It wasn’t the intention of the Los Angeles Times, but the newspaper has provided historical drought data with implications for a U.S. Supreme Court case that was heard Monday, Feb. 24  — “U.S. Chamber of Commerce v. U.S. EPA.”

The case challenges whether the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency can expand its mission from reducing air pollution to fighting global warming without going back to Congress for authorization to do so.  This has relevance for the California Air Resources Board and its similar shift from reducing carbon dioxide emissions to the vaguer task of fighting “climate change.”  Assembly Bill 32, the state’s far-reaching environmental law, was known as the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. But CARB changed the focus of AB32 with the release of its “Climate Change Scoping Plan” in 2008.

The Times’ story (“Severe Drought? California Has Been There Before,” Feb. 23) reconstructed 1,000 years of climate records from tree ring data.  Dendrochronology is the study of tree rings as an indicator of changes in climate; “dendro” means relating to trees.  Thick rings indicate wet climate and tree growth and narrow rings dryness and less growth.

Driest years in CA mostly predated Industrial Revolution

A chart showing the 1,000-year record of “wetter than average” and “drier than average” years indicates that 1580 was the driest year on record.  California had a severe dry spell from 1976 to 1977.  But the only years that were drier were prior to 1580.  This data can be read as refuting the assumption that industrialization has resulted in either significant global warming or vaguely defined climate change.

The Times’ climate chronology echoes a recent study of California climate conducted by biologist Jim Steele, formerly a supervisory biologist with the California Department of Fish and Game.  In his 2013 book, “Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism,” Steele studied 100 years of climate data from Lake Tahoe.

What he found was that California wasn’t “getting hotter, just less cold.”  Steele says that studying average temperatures to find climate change is not as useful as studying maximum and minimum temperatures.

The California Air Resources Board has won two court challenges to the legality of the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB32).  However, former EPA attorney Jacob Hollinger of the McDermott, Will and Emery law firm in New York stated a ruling against the EPA in the U.S. Supreme Court case could be utilized to challenge every future step of its effort to manage climate change. Since the current case before the Supreme Court consolidated challenges to the EPA from the states of California, Virginia and Texas, and from industrial organizations, there would be implications for California if the case were decided broadly.

Air board facing legal challenges over change in goals

CARB’s shift from dealing with global warming to managing climate change could have implications in another case filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation alleging that its cap-and-trade air pollution permit auctions are a tax.  PLF’s case (“The Morning Star Packing Co. v. CARB,” filed in April 2013) resulted in a trial decision backing the air board in November, but it has been appealed.  The PLF complaint states:

“The California Air Resources Board (CARB) devised the auction plan as a means of raising billions of dollars in revenue, without any instruction or direction from the Legislature. CARB hatched the auction program purportedly to implement AB 32, the 2006 legislation that requires reductions in the emission of carbon dioxide in California by the year 2020. But nothing in AB 32 authorizes creation of an auction process to sell carbon dioxide emission allowances for billions of dollars. Nor does AB 32 authorize the creation of any kind of new tax.”

On Feb. 10, 2014, CARB released its first update to its Climate Change Scoping Plan of 2008, which stated:

“Climate change presents an unprecedented set of challenges for California.  We are already experiencing its impacts and know they will only increase. But it can also be a great unifier.”

Use of cap-and-trade auction proceeds targeted

However, what California’s Global Warming Solutions Act and the cap-and-trade program have yielded is a series of divisive court cases.  Gov. Brown’s recent transfer of $20 million of cap-and-trade revenues to water conservation projects to alleviate drought indicates that California doesn’t even have to invoke the need to reduce air pollution or carbon dioxide to find a justification to spend the money as it pleases.

Brown even wants to use $1 billion per year of cap-and-trade revenues to pay off bonds to build California’s high-speed rail project authorized under Proposition 1A in 2008.  That plan may depend not only on challenges to the legality of issuing bonds, but also on the lawsuit against the EPA now being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Beyond the governor’s fiscal maneuvering, the L.A. Times’ drought chronology story raises more basic questions about the broad claims used to justify both AB32 and federal regulations. If historical evidence doesn’t back up the assertions made about either global warming or climate change, that strengthens the arguments of skeptics who argue such laws and regulations are more power grabs than wise public policy. This in turn may strengthen the cases of those challenging the implementation and interpretations of these laws and regulations.

