GWPF | 30 Oct 2015
Obama Administration Wants To Hold Off Court’s Climate Ruling Until After Paris UN Summit
Putin’s climate scepticism dates from the early 2000s, when his staff “did very, very extensive work trying to understand all sides of the climate debate”, said Andrey Illarionov, Putin’s senior economic adviser at the time and now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington. “We found that, while climate change does exist, it is cyclical, and the anthropogenic role is very limited,” he said. “It became clear that the climate is a complicated system and that, so far, the evidence presented for the need to ‘fight’ global warming was rather unfounded.” That opinion endures. During a trip to the Arctic in 2010, Putin acknowledged that “the climate is changing”, but restated his doubt that human activity was the cause. —Reuters, 29 October 2015
1) Putin Believes Global Warming ‘Is A Fraud To Restrain Developing Nations’ – Reuters, 29 October 2015
2) Obama Administration Wants To Hold Off Court’s Climate Ruling Until After Paris UN Summit – The Hill, 28 October 2015
3) Steel Bosses Warned David Cameron Five Years Ago That Green Taxes Risked Industry – The Northern Echo, 30 October 2015
4) Green Energy Investment Funds Are Tanking, Losing Shareholders Millions – Daily Caller News Foundation, 28 October 2015
5) David Whitehouse: The Hiatus And The Hostage – Global Warming Policy Forum, 29 October 2015
Obama administration lawyers want a federal court to hold off on deciding whether to block its climate change rule for power plants until late December. Since the regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency is the United States’s most significant climate change initiative, opponents think staying the rule would send a strong signal and could derail an international pact to fight climate change. While the Justice Department and the EPA characterized the schedule as reasonable, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) said the administration was trying to delay proceedings. “The Clean Power Plan is on legally vulnerable ground, and the agency knows it,” Inhofe, chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement. –Timothy Cama, The Hill, 28 October 2015
Steel bosses warned David Cameron five years ago that energy taxes would risk thousands of jobs on Teesside, but ministers ignored the pleas as they were determined to lead ‘the greenest government in history’. Prior to taking control of the former British steel plant on Teesside in 2011, SSI repeatedly sought assurances from ministers that it would not be hit with punitive taxes for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. George Osborne, however, imposed duty which hiked energy costs for steel manufacturers and other energy-intensive industries that meant that British steelmakers ended up paying 80 per cent more for electricity than the EU average, which is two times higher than the US, and three times more than in China. Despite repeated warnings that the levy would make it almost impossible for British steel firms to compete with overseas rivals the Government has only now stepped to save the industry from collapse. –Andy Richardson, The Northern Echo, 30 October 2015
Green energy investments have been shredded over the past eight years, gutting shareholder value and calling the financial viability of renewable energy into question. The Energy Select Sector SPDR exchange-traded fund, which tracks the alternative energy sector, is down 15 percent over the past eight years. Barron’s reports that losses among individual ETFs in the green energy sector, however, are much worse. Guggenheim Solar ETF has lost investors 88 percent over the same timeframe, with PowerShares WilderHill Clean Energy Portfolio losing a similar 82 percent. Global government cuts in green energy subsidies will continue to threaten alternative energy investments going forward. –Steve Birr, Daily Caller News Foundation, 28 October 2015
The global warming hiatus is one of the most important topics in climate science. The data shows us something very interesting is happening and many scientists, looking at many aspects of the environment, are producing amazing research in pursuit of an explanation. It will not be explained or dismissed by this or that paper, and the latest one championed in the media is unlikely to last long. The hiatus is not only telling us something about the importance of natural climatic variations but also about the polarisation of science exemplified by questions like whose side are you on. –David Whitehouse, Global Warming Policy Forum, 29 October 2015
1) Putin Believes Global Warming ‘Is A Fraud To Restrain Developing Nations’
Reuters, 29 October 2015
President Putin believes that “there is no global warming, that this is a fraud to restrain the industrial development of several countries including Russia. That is why this subject is not topical for the majority of the Russian mass media and society in general.”
MOSCOW — Wildfires crackled across Siberia this summer, turning skies ochre and sending up enough smoke from burning pines to blot out satellite views of the 400-mile-long Lake Baikal.
