Month: March 2018

Endangerment

Civil Defense Perspectives 33(1): January 2018

The basis for draconian anti-carbon regulations by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is the Endangerment Finding issued in 2009. This finding created a statutory obligation to regulate carbon emissions on the basis that greenhouse gas emissions, especially CO2, endanger human health and welfare.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has recently acknowledged that agency staff short-circuited the science review early in the regulatory process. Sen. James Inhofe (R, Okla.) had asked the EPA’s Office of Inspector General, in April 2010, to assess the adequacy of the peer review of the Technical Support Document, writes Ross McKitrick (https://tinyurl.com/y7tjz2tv). The OIG found that the EPA had violated its own rules, but agency staff responded with a preposterous legal fiction that the docu- ment was not a Highly Influential Scientific Assessment that should have been reviewed as such.

A petition requesting reconsideration of the Endangerment Finding (https://tinyurl.com/y7aokaqm), filed by the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council, states that the lines of evidence on which the Finding is based have all been invalidated. The essential “greenhouse fingerprint” or “tropical hot spot” is not to be found. If the theory of how greenhouse gases will cause catastrophic warming is correct, it is “critical and necessary” to see evidence in the tropics that the upper tropo- sphere is warming faster than the lower, which is warming faster than the surface because of greenhouse gases blocking heat trans- fer into space. But we don’t see this. Models are not evidence.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) also filed a Petition (https://tinyurl.com/ya68nab3). It emphasizes that “there has been no statistically significant atmospheric warming despite a continued increase in atmospheric [CO2] levels.” The “warmest year on record” (2016) was reportedly 0.02 °C warmer than 1998, only one-fifth as much as needed to be statistically significant. A warming of 2 °C would fall within the natural range of variability over recent geological time. Moreover, “at the current level of

~400 ppm we still live in a CO2-starved world. Atmospheric lev- els 15 times greater existed during the Cambrian Period (about 550 million years ago) without known adverse effects.”

The Four Fears

On Dec 10, 1948, the 3-year old-UN adopted in its Univer- sal Declaration of Human Rights what Eleanor Roosevelt called the Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Now, it appears that a principal purpose of the UN is not to protect freedoms, but to promote fears. The Summary for Policymakers of the Synthesis Report, of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR-5, 2013 & 2014) for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes (IPPC) predicts a dire future from continued use of carbon-based fuels. The four phantom fears, based on never-validated models, are:

  • Fear of Dire Temperature Increase
  • Fear of Sudden Sea Level Rise
  • Fear of Ocean Acidification (change in chemistry) and
  • Fear of Famine

These are debunked by Ken Haapala (The Week That Was 12/9/17, https://tinyurl.com/y9k8yv2w), and also in the Cli- mate Change IQ Project of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (www.ddponline.org).

Global Health and Welfare

Since 1950, as atmospheric CO2 has climbed, the percentage of the world’s population living in absolute poverty (a condition of severe deprivation of basic human needs) has decreased from around 72% to less than 10% in 2015 (https://tinyurl.com/ yb7q45ms). Since 1990, hunger, illiteracy, and child mortality have all declined (https://tinyurl.com/ybnbj8fg).

Poverty is the world’s greatest killer. Income rises with CO2 emissions, and life expectancy rises with income (https:// tinyurl.com/y9dumthf). Also necessary is the legal and eco- nomic system that provides incentive to work, invest, and inno- vate: free markets (https://tinyurl.com/yacmbckg). The de- struction of capitalism is the expressed goal of Christiana Fi- gueres, executive secretary of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (https://tinyurl.com/yabex9wr).

Insurance, or Suicide? 

Will Happer, Director of the Office of Science in the U.S. Dept. of Energy from 1991-1993, compares the climate change consensus to Pascal’s Wager (https://tinyurl.com/yak8o93t). As with the existence of God, the stakes are said to be so high that it is far better to act and discover it was not necessary, than not to act and discover it was. Cutting CO2 emissions is just an “insurance policy.” However, as John Christy pointed out in testi- mony to Congress, a total elimination of U.S. emissions would have a near zero impact on global climate despite devastating economic consequences. Happer writes:

But the insurance salesmen, like the Laputan professors of Gulliver’s Travels, “instead of being discouraged, … are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope and  despair.” This is a protection racket, not insurance.

The German Energiewende provides a preview of the results (http://www.nber.org/papers/w22467). Electricity cost Ger- man households $0.30/kWh in 2016, vs. $0.17 in France. Wind and solar supply 16% of German electricity and 3.5% of total energy. Wind production was 5.85 GW (installed capacity, 35.92 GW); solar 3.7 GW (installed 37.34 GW). Volatility is buffered by conventional plants, which cannot operate profitably and must pay feed-in tariffs guaranteed for 20 years to assure “fairness.” The viability of huge power companies is at risk (also see p 2).

