Sen. Whitehouse (D-RI) tells EPA Administrator Jackon to hold coal accountable

HT jskowalski
via twitter

Outrageous

J. SCOTT ARMSTRONG rebutting Krugman

We identified 26 analogous situations, such as the alarm over mercury in fish. Government actions were demanded in 25 situations and carried out in 23. None of the alarming forecasts were correct, none of the interventions were useful, and harm was caused in 20.

A Forecasting Expert Testifies About Climate Change

Emphasis mine. No links, no evidence... nothing to support that outrageous claim. I'm looking for documentation on the efficacy of the EPA regulations.

However there's this to refute it.

In America one-in-six children born every year have been exposed to mercury levels so high that they are potentially at risk for learning disabilities and motor skill impairment and short-term memory loss. That type of mercury exposure is caused by eating certain kinds of fish, which contain high levels of the toxin from both natural and man-made sources such as emissions from coal-fired power plants. One government analysis shows that 630,000 children each year are exposed to potentially unsafe mercury levels in the womb. If the government and its scientists know about the mercury problem, why do so many people continue to be poisoned?
...


In February 2004, a new analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency revealed that "about 630,000 children are born each year at risk for lowered intelligence and learning problems caused by exposure to high levels of mercury in the womb," nearly double the previous EPA estimate.

Looks like regulation is not doing enough:





Why is that relevant to this blog? Because some in congress are trying to castrate the EPA, which is trying to limit CO2... and if they succeed, it may put civilization at risk

GOP war on science

Republicans Gut EPA Climate Rules, Slash Deeply Into Climate Research, Aid and Technology Programs

House Republicans introduced spending legislation Friday that would strip U.S. EPA of its ability to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, gut the State Department's climate aid programs and slash funding for energy and climate research across the federal government

A bitter GOP-led hearing on EPA's climate regs highlights an intractable ideological division over whether CO2 rules will create jobs and prosperity

A bitter GOP-led hearing on EPA's climate regs highlights an intractable ideological division over whether CO2 rules will create jobs and prosperity

I have a hard time believing the sincerity of the deniers.

GOP endangers our children and grandchildren

Top staff members for key House and Senate Republicans met in a closed-door session Tuesday with energy industry interests to work on strategy to handcuff the Obama administration’s climate change agenda.

With the backing of GOP caucus leaders, aides for House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Senate Environment and Public Works Committee ranking member Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) are seeking unwavering support from a host of industries for an all-out push to block federal and state climate rules.

GOP staff, energy lobby in closed-door talks


HT Think Progress

They claim these regulations kill jobs, but they do quite the opposite.
They ignore or deny the impending doom our children and grandchildren face if we do not curb our greenhouse gas emissions.

Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change

James E. Hansen and Makiko Sato

NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University Earth Institute, New York

Scenarios and predictions

• Predictions of future sea level change are inherently difficult because, we assert, ice sheet disintegration is fundamentally a non-linear process. However, in addition, the climate forcing scenario is uncertain. When predictions are made, or statements that can be construed as predictions, it is important to be clear what climate forcing scenario is being considered.
• IPCC BAU (business-as-usual) scenarios assume that greenhouse gas emissions will continue to increase, with the nations of the world burning most of the fossil fuels including unconventional fossil fuels such as tar sands.
• An alternative extreme, one that places a substantial rising price on carbon emissions, would have CO2 emissions beginning to decrease within less than a decade, as the world moves on energy systems beyond fossil fuels, leaving most of the remaining coal and unconventional fossil fuels in the ground. In this extreme scenario, let's call it fossil fuel phase-out (FFPO), CO2 would rise above 400 ppm but begin a long decline by mid-century (Hansen et al., 2008).
• The European Union 2°C scenario, call it EU2C, falls in between these two extremes.
• BAU scenarios result in global warming of the order of 3-6°C. It is this scenario for which we assert that multi-meter sea level rise on the century time scale are not only possible, but almost dead certain. Such a huge rapidly increasing climate forcing dwarfs anything in the peleoclimate record. Antarctic ice shelves would disappear and the lower reaches of the Antarctic ice sheets would experience summer melt comparable to that on Greenland today.
• The other extreme scenario, FFPO, does not eliminate the possibility of multi-meter sea level rise, but it leaves the time scale for ice sheet disintegration very uncertain, possibly very long. If the time scale is several centuries, then it may be possible to avoid large sea level rise by decreasing emissions fast enough to cause atmospheric greenhouse gases to decline in amount.
• What about the intermediate scenario, EU2C? We have presented evidence in this paper that prior interglacial periods were less than 1°C warmer than the Holocene maximum. If we are correct in that conclusion, the EU2C scenario implies a sea level rise of many meters. It is difficult to predict a time scale for the sea level rise, but it would be dangerous and foolish to take such a global warming scenario as a goal.

Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change

emphasis mine.

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Update
See Climate Progress post on Hansen Sato paper.

The Legal Underpinnings of EPA’s Climate Rules

all EPA has to do is to make a finding under some relevant provision of the statute that greenhouse gases endanger public health or welfare

Legal Planet

That shouldn't be difficult...

Odds and ends

Supreme Court takes global warming case that targets power companies
If the court rules that pollution is a form of free speech I'm moving to Canada (or New Zealand).

Fantastic solar plastic breakthrough
I'm waiting for solar paint.

Meet the Anti Christ
Scroll down to the Beck segment. Man these guys are crazy!
Ho Ho Ho Green Dragon. I think it has nice ring to it don't you?.

Meanwhile

Each year there are 350,000 people dying due to climate change, with a total death toll by 2020 of five million; each year after that deaths from climate change are likely to be as high as one million people annually--that is unless we take action to soften the blow with immediate and rapid greenhouse gas emission reductions. That's the word from DARA's new Climate Vulnerability Monitor: The State of the Climate Crisis.

Climate Change to Kill 5 Million People Globally by 2020 & It Just Goes Up Each Year After That

Unfortunately it's the least able to protect themselves that die first. Children. Poor children.

Stop the world! I want to get off!

Inhofe as chairman of the of the Environment and Public Works Committee?

His top priority, he says, is to stop "wasting time" on global warming hearings and get down to business on issues he says have been neglected, like overseeing U.S. EPA and passing major transportation and water infrastructure bills.


"We haven't really been doing anything because they've been wasting all of our time on all that silly stuff, all the hearings on global warming and all that," Inhofe said.

Sen. Inhofe Confident He'll Be EPW Chairman After Midterm Elections

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A must read collaborative post by Climate Progress and Skeptical Science:

A detailed look at climate sensitivity
Debunking the dangerous anti-science fantasy of the 'lukewarmers

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Dumb de Dumb Dumb

Any scientist who has not sold his soul to the environmental movement will tell you that the reason that greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2), do not cause any warming is due to the fact that they have to conform to the laws of thermodynamics. The first law states that “energy can be neither created nor destroyed. It can only change form."

No science, fake science, and the destruction of the nation


Sorry, I thought this was so funny!

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HICD = Human Induced Climate Disruption... like it?

Have you heard?

Concerning the Hirsch report

[oil man] - What happened after you published your 2005 report on ‘peak oil’ for the US Department of Energy (DoE) ?
The people that I was dealing with said : « No more work on peak oil, no more talk about it. »


People that were high in the administration hierarchy ?
The people that I was dealing with were high in the laboratory level. They were getting their instructions from people on the political side of the DoE, at high levels.
After the work we did on the 2005 study and the follow-up of 2006, the Department of Energy headquarters completely cut off all support for oil peaking and decline analysis. The people that I was working with at the National Energy Technology Laboratory were good people, they saw the problem, they saw how difficult the consequences would be – you know, the potential for huge damage – yet they were told : « No more work, no more discussion. »


That was in 2006, under Bush administration. Has anything changed with the Obama administration ?
It has not changed. I have friends who simply won’t talk about it now. So I have to assume that they are receiving the same kind of instructions.

Peak oil : “A conspiracy to keep it quiet” in Washington, says Robert Hirsch
Interview with Robert L. Hirsch (2/2)

 HT The Oil Drum

I'm not big on conspiracies... but this has me going a bit.

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• At least 170 people have died from heatstroke and more than 54 000 have been rushed to hospital in Japan's hottest summer on record
• Russian heatwave killed 11,000 people
• Late Season Heat Wave May Reach New York, Philadelphia

Google it yourself. It's scary

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40 years of clean air progress

To this I can attest personally. In the 60s and 70s a trip to LA meant an asthma attack. The air was brown, and you couldn't see the mountains just a few miles away.
Now I live here (behind the Orange Curtain) and I can see the mountains clearly almost every day, and if there is a mist, it's white, not brown. No more asthma either.

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Dealing With the Issues of Nuclear Energy by Steven Chu


The old time environmentalists will have to make peace with nuclear power.

Scopes Trial Redux

Essentially putting global warming science on trial, Texas officials on Thursday expanded their arguments in a lawsuit meant to prevent the federal regulation of greenhouse gases.

State hammers EPA on science of global warming


This ought to be interesting.

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HT Cost of Energy

The record heat experienced in the United States in the summer of 2010 is no isolated event. Global temperature data compiled by NASA show that the first seven months of 2010 was the hottest such period on record. This comes on top of the warmest decade on record (2000-2009), which surpassed the previous record set by the 1990s, which itself supplanted the 1980s as the warmest decade on record at that time.

The Worst Summer Ever?