The new plan concludes that climate change can be combated and the economy can grow at the same time. It also claims battling climate change can be a “great unifier” for all the state’s activities.

The updated plan reaffirms that it will stay on the course of AB32:

“Climate change presents an unprecedented set of challenges for California.  We are already experiencing its impacts and know they will only increase. But it can also be a great unifier.” 

Comprehensive plan

The updated Scoping Plan includes:

• Energy.  The main element of the plan is to bring about a “comprehensive greenhouse gas reduction program for the state’s electric and energy utilities by 2016.” Thus far, California’s energy policy has shut down the cleanest and cheapest power plant in the state – the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. It has also ordered a shut down of all 19 California coastal power plants that rely on ocean water to cool its steam turbines. This has resulted in conflicts with local coastal communities which don’t want the older power plants replaced with natural gas powered plants.

• Water. The plan promises to “enhance water quality and supply reliability, while also addressing climate resiliency requirements.”  No mention is made how this would come about with no added water storage reservoirs in California to face droughts such as California is now experiencing.

The main strategy for water management will be “to employ pricing policies [that] will maximize efficiency and conservation efforts…to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and maintain water supply reliability during drought periods.”

“Pricing policies” likely means higher water rates and adding no more water storage reservoirs. Such policies are not resulting in unification but greater conflict between Central Valley farmers and environmentalists.

• Green Buildings.  Green buildings are also a part of the plan, despite empirical findings that energy-efficient buildings make people sick.  Whether the health lifestyle movement or the environmental movement will prevail on energy-efficient buildings is an unresolved conflict.

• Cleaner Fuels.  The plan’s goal to continue with its Low Carbon Fuel Standard of lower carbon transportation fuels has brought a swarm of lawsuits challenging the policy on multiple legal grounds.

Eight years after

The new Scoping Plan does not deal with many objections that have cropped up since AB32 was passed in 2006. But there has been a lot that the public has learned about what used to be called “global warming” but is now called “climate change”:

• Climategate. Hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain in 2009 showed some global-warming scientists manipulated the data and suppressed critics.
• “Pseudoscientific.” In 2010, U.C. Santa Barbara renowned emeritus professor of physics Hal Lewis resigned from the American Physical Society saying “global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud” in the history of science and that government money had corrupted the integrity of science.
• “Less cooler.” Eminent former California state biologist Jim Steele released his 2013 book, “Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism,” showing that 100 years of temperature readings near Lake Tahoe indicated “the world isn’t getting hotter, it is getting less cooler.”  Steele is skeptical that global warming has anything to do with declining fish, droughts and flooding, or a sea-level rise in the Sacramento Delta.
• “Incomprehensible.” Climate scientist Judith Curry of Georgia Tech called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report of 2013 “incomprehensible” because it concluded global warming was due to greenhouse gases like C02. But there have been more greenhouse gases and less warming in the last 18 years.
• Statistically insignificant. No 15-year interval yields a statistically significant global temperature trend. Worse, no 130-year period has indicated any statistically significant trend in world temperature.  Even if the temperature rose in the past, it was not statistically significant.  Statistical significance is an event that is not likely to occur randomly, but is attributable to a specific cause.
• Predictions. Historian Rupert Darwall of Cambridge University released his 2013 book, “The Age of Global Warming: A History,” documenting the number of failed pseudoscientific predictions of global warming and resource depletion by William Stanley Jevons in 1865, John Tyndall in 1859, Guy Stewart Callendar in 1896, Gifford Pinchot in 1909, Charles Keeling in 1956, Rachel Carson in 1962, Paul Ehrlich in 1968 and James Hansen in 1988.  Republicans Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon and Democrats Jerry Brown, Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Baines Johnson all embraced global warming predictions.  

Expansion

CARB does not refute any of the above. Instead, CARB’s 159-page plan lauds the accomplishments of cleaner and more efficient energy, cleaner transportation and the cap and trade air emissions taxation program.