To many climate scientists, the worsening fires are a consequence of Siberia getting hotter, the carbon unleashed from its burning forests and tundra only adding to man-made fossil fuel emissions. Siberia’s wildfire season has lengthened in recent years and the 2015 blazes were among the biggest yet, caking the lake, the “Pearl of Siberia”, in ash and scorching the surrounding permafrost.
But the Russian public heard little mention of climate change, because media coverage across state-controlled television stations and print media all but ignored it. On national TV, the villains were locals who routinely but carelessly burn off tall grasses every year, and the sometimes incompetent crews struggling to put the fires out.
While Western media have examined the role of rising temperatures and drought in this year’s record wildfires in North America, Russian media continue to pay little attention to an issue that animates so much of the world.
The indifference reflects widespread public doubt that human activities play a significant role in global warming, a tone set by President Vladimir Putin, who has offered only vague and modest pledges of emissions cuts ahead of December’s U.N. climate summit in Paris.
Russia’s official view appears to have changed little since 2003, when Putin told an international climate conference that warmer temperatures would mean Russians “spend less on fur coats” while “agricultural specialists say our grain production will increase, and thank God for that”.
The president believes that “there is no global warming, that this is a fraud to restrain the industrial development of several countries including Russia,” says Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst and critic of Putin. “That is why this subject is not topical for the majority of the Russian mass media and society in general.”
And with Russian media focused on the economic squeeze at home and events in Ukraine and Syria abroad, the absence of a robust media conversation on climate change means his scepticism goes largely unchallenged.
“It is difficult to spend editorial resources on things that are now a low priority in the midst of the economic crisis,” says Galina Timchenko, former editor-in-chief of the successful news site Lenta.ru. Timchenko now runs Meduza, a popular site that covers Russian news but devotes little space to climate issues.
“Unfortunately climate change is not very interesting to the public,” she says.
“EXTENSIVE WORK”
Putin’s scepticism dates from the early 2000s, when his staff “did very, very extensive work trying to understand all sides of the climate debate”, said Andrey Illarionov, Putin’s senior economic adviser at the time and now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington.
“We found that, while climate change does exist, it is cyclical, and the anthropogenic role is very limited,” he said. “It became clear that the climate is a complicated system and that, so far, the evidence presented for the need to ‘fight’ global warming was rather unfounded.”
That opinion endures. During a trip to the Arctic in 2010, Putin acknowledged that “the climate is changing”, but restated his doubt that human activity was the cause.
His trip was to inspect the retreat of the polar ice cap, something that promises to make the Arctic ocean and northern Siberia more accessible to exploration and production of the oil that Russia, the world’s leading producer, depends on for export earnings.
Marianna Poberezhskaya, author of the academic work “Communicating Climate Change in Russia”, characterized media coverage in Russia as “climate silence”, broken only by the airing of official doubts about any human impact on global temperatures.
“Russian mass media repeat the same mistake that Western journalists used to make: the false balance, where the idea of the human effect on climate change is presented along with skeptics’ point of view,” she said.
Russian school teaching also appears to lag behind the rapidly expanding science on climate change.
Randomly sampled geography textbooks make no mention of human impact on the climate, and one college-level text states that climate changes are caused mainly by solar activity, the movement of the planet’s crust and volcanoes.
“I see what they have abroad on the problem of climate change,” says Asya Korolkova, 15, who studies high school biology in Moscow. “People there talk about it a lot; you can feel it’s a serious problem. We don’t have that here.”
DECREASE IS AN INCREASE
Environmentalists say that attitude is also reflected in Russia’s pledge for December’s global summit, one that received little media coverage at home.
In suggesting a reduction in its emissions to “70 to 75 percent” of 1990 levels by 2030, Moscow is actually proposing an increase from 2012 levels. Russian emissions are currently far below the levels produced by obsolescent ex-Soviet smokestack industries in 1990.
Even that offer is hedged. Russia has said reaching the target will require generous accounting for the role Russia’s forests play in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Some observers do see signs of a slight softening in Moscow’s position in the face of a series of weather disasters, from drought and searing summer fires in 2010 to raging floods in Sochi on the Black Sea last year.
Natural resources minister Sergei Donskoy has said extreme weather could cut Russia’s economic output by 1-2 percent every year for the next 15 years, adding that “this has to be taken into account when determining the policy and measures in the field of adaptation to climate change”.
