6 June 2014

In the News
How the Climate Crusade Came to Resemble a Cult
Steven Hayward, Weekly Standard, June Issue
Does EPAs Left Hand Know What Its Far-Left Hand Is Doing to Fight Fracking?
Mark Tapscott, Washington Examiner, 6 June 2014
CASAC Sows Confusion on Ozone by Playing Legal Word Games
William Yeatman, GlobalWarming.org, 5 June 2014
EPAs Next Wave of Job-Likking CO2 Regulations
David Rothbard & Craig Rucker, Watts Up With That?, 5 June 2014
Our new Climate Strategy: Jump off Cliff, Ask China to Follow
Christopher Prandoni, Forbes, 4 June 2014
National Climate Assessment Doubles Down on Climate Doom
Fred Singer, American Thinker, 3 June 2014
James Hansen to Obama: Cap-and-Trade Is a Special Interest Boondoggle
Robert Bradley, Jr., Master Resource, 2 June 2014
Obamas Cold Political Calculus on Global Warming
Patrick Michaels, Washington Times, 2 June 2014
How Fracking Helps America Beat German Industry
Reuters, 2 June 2014
Europes Gas Power Capacity at Risk as Utilities Turn to Coal
Isis Almeida, Bloomberg, 1 June 2014
News You Can Use
Polar Bears International Admits Its Only Guessing
Polar Bears International, which claims to be the pre-eminent resource for all things polar bear
and which provides widely-used teaching materials for schools, long has asserted that climate
change would wipe out 2/3 of polar bears by the end of the century. This week, the group
conceded that the claim was simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand, and
agreed to put a disclaimer on all its educational materials.
Inside the Beltway
Myron Ebell
Obama's EPA Touts Asthma Benefits of Higher Electric Rates
and Job Losses

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy introduced the proposed rule for
limiting carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants in an extraordinary speech to the
media at the EPA's headquarters on Monday, 2nd June. It turns out that the main selling point
of cutting CO2 emissions by 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 is that one of the alleged co-
benefits is up to 150,000 fewer childhood asthma attacks per year. That should be a great
comfort to the millions of children whose parents lose their jobs and can't afford to keep the
lights on because of a policy that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) concisely described
as nuts.