As the new Scoping Plan notes, the defeat of Proposition 23 in 2010, which would have restricted AB32 implementation, indicates that CARB’s new powers in regulating vast new areas of the state economy will continue and expand.

California is about to undertake a massive multibillion-dollar investment in re-engineering fish habitats in the Sacrament Delta called the Bay Delta Conservation Plan.  It is already rewiring and revamping the entire state energy and transportation systems to comply with the California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.  But Jim Steele’s breakthrough new book —  “Landscape and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism” — is highly skeptical that reducing global warming has anything to do with preventing a decline of fish populations, reducing droughts and flooding, or preventing a sea-level rise in the Sacramento Delta.

It is important to understand the significance of who is saying these things.

“We’re not getting hotter, just less cold”

Steele says that looking at average temperatures to find global warming is useless to a biologist. He found that maximum temperatures have declined and minimum temperatures have risen over the last 100 years near Lake Tahoe in California. His conclusion: “the world isn’t getting hotter, just less cold!”

In chapter one of his book, Steele takes on NASA climate change guru James Hansen: “In contrast to predictions of accelerating heat stress by ‘C02 advocates’ like Dr. Hansen, the past 60 years of climate change in California should have benefited wildlife. … Top-down global climate change models have repeatedly failed to explain regional climate change.” So much for all the global-warming scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena and UC Santa Cruz.

Steele says C02 has been so demonized and politicized that it has created a blinding bias that has diverted focusing on factors that affect the biosphere and droughts such as urbanization and ocean temperature cycles called  El Niño (wet monsoon rainstorm years) and La Niña (dry years).

Steele is not one who avoids blaming industrialization where blame is due.  He relates a story of how he restored a watershed about 50 miles east of Tahoe City that had been degraded by the construction of a railroad 100 years ago. But such changes are local and regional, not global, says Steele. He also points out tornadoes don’t occur in California frequently because there is no naturally formed “tornado alley” as there is in the Midwestern U.S.

Don’t fear for emperor penguins, polar bears

In chapter four, Steele (shown at right) explains that the emperor penguins shown in the film “March of the Penguins” are not going extinct due to warming. Instead, he writes their numbers have decreased when environmentalists disturbed their habitat and explosives were used on three islands to construct an airplane landing field. Steele’s field research findings are reminiscent of California Judge Oliver Wanger’s ruling that the scientific basis for shutting down water deliveries to protect the Delta Smelt fish was bogus.

In chapters 14 and 15, he discusses photogenic polar bears that are the poster children of the media. Steele writes that polar bears aren’t going extinct and there never was any warming of their habitats. He offers evidence that the local food supply benefits from less ice.

Steele relates how he has experienced accusations from his colleagues that he is a global-warming “denier” who is collaborating with “Big Oil.” However, Steele explains that Galileo offered his antagonists the opportunity to look through a telescope and see the Earth is round and revolves around the sun and not the other way around.  Like Galileo, Steele has encouraged his opponents to look at the historical temperature data, but they have also refused.

He writes that the opposition to Galileo wasn’t religious but was due to entrenched Dominican scientists who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope because their scientific fiefdom was threatened. In California, the impartial state Legislative Analyst’s Office has reported California spends $15 billion a year on energy efficiency programs for which there is no proven effectiveness. This is more than the Legislature appropriates for the entire state university system.  Entrenched California bureaucracy is not much different than in Galileo’s time.

Steele’s words of wisdom

A few guidelines for policy-makers and citizens to take away from Steele’s book:

“It is not getting hotter, just less cold.”

“Although it is wise to think globally, all wildlife reacts locally.”

“The U.S. is not particularly warmer or wetter than anywhere else.”

“Many people mistakenly believe limiting CO2 concentrations will control the devastating cycles of El Niño’s floods and La Niña’s droughts.”

“To my great surprise and great relief, when I examined 100 years of local climate observations throughout California, I found they contradicted the global models.”

Steele’s book is written for nonscientists and should be of interest to those who are concerned about California’s wildlife and who are open to a nonconformist evaluation of global warming.