The business newspaper Kommersant, owned by wealthy businessman Alisher Usmanov, is, like some other Russian media, taking some interest in those economic consequences, though it also did not discuss the possibility that climate change might have contributed to the Siberian fires.
“I write about what needs to be done to change production and consumption practices – the human effect on the climate is a given for us,” said Kommersant journalist Alexey Shapovalov.
But for all that, there is no sign of public pressure on authorities to do more, let alone of Putin relaxing Russia’s hard line ahead of the Paris talks.
“This subject has failed to become a priority,” says Konstantin Simonov, the founder of a non-governmental oil and gas research fund who often appears on Russian media.
“Russia’s attitude will most likely be something like this: Guys, you put economic pressure on us, introduced sanctions. Do you expect us to be holier than the Pope about the issue you’re pushing through and take a load of responsibilities?”
The answer, he says, will be: “No.”
2) Paris Poker: Obama Administration Wants To Hold Off Court’s Climate Ruling Until After Paris UN Summit
The Hill, 28 October 2015
Timothy Cama
Obama administration lawyers want a federal court to hold off on deciding whether to block its climate change rule for power plants until late December.
The schedule proposed by Justice Department lawyers in a court filing Wednesday would have the last briefs for a requested stay filed Dec. 23, at which point the judges would be able to decide.
Some opponents of the regulation wanted the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to decide whether to temporarily block the rule by Dec. 11, when United Nations climate talks are due to end in Paris.
Since the regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency is the United States’s most significant climate change initiative, opponents think staying the rule would send a strong signal and could derail an international pact to fight climate change.
While the Justice Department and the EPA characterized the schedule as reasonable, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) said the administration was trying to delay proceedings.
“The Clean Power Plan is on legally vulnerable ground, and the agency knows it,” Inhofe, chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement.
“The EPA has been slow walking the publication of the Clean Power Plan in an attempt to delay the inevitable, and now is asking the federal court to delay next steps on the rule’s legal challenges until after the international climate talks in Paris.”
Twenty-six states and dozens of businesses, fossil fuel interests and other associations have sued the EPA to challenge its regulation, saying it violates the Clean Air Act. Many of the litigants have asked a court to stay the rule to prevent harm from its implementation while judges consider its legality.
3) Steel Bosses Warned David Cameron Five Years Ago That Green Taxes Risked Industry
The Northern Echo, 30 October 2015
Andy Richardson
STEEL bosses warned David Cameron five years ago that energy taxes would risk thousands of jobs on Teesside, but ministers ignored the pleas as they were determined to lead ‘the greenest government in history’.
SSI Steelworks in Redcar was among the firms hit with green taxes that David Cameron has now agreed to ease. Picture: Anna Gowthorpe/PA Wire.
The Prime Minister yesterday confirmed he would ask the EU to approve tax breaks that will ease the burden on Britain’s under-fire steel industry.
But the move will come too late for thousands of former Redcar steelworkers who are looking for new jobs.
Prior to taking control of the former British steel plant on Teesside in 2011, SSI repeatedly sought assurances from ministers that it would not be hit with punitive taxes for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
George Osborne, however, imposed duty which hiked energy costs for steel manufacturers and other energy-intensive industries that meant that British steelmakers ended up paying 80 per cent more for electricity than the EU average, which is two times higher than the US, and three times more than in China.
Despite repeated warnings that the levy would make it almost impossible for British steel firms to compete with overseas rivals the Government has only now stepped to save the industry from collapse.
During Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, Mr Cameron gave a commitment to bring forward the Energy Intensive Industries Compensation Package, first announced in the 2014 budget, but only after state aid clearance is obtained from the European Commission.
Gareth Stace, the director of UK Steel, welcomed the move. “It is now essential that we seek state aid as soon as possible so that payments can begin immediately as promised. This will help provide the breathing space to help the sector through the current crisis.”
Earlier in the day former SSI Redcar workers, who lost their jobs when the plant was liquidated this month, joined a march to Parliament where a Save Our Steel banner was unfurled prior to steel crisis talks.
4) Green Energy Investment Funds Are Tanking, Losing Shareholders Millions
Daily Caller News Foundation, 28 October 2015
Steve Birr
Green energy investments have been shredded over the past eight years, gutting shareholder value and calling the financial viability of renewable energy into question.
