, for instance, did not see fit to print this story.

But as John Hinderaker over at Powerline points out,  at least as big a problem is lousy data and the dishonest used of it by climateers and politicians.  Governor Jerry Brown of California recently said that, “Global warming’s impact on Lake Tahoe is well documented.” But it turns out that the data supporting that claim comes from just one weather station, which has measured an increase beginning about 1980. No other weather station in the area shows any increase in average temperatures, so why does this one? Because a local janitor was for years burning refuse in a barrel located only a few feet from the station and a tennis court was built not much further away in about 1980. The tennis court, of course, absorbs heat all day long and then slowly emits it all night. You can find pictures and charts here.

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The Free Market Is Crushing CO2 Emissions

08.17.2012 - 12:25 PM

Anti-CO2 activists may have to find something else to give their lives meaning. The AP reports that “the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere in the U.S. has fallen dramatically to its lowest level in 20 years, and government officials say the biggest reason is that cheap and plentiful natural gas has led many power plant operators to switch from dirtier-burning coal.”

So if you’ve been championing government action as the last best hope to save humankind from the big broil, you too should find a hobby: “Many of the world’s leading climate scientists didn’t see the drop coming, in large part because it happened as a result of market forces rather than direct government action against carbon dioxide.”

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Obama’s Campaign Strategy Conundrum

04.26.2012 - 9:40 AM

In just the latest indication of the direction his campaign will take, President Obama used a fawning interview in Rolling Stone to make it clear that he thinks his re-election will depend on mobilizing his liberal base. Because he must try to find a way to motivate erstwhile supporters who lack the enthusiasm for him that they showed during his 2008 victory, the president is counting on a twin strategy of demonizing Republicans and tilting to the left on domestic issues.

The starkest illustration of this came in his answers to questions about climate change in which he promised to make this article of faith for the left a central issue in the coming campaign. This may play well for the readers of Rolling Stone. But given the growing skepticism among ordinary Americans about the ideological cant on the issue that has spewed forth from the mainstream media and the White House, it may not help Obama with independents and the working class voters he needs as badly in November as the educated elites who bludgeoned him into halting the building of the Keystone XL pipeline. This conflict illustrates the contradiction at the core of the president’s campaign.

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Obama and the Rise of the Ocean Tides

03.16.2012 - 9:30 AM

The New York Times published a story earlier this week with the headline, “Sea Level Rise Seen as Threat to 3.7 Million.”

According to reporter Justin Gillis, “About 3.7 million Americans live within a few feet of high tide and risk being hit by more frequent coastal flooding in coming decades because of the sea level rise caused by global warming, according to new research. If the pace of the rise accelerates as much as expected, researchers found, coastal flooding at levels that were once exceedingly rare could become an every-few-years occurrence by the middle of this century.”

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A Sad Day for Science

02.21.2012 - 2:30 PM

When internal fundraising and strategy documents from the Heartland Institute, a conservative group skeptical of man-made climate change, were leaked online last week, global warming activists were ecstatic. That excitement ended today when a prominent climate scientist, Peter Gleick, admitted to using a fake identity to obtain donor and budget records from Heartland, supposedly in order to “confirm” an explosive internal memo on the group’s 2012 Climate Strategy, which he claims was sent to him anonymously.

Heartland has disputed the veracity of the memo, which was leaked to the press along with the other documents.

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