Climategate Update 17: What The Greenland Ice Core Tells Us, The EPA's Reliance On The IPCC, & The Left's War On Coal

This from a post at Watts Up With That, based on J. Storrs Hall unadjusted analysis of ice cores providing 50,000 years of climate history in Greenland.

Graph 1:



Looking from 1600 to the present, we see a true hockey stick showing Greenland's temperatures on a long cooling trend since 1600, then shooting upwards. Michael Mann must feel vindicated.


Graph 2:

Now here is information from the same ice cores, but looking back to 900 A.D., when the Medieval Warm Period began and temperatures raced to record highs much hotter than we are today. And the MWP occurred all without the benefit of any substantive help from man. This is what Mann wiped out with his criminally fraudulent hockey stick graph. At any rate, what this tells us is that there is nothing unprecedented about the warming of the climate over the past century, nor is there anything to indicate that what is happening is man-made as opposed to a natural cycle of our planet.

Graph 3:

And if we look back in time even further to 5000 B.C., we see the MWP itself was not an abberation, but rather one of many periods of rapid heating and cooling of the earth, with the average of the temperatures being about what it was during the height of the MWP.

Watts Up With That has more graphs from the same study that demonstrate both that periods of rapid incline and decline of average temperature has been our world's the norm, and that there is nothing unusual about our current incline - one which is relatively minor by historic standards. Indeed, while we seemed to be climbing towards merely the MWP average temp, we plateuaed out about a decade ago - all of which proved very embarresing for IPCC's high priest, Kevin Trenberth, who wrote to Michael Mann and Phil Jones in an e-mail not two months ago on "where the heck is global warming?" He further noted that the "fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment."

While that may have been true prior to Climategate, it is apparently not true today, as the UK Met Office and World Meteorological Organization are in overdrive trying to spin reality. If only they were using data that wasn't so obviouvly wrong for their pronouncements - Q&O has the story and more in his post, Global Warming Scientists Double Down. This would be comical were not the ramifications exestential for those of us not part of the AGW-Industrial Complex.

Then there is the EPA, whose recent finding of carbon dioxide as a pollutant the Obama administration is using as threat to destroy our economy if Congress doesn't enact cap and trade legislation. In making its finding that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, the highly "politicized" Obama EPA, as Alan Carlin describes it at PJM, did not make an independent assessment, but instead adopted its reasoning from the IPCC's March 2007 assessment. Powerline, several days ago, linked to a document authored by Patrick Michaels, a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and former program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. In this pre-Climategate publication, Michaels points to all of the holes in the EPA's reasoning which, on can hope, will soon be the basis for legal challenges to the EPA's recent act. The problems with the EPA's method of deciding on its endangerment finding are laid bare in Dr. Michaels' report, and should raise even more flags today because, among other things, like the IPCC, they relied heavilly on data from the now disgraced East Anglia CRU. For example:

1. Warming Due to Greenhouse Gases Overestimated

Proposed Endangerment confidently attributes “most” of recent warming to change in greenhouse gas concentrations, ignoring recent important scientific papers that, in aggregate, seriously challenge this assertion. According to the EPA study, “The heating effect caused by the human-induced buildup of greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere is very likely the cause of most of the observed warming of the last 50 years” (EPA 2009a: 18888). The reference given in Proposed Endangerment is to the IPCC, which implies that this is referring to the IPCC temperature records. Traditionally, the most commonly cited of these is from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, a temperature record often referred to as “HadCRUT3” (Brohan et al. 2006). In the last 50 years (1959–2008), the HadCRUT3 data show a rise in global average surface temperature of 0.13°C per decade. However, as much as half of this rise appears to be a result of mistakes in data analysis, which is the implication of an article published in a prominent journal that was ignored in the CCSP background documents (Thompson et al. 2008). . . .

I think, as Powerline recommended in their post, that Dr. Michaels report should be mandatory reading.

Deroy Murdock, writing at NRO, has a very good article highlighting what's at stake for the U.S. if the deals being made in Copenhagen come to fruition, and highlighting the insanity of it all, given that the computer models being used to forecast doom and gloom are fatally flawed.

Megan McArdle, at the Atlantic, still wants to believe that the people she is reluctantly defending are not the outright scam artists they appear to be. She looks at clear evidence of fraud, then concludes that it is something less than that. Go figure. Here is what she seems to be missing. I'll refer to the graphs at the top of the page. No one is contesting that we live in a period when the globe is warming. As William Briggs so aptly points out at PJM, in his discussion of the latest IPCC Copenhagen briefing points, the penultimate question is whether that warming is natural or man made. Many of those who wish us to believe the latter appear to have financial and ideological motives that transcend science. The people she is defending have written the MWP out of the climatic record and are now massaging data to show unnatural increases in temperature where little if any of statistical signifigance exists at all. Ms McArdle may see that as innocent, I see it as criminal.