Five years into the most sluggish economy since the Great Depression, President Barack
Obama has taken the biggest step yet in fulfilling his 2008 campaign promise that under his plan
electricity rates will necessarily skyrocket. The sad fact is that the president knows so little
about how the economy works that he might actually believe the new report from his White
House Office of Management and Budget that claims that major regulations promulgated since
2003 have cost only $57 billion, but have produced $863 billion in benefits. Clearly, the road to
prosperity is paved with red tape.
The EPA proposes to achieve a 30 percent cut in emissions from existing coal and natural gas
power plants by requiring electric utilities to use a variety of tools, most of which Congress
rejected in 2009-10, when the Democrats controlled both the House and Senate by wide
majorities. The Waxman-Markey bill, H. R. 2454, failed in the Senate, but cap-and-trade,
renewable standards, and demand-side management apparently do not need to be enacted by
the Congress, but can be required by administrative ukase.
The formulas used to apportion the CO2 reductions among the states are complicated and will
require considerable analysis. The 2005 baseline is much easier to understand. It rewards the
states that have already undertaken significant energy-rationing regimes, such as California and
the members of the northeast Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. And it punishes the states
that have had significant economic and population growth. These are largely states that have
pursued policies that result in affordable energy from coal and natural gas power plants. Cynics
may notice that the former states are mostly controlled by Democrats and the latter states by
Republicans.
GlobalWarming.org has several posts by my CEI colleagues William Yeatman and Marlo Lewis
that provide expert analysis of many of the details in the proposed rule. See here, here, here,
and here.
Across the States
William Yeatman
Federal Judge Issue Suspect Ruling in West Virginia
In a ruling delivered Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge sided with West Virginia Highlands
Conservatory, Sierra Club, and the Ohio Valley Coalition, determining that subsidiaries of Alpha
Coal committed at least one violation of Clean Water Act permits. The alleged violation
pertained to discharges of saline effluent into West Virginia waterways.
The ruling is flawed on a number of counts. For starters, the permits at issue were issued by
West Virginia, acting pursuant to its Clean Water Act authority, and the state doesnt regulate
saline effluent, which is more commonly referred to by its primary physical propertyelectric
conductivityso this would appear to be a case of an activist judge. This perception is not
aided by the fact that Judge Chambers used to be a member of one of the plaintiff organizations
(the WV Highlands Conservancy), who has issue controversial, anti-coal rulings in the past.
Finally, it is worth noting that the putative victims of saline pollution is a short-lived order of
insects, the mayfly, which isnt an endangered species.
Alpha Resources said it will appeal the ruling to the 4th Circuit.
Around the World
William Yeatman
Media Evinces Knee-Jerk Bias by Running with Fake News
on China Carbon Cap
On Tuesday morning, a number of prominent reporters allowed wishful thinking to get in the way
of their jobs by running with a mistaken Reuters report that China would cap its CO2 emissions
in 2016. It turns out that the Reuters report was based on a misquote that got lost in translation,
but before the article was retracted, reporters at the New York Times and New York magazine,
among others, concluded that President Obamas climate plan was the cause. IMHO, these
reporters evident absence of skepticism and also their willingness to give to credit to EPAs new
climate plan, is telling.
Science Update
Marlo Lewis
Richard Tol Challenges 97% Consensus Claim
How many times have you heard there is a 97% consensus among climate scientists?
The claim comes from a study by John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli of the misnamed Skeptical
Science blog and colleagues, who examined 11,944 abstracts of climate papers published
during 1991-2011.
Supposedly, Cook et al (2013) found that 97% of climate scientists agree with the UN
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that most of the 0.7C of global warming
since 1951 is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases. Skeptics, they suggest, are a
fringe element, unworthy of public attention.
But the Cook study does not really prove what the spinners claim it proves.
Nearly two-thirds of the 11,944 abstracts expressed no opinion on the supposed consensus
position. So for all we know, many of the authors may doubt the consensus view.
Of the abstracts that expressed an opinion, Cook et al. claim that 97.1% (less than one-third of
the original total) agree with the IPCC consensus position. That too is more than the Cook team
can possibly know.
University of Delaware Prof. David Legates and three colleagues examined Cook et al.s
database, and found that less than 1% of the 11,944 abstracts explicitly endorse the so-called
consensus.
Is the 97% figure made up out of whole cloth? Not quite. It turns out that 97% of about one-third
of the abstracts affirms or implies that humans are responsible for some portion of global
warming since 1951.
And guess what? Just about every prominent skeptic agrees with that as well. As an attempt to
discredit contrarians, the Cook study is a bust.
A new study by climate economist Richard Tol, published this week in Science Direct, dumps
more cold water on the Cook et al. 97% consensus study. Tol, you may recall, withdrew his
name from the IPCC climate impacts report summary for policymakers because of its alarmist
hype.
Tol accepts the IPCC view that most warming of the past six-plus decades is anthropogenic.
Nonetheless, as an assessment of what most scientists think, he finds Cook et al. To be deeply
flawed. From the abstract:
A claim has been that 97% of the scientific literature endorses anthropogenic climate change
(Cook et al., 2013. Environ. Res. Lett. 8, 024024). This claim, frequently repeated in debates
about climate policy, does not stand. A trend in composition is mistaken for a trend in
endorsement. Reported results are inconsistent and biased. The sample is not representative
and contains many irrelevant papers. Overall, data quality is low. Cooks validation test shows
that the data are invalid. Data disclosure is incomplete so that key results cannot be reproduced
or tested.
The consensus-mongers should stop wasting our time. The key science question for climate
researchers today is not whether greenhouse gas emissions warm the planet but whether state-
of-the-art computer models are accurate enough to forecast climate change and inform policy
decisions. As it turns out, the IPCCs latest ensemble of climate models produce estimates that
overshoot the warming of the past 20 years by 100% and of the last 15 years by 400%.
The key science question for citizens and their representatives is not whether most recent
warming is man-made but whether climate change, as Al Gore put it, is a planetary emergency
a crisis that threatens the survival of civilization and the habitability of the Earth. This
doomsday view of global warming is not credible (see here, here, and here).
Finally, the key issue for policymakers is not whether climate change poses risks but whether
the proposed solutions carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, and other schemes to rig the market
against plentiful, affordable, reliable fossil fuels would do more harm than good. There are
many compelling reasons to regard those so-called solutions as either all cost for no benefit or a
cure worse than the alleged disease.