Hold on to your wallets and purses.
A recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ruling declaring CO2 a harmful pollutant will generate hundreds of new regulations that will drive up the cost of living for financially strapped Americans while severely burdening small businesses and hampering U.S. competitiveness in the world marketplace.
The EPA ruling, which is designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions, “amounts to little more than a new tax on businesses and consumers,” says the National Taxpayers Union.
“If EPA’s ‘endangerment finding’ is fully implemented, all kinds of products and services – from milk and paper towels to gasoline and electric bills – will cost more. And these new taxes are the last things Americans can afford right now as they attempt to crawl out of a recession.”
The EPA finding has been challenged by several industry groups, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute.
“This action poses a threat to every American family and business if it leads to regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Such regulation would be intrusive, inefficient, and excessively costly. It could chill job growth and delay business expansion,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute. “The Clean Air Act was meant to control traditional air pollution, not greenhouse gases that come from every vehicle, home, factory and farm in America,” he said.
The new finding has been denounced by members of both political parties, including Collin Peterson, the Democratic Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee from Minnesota’s seventh congressional district.
“With or without congressional action, EPA will be free to regulate greenhouse gases, resulting in one of the largest and most bureaucratic nightmares that the U.S. economy and Americans have ever seen,” Peterson warned in a recent press announcement.
Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski from Alaska also condemned the ruling.
“Businesses will be forced to cut jobs, if not close their doors for good. Domestic energy production will be severely restricted, increasing our dependence on foreign suppliers and threatening our national security. Housing will become less affordable, and consumer goods more expensive, as the impacts of the EPA's regulations ripple and rake their way across our economy . . . The EPA's endangerment finding may be intended to help protect our environment, but the regulations that inevitably follow will only endanger our economy,” she said.
Economy-killing ruling based on flawed science
The EPA ruling is based on the theory that rising CO2 levels, caused by human activity, amplify the earth’s normal greenhouse effect, which, in turn, causes global warming. But the hotly debated theory has come under increasing attack in recent months following the release of pilfered e-mails from Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). The correspondence shows leading climate scientists conspiring to manipulate data, evade freedom of information requests, silence critics, and interfere with the publication of research challenging the man-caused warming theory.
Much of the manipulated data found its way into U.N. International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report published in 2007, a primary source of research used by the EPA to justify its endangerment finding.
The IPCC report has been attacked in recent months by critics who accuse the organization of using non-peer-reviewed research to support its predictions of catastrophic climate change. In February, the IPCC was forced to retract statements in its assessment claiming that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 and 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest would very likely disappear if temperatures continued to rise.
The IPCC also had to back away from a statement in the report claiming that rising seas would endanger the 55 percent of the countryside in Netherlands that is below sea level. The embarrassing truth: only 20 percent of the Netherlands is below sea level.
All three fraudulent claims were lifted from non-peer-reviewed magazine articles or studies supplied by writers or researchers linked to environmental pressure groups and the climate-change movement. Britain’s Sunday Telegraph documented at least 16 non-peer-reviewed articles produced by the preservationist group World Wildlife Fund – all used as sources in the IPPC report.
Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guleph in Ontario, Canada, says the U.N. needs to determine how much other research has been "likewise compromised." He claimed in a FoxNews.com interview that the IPCC is “admitting what they did only because they were caught. The fact that so many IPCC authors kept silent all this time shows how monumental has been the breach of trust."
In its independent assessment of the IPPC report, the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) described the document as “flawed."
“The overall tone of AR4 is highly alarmist, with evidence that might point in other directions deliberately edited out or buried out of sight. It is not a reliable basis for making public policy.”
According to the NIPCC, most of the “2,500 scientists” who contributed to the assessment were never given a chance to review the conclusions contained in the final Summaries for Policymakers (SPM). Instead, the summaries were written by a small group of scientists and then revised and agreed to, line-by-line, by representatives of member governments prior to publication.
NIPCC claims the IPCC’s full report was revised after the executive summaries were written to make it agree with the political documents.
The state of Texas recently filed a petition with the EPA, asking it to reconsider its endangerment finding and accusing climate scientists affiliated with the IPCC of an “orchestrated effort to violate freedom of information laws, exclude scientific research, and manipulate temperature data.”
In a Feb. 16 announcement, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said the agency had outsourced “the scientific basis for its greenhouse gas regulation to a scandal-plagued international organization that cannot be considered objective or trustworthy.”
CO2 a harmless trace gas
The EPA’s endangerment finding identifies six greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride – which it asserts are the “primary driver of climate change” and “threaten the public health and welfare of the American people.”
But according to paleobotany research site Geocraft, total human contributions to greenhouse gases account for only about 0.28 percent of the greenhouse effect. Anthropogenic (man-mad) carbon dioxide comprises about 0.117 percent of this total, and man-made emissions of other gases (e.g. methane, nitrous oxide, and hydrofluorocarbons) contribute another 0.163 percent. Using a real-world comparison, 0.117 percent of a football field -- the amount of CO2 in the air -- would equal just over 4 inches.
As Geocraft explains: “At 385 parts per million, CO2 is a minor constituent of earth's atmosphere – less than 4/100 of 1 percent of all gases present. Compared to earlier geologic times, earth's current atmosphere is CO2-impoverished.
“Human activities contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. However, these emissions are so dwarfed in comparison to emissions from natural sources we can do nothing about, that even the most costly efforts to limit human emissions would have a very small – perhaps undetectable – effect on global climate.”
As physical science and mathematics professor Richard F. Yada writes in his 2009 paper, “Reality Check: CO2”:
“The great lesson from geologic history is that carbon dioxide is critical to life. The move to label it as a pollutant is simply preposterous. The logical extension to that thought process is that the government has legally regulated life. The notion would be laughable if it were not so tragically real.”
IPCC uncertain of its own climate models
If the EPA had dug more deeply into IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, it would have found this stunning admission in the section, "Working Group 1: The Physical Science Basis: IPCC 8.6.4":
“A number of diagnostic tests have been proposed since the TAR [Third Assessment Report] (see Section 8.6.3), but few of them have been applied to a majority of the models currently in use. Moreover, it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining future projections. Consequently, a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed.”
In plain English, the IPCC is admitting it doesn’t know which metrics to employ in its models to test their reliability. And it is not sure how high or low temperatures will be in the future, because the models it relies on are incapable of calculating climate sensitivity to CO2.
In short, the incessant fear-mongering about rising CO2 emissions – and the EPA’s decision to declare an atmospheric plant nutrient dangerous – is based on unrealistic and unproven climate models whose predictive accuracy is questionable, if not completely unsound.
The hare-brained anti-CO2 schemes advocated by overwrought global warming alarmists would border on theatrical if it were not for the clear and present danger they pose to economic development and human advancement.
As MIT professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen opines:
“Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.”
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Kirk Myers' columns appear several times weekly. To receive e-mail alerts when new articles are published, click on the "subscribe" button above. For a comprehensive look at global warming, please see the list of links to the right.
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