‘I Feel Duped on Climate Change’

by CalWatchdog Staff | February 14, 2012 3:51 pm

[1]John Seiler:

The keystone of economic and technological growth in California for the next century is AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. It was signed into law by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger with great fanfare. And it has been embraced by Gov. Jerry Brown and the entire Democratic political establishment, as well as many Republicans. Voters rejected [2]an attempt to suspend it.

It mandates a draconian reduction of “greenhouse gases” in the state of 25 percent by 2020.

It’s based on the premise, as the words of the law actually state[3]: “38501. The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:

“(a)  Global warming poses a serious threat to the economic well-being, public health, natural resources, and the environment of California. The potential adverse impacts of global warming include the exacerbation of air quality problems, a reduction in the quality and supply of water to the state from the Sierra snowpack, a rise in sea levels resulting in the displacement of thousands of coastal businesses and residences, damage to marine ecosystems and the natural environment, and an increase in the incidences of infectious diseases, asthma, and other human health-related problems.”

Gotta worry about that “snowpack.”

More: “(b)  Global warming will have detrimental effects on some of California’s largest industries, including agriculture, wine, tourism, skiing, recreational and commercial fishing, and forestry. It will also increase the strain on electricity supplies necessary to meet the demand for summer air-conditioning in the hottest parts of the state.”

Now, damaging the wine crop I could understand worrying about.

More: “(c)  California has long been a national and international leader on energy conservation and environmental stewardship efforts, including the areas of air quality protections, energy efficiency requirements, renewable energy standards, natural resource conservation, and greenhouse gas emission standards for passenger vehicles. The program established by this division will continue this tradition of environmental leadership by placing California at the forefront of national and international efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.”

Put another way, California is an “international leader” in excessive environmental bureaucracy that destroys industry.

More: “(d)  National and international actions are necessary to fully address the issue of global warming. However, action taken by California to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases will have far-reaching effects by encouraging other states, the federal government, and other countries to act.”

Except that even left-wing Canada just ditched t[4]he 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

Ah, those halcyon days of 2006, when the Terminator was saving California, when we could dump industry because a never-ending upward real-estate boom would fund everything in the state. All Californians would become real-estate speculators and we would prosper forever.

No more.

‘Climate Change’

“Global warming” has become so ridiculed since AB 32 in 2006, that true believers now call it “climate change.” That way, every hurricane or tornado or flash flood can be blamed on man-caused “climate change,” and vast new bureaucracies set up to deal with it.

Now, along comes a major global-warming enthusiast, a utility executive and chemist, to change his mind about “global warming.” Reports the German magazine Der Spiegel, itself a left-wing publication: “The articulate utility executive is nervous at the beginning of the conversation. He is groping for words — not a common occurrence for the practiced provocateur. After all, Fritz Vahrenholt, 62, who holds a doctorate in chemistry, has been a rebel throughout his life. ‘Perhaps it’s just part of my generation,’ he says.

“He is typical of someone who came of age during the student protest movement of the late 1960s, and who fought against the chemical industry’s toxic manufacturing plants in the 1970s. His party, Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), chose him as environment senator in the city-state of Hamburg, where he incurred the wrath of the environmental lobby by building a waste incineration plant, earning him the nickname ‘Feuerfritze’ (Fire Fritz). He worked in industry after that, first for oil multinational Shell and then for wind turbine maker RePower, which he helped develop. Now, as the outgoing CEO of the renewable energy group RWE Innogy, he is about to embark on his next major battle. ‘I’m going to make enemies in all camps,’ he says.

“He wants to break a taboo. ‘The climate catastrophe is not occurring,’ he writes in his book ‘Die Kalte Sonne’ (The Cold Sun), published by Hoffmann and Campe, which will be in bookstores next week.”

Somebody should send a copy to Schwarzenegger, who could read it in his native Deutsche.

No Warming in 14 Years

In an interview with Der Spiegel, Vahrenholt himself says: “Today, I want new scientific findings to be included in the climate debate. It would then become clear that the simple equation that CO2 and other man-made greenhouse gases are almost exclusively responsible for climate change is unsustainable. It hasn’t gotten any warmer on this planet in almost 14 years, despite continued increases in CO2 emissions. Established climate science has to come up with an answer to that….

“In my experience as an energy expert, I learned that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is more of a political than a scientific body. As a rapporteur on renewable energy, I witnessed how thin the factual basis is for predictions that are made at the IPCC. In one case, a Greenpeace activist’s absurd claim that 80 percent of the world’s energy supply could soon be coming from renewable sources was assumed without scrutiny. This prompted me to examine the IPCC report more carefully.”

The IPCC was the locus of the “climategate[5]” scandal which showed that top global warming — excuse me, “climate change” — scientists cooked the numbers.

Vahrenholt: “In terms of the climate, we have seen a cyclical up and down for the last 7,000 years, long before man began emitting CO2 into the atmosphere. There has been a warming phase every 1,000 years, including the Roman, the Medieval and the current warm periods. All of these warm periods consistently coincided with strong solar activity. In addition to this large fluctuation in activity, there is also a 210-year and an 87-year natural cycle of the sun. Ignoring these would be a serious mistake ….

“In the second half of the 20th century, the sun was more active than it had been in more than 2,000 years. This “large solar maximum,” as astronomers call it, has contributed at least as much to global warming as the greenhouse gas CO2. But the sun has been getting weaker since 2005, and it will continue to do so in the next few decades. Consequently, we can only expect cooling from the sun for now.”

Read the whole article and interview[6].

So, the lynchpin of California’s economic future is based on a palpable fraud. Rather than “global warming,” we’re more likely to get “cooling from the sun for now,” something that happens because of the cycles of the sun itself.

The whole AB 32/global warming/climate change scam is the nuttiness and absurdity and anti-human obsession of California politics in a nutshell.

Feb. 14, 2012

Source URL: https://calwatchdog.com/2012/02/14/i-feel-duped-on-climate-change/

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