Lastly, there is this from Amanda Carpenter:

. . . A Pittsburgh-based coal company, CONSOL Energy, will lay off nearly 500 of its West Virginia workers next year and its CEO blames environmentalists dead-set against mountaintop mining who have waged “nuisance” lawsuits for the job loss.

But CONSOL Energy’s political problems are not unique to the mining industry, which has suffered under the Obama Administration. The Environmental Protection Agency is already holding 79 surface mining permits in West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee. The EPA says these permits could violate the Clean Water Act and warrant "enhanced" review. And, agency went even further in October, announcing plans to revoke a permit for the Spruce No. 1 Mine in West Virginia.

The latest setback for the coal industry was announced on Tuesday when CONSOL Energy said close to 500 workers would lose jobs at their Fola Operations location near Bickmore, West Virginia in February 2010.

CEO Nicholas J. DeIuliis said the poor economy compounded by legal challenges by environmental activists forced CONSOL to slash jobs.

"It is challenging enough to operate our coal and gas assets in the current economic downturn without having to contend with a constant stream of activism in rehashing and reinterpreting permit applications that have already been approved or in the inequitable oversight of our operations,” he said in a statement. “Customers will grow reluctant to deal with energy producers they perceive are unable to guarantee a reliable supply due to regulatory uncertainty. It inhibits the ability to remain competitive."

The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, the Sierra Club, the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy and the Coal River Mountain Watch were the various groups active on the legal challenge CONSOL Energy refers to . . .

This plays into a point I have made repeatedly on this blog. Environmental regulations and laws need to be significantly tightened to end the scourge of radical left wing elements using our court system to determine public policy. The economic costs imposed upon our nation by these people over the past half century are enormous. Rules of standing must be changed and courts need to be taken out of the business of deciding upon matters of environmental policy that should fall exclusively to Congress over whom we have the power of the ballot box.

But it goes far beyond that. In the Powerline post I linked above, Scott makes the point that the entire scheme of regulations issued by regulatory agencies is rapidly drowning our nation. This from Powerline:

. . . The underlying threat to our form of government represented by the EPA finding is that presented by the administrative state erected by the congressional delegation of power to administrative agencies under numerous federal statutes. This is the theme elaborated in the scholarship of Paul Rahe, for example, and touched on in his posts here such as "Obama's tyrannical ambition."

The architects of the modern administrative state with its vast array of administrative agencies combining legislative, executive, and judicial powers have sought to displace the system of self-government imagined under limited powers into being by the American Constitution. As we see in the case of the EPA endangerment finding, they have achieved extraordinary success.

it is important to understand what is happening at its roots so that resistance can lead to restoration. Given the abdication of the courts under the doctrine of the living Constitution -- meaning, as my friend Steven Hayward says, that the written Constitution is dead -- It remains in the hands of Congress to take back the powers it has ceded to administration.

And if not this Congress with the blessing of this president, then another Congress with the blessing of the next president.

Prior Posts:

Climategate and Surrealism
More Climategate Fallout
Climategate Update 3
Climategate Update 4: CRU Records Worthless
Climategate Update 5: IPCC's Chairman Mao
Climategate Update 6: Climategate In Video
UNEP, Green Religion & Global Governance
Climate Update 7: IPCC's Chairman Mao Plays The Obama Card, Peer Review Analyzed, Scientific Method Explained For Paul Krugman
Climategate Update 8: The NYT Reports
Climategate Update 9: CRU Head Phil Jones Steps Down During Investigation, An MIT Prof Explains The Holes In AGW Theory, And Climate Fraud Is Everywhere
Climategate Update 10: Climategate Reverberates From The UK To Down Under
Climategate Update 11: Finally An AGW Consensus, "Hockey Stick" Mann Attacks Jones, Gore Goes To Ground
Climategate Update 12: The AGW Wall Starts To Crumble, The Smoking Code & The Tiger Woods Index
Clmategate Update 13: Hack Job Alert - Washington Post Leads With Climategate and A Complete Defense Of Global Warming
Climate Update 14: A Tale of 4 Graphs & An Influential Tree, Hide The Decline Explained, Corrupt Measurements, Goebbelswarming at Copenhagen
Climategate Update 15: Copenhagen, EPA Makes Final Finding On CO2, Courts & Clean Air
Climategate Update 16: Copenhagen'$ Goal$, Palin Weighs In, As Do Scientists