The Energy Select Sector SPDR exchange-traded fund, which tracks the alternative energy sector, is down 15 percent over the past eight years. Barron’s reports that losses among individual ETFs in the green energy sector, however, are much worse. Guggenheim Solar ETF has lost investors 88 percent over the same timeframe, with PowerShares WilderHill Clean Energy Portfolio losing a similar 82 percent.
Global government cuts in green energy subsidies will continue to threaten alternative energy investments going forward. According to the Guardian, the U.K. was forced to cut a green tax relief program due to uncertainty in the market.
Jan-Willem Bode, director of one of the largest green energy organizations in the U.K. said Wednesday, “Many shareholders feel like pulling the plug right now because it is just too much negativity thrown at the sector.”
Dwindling demand and oversupply in the energy market also don’t bode well for floundering alternative energy investments. According to Barron’s, with oil prices at record lows countries may be less likely to invest in expensive energy alternatives, especially with price volatility causing so much uncertainty.
Overall, the entire energy sector has struggled, with the S&P 500 energy index down almost a quarter in 2015.
5) David Whitehouse: The Hiatus And The Hostage
Global Warming Policy Forum, 29 October 2015
Being certain in science is very often being a hostage to fortune. There is nothing any scientist who expresses an opinion can do about it, and that’s a good thing because science is all about the unexpected. It’s easy to look at the history books and be amused by comments that science is finished and that all that remains is measuring to finer precision – then came the quantum revolution, or that continental drift is “out of the question” (Prof Harold Jeffreys), and also that space travel is utter bilge (Astronomer Royal). But it is not just the big pronouncements that are interesting. Arguably more important are the lower level declarations of certainty that accompany normal scientific progress as they too are very often wrong, and thus at the same time useful and embarrassing. But in climate change being wrong is seen by some as being unscientific, and often unforgivable.
Reading the latest edition of US Climate Variation and Predictability reminds me of the sweeping pronouncements and hostages captured that are made about the “hiatus” observed in global surface temperatures over the past 15 years or so. If you look at much of the media you would be forgiven for thinking that the question of the hiatus had been settled because up-to-date analysis using new and better temperature databases have shown it was an illusion. ‘Science shows the hiatus never existed’, say the headlines – and anyone who disagrees is a denier. But these latest papers tell a different story.
There are six readable papers and five of them acknowledge the hiatus and go about seeking explanations for it. One paper whose lead author is an independent statistician says the hiatus does not exist and never has. It is clear that this particular interpretation of the surface temperature data, stridently and intolerantly expressed, has not gathered deep support in the climate change community.
The Hiatus Is Clear
It is Gerald Meehl of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research that produces in my view the most thoughtful paper in the collection.
He says that the many adjustments of the surface temperature data sets – adjustments that invariably eliminate the hiatus – have not been as definitive as some suggest. He says that the claims of no hiatus rest on questionable interpretations of forced climate change due to greenhouse gasses and its relationship with inter-decadal and decadal natural climate variability. The hiatus is clear he says, and not an artifact of the data.
Indeed, it has been said many times that the lesson of the hiatus is that of an increasing appreciation of natural climatic variability and its relationship to forced climate change. Consider this: A decade ago it was not uncommon to hear that forced climate change was the dominant factor and that natural variability was minor. Then came the hiatus and now it’s the other way around for decadal timescales.
Meehl, like many others, thinks the answer to the hiatus may reside in the decadal temperature cycles of the Pacific. It is an interesting hypothesis, but we should remember that such cycles were identified less than 20 years ago and so we have little to go on when considering decadal variations.
There are indications that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) went from a cool phase to a warm one in 2014, and some suggest that it marks the end of the hiatus. Whilst we wait for the data to see if this is the case, it is worth remembering that in the past there have been many predictions of the end of the hiatus. Remember the Climategate comments by Phil Jones that if the surface temperature didn’t start increasing after 15 years we should be worried; or take Ben Santer’s proclamation that a 17-year standstill is the time to start worrying. These predictions have come and gone and been replaced by new timescales with the “worry point” always a few years ahead of the data!
The hiatus is one of the most important topics in climate science. The data shows us something very interesting is happening and many scientists, looking at many aspects of the environment, are producing amazing research in pursuit of an explanation. It will not be explained or dismissed by this or that paper, and the latest one championed in the media is unlikely to last long.
The hiatus is not only telling us something about the importance of natural climatic variations but also about the polarisation of science exemplified by questions like whose side are you on.