“If [Matt] Ridley is right and the earth is slowly slipping back into a proper ice age,” writes Maurice Newman, former head of Deutsche Bank, in The Australian, “our successors will need a plentiful supply of cheap, reliable energy, impossible given to- day’s intelligentsia’s religious objection to low-cost fossil and nuclear fuels. It’s not carbon dioxide that threatens us with ex- tinction but blind ideology dressed up as science” (https:// tinyurl.com/y8ugb7xv).

Publication Schedule

Civil Defense Perspectives (formerly DDP Arizona Newsletter) was continuously published as a bimonthly from November 1984 until September 2015, although the later issues were often written months after the issue date. The editor constantly fell behind owing to other obligations, especially work on the fifth edition of Sapira’s Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis, which should be re- leased by Wolters Kluwer around April 2018. Volume 32 con- tains three issues: #1 (November 2015), #3 (March 2016), and #6 (September 2016). No issues were published in 2017, so volume 33 will commence with this issue.

Physicians for Civil Defense continued to work during 2017. We sent nine news releases through PR Newswire, which were viewed 1,936 times by the public, 763 times by media outlets, and more than 41,000 times by webcrawlers. (Click “press releases” tab on www.physiciansforcivildefense.org.) In addition, we provide substantial support to the annual meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (www.ddponline.org.)

Numbers

  • $40 billion: amount spent by U.S. government on Climate Sci- ence, including funding of IPCC, without finding hard evidence that CO2 is causing dangerous global warming (TWTW11/25/17, sepp.org.) See Searching for the Catastrophic Signal: The Origins of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by Bernie Lewin and https://tinyurl.com/y6v7wh64 for IPCC history.
  • $100 billion: amount spent by  S.  to  “fight  climate change” (ibid.). Climate is still changing.
  • $350,000,000: annual operating budget of Greenpeace,

<$200,000 for the CO2 Coalition (a “CO2 Anti-Defamation League”) (https://tinyurl.com/ya5zxrwb).

  • 800,000 German households: number unable to pay the elec- tric bill (the “second rent”) (https://tinyurl.com/y8majnlw).
  • $77 million: active EPA research grants held by scientists on EPA scientific advisory boards over the past 3 years prior to di- rector Scott Pruitt’s policy to exclude them from such positions (Science 11/9/17).
  • 8: number of manufacturing jobs lost in Ontario per “green job” (often temporary) created by government policy (TWTW 11/11/17).
  • 220 tonnes: coal needed to produce steel for 1 MW wind elec- trical generating capacity (or 220 small cars).
  • 000014%: amount by which Virginia cap-and-tax plan would reduce global CO2 emissions by 2030 (AP 11/16/17).
  • 18%: reduction in production of wheat, maize, rice, and soy-

beans that would result from return to pre-industrial temperature and CO2 levels, with serious consequences for food security (TWTW 11/18/18, www.sepp.org).

The Great Manure Crisis

In 1894, the London Times predicted that in 50 years, every street in London would be buried under 9 ft of manure. In New York City, about 100,000 working horses produced 2.5 million pounds of manure per day. About 20,000 New Yorkers died each year of diseases related to this. Fortunately, the government did not intervene by subsiding steam engines. Free markets brought the far superior internal combustion engine (WSJ 11/13/17).

New York City et al. Sue Exxon/Mobil

Along with several California jurisdictions, NYC mayor Bill de Blasio has sued Exxon/Mobil and other oil majors for climate conspiracy covering up the claims that CO2 is causing dangerous climate change. Exxon/Mobil is pointing out to the court that these plaintiffs either ignored the “irreparable” harms in its bond offerings, which would be a severe securities violation, or claimed that risks were unpredictable. Exxon also calls the municipalities “eager consumers of energy” that emit substantial amounts of greenhouse gases. (https://tinyurl.com/y9q55vrw).

Buffering Volatility of Wind and Solar

The unreliability of wind and solar electricity places an upper limit on wind and solar generation. Without relying on neighbor- ing nations, if Germany tried to handle the volatility of wind and solar production without using stores, while replacing all nuclear and carbon-based fuels, on average 61%, and at the margin 94% of wind and solar capacity would have to be wasted, states Hans- Werner Sinn, one of Germany’s top economists (NBER, op. cit.). The best form of storage of excess power production is pumping water to a higher reservoir—pumped-storage plants or PSPs, of which Germany has 35 and few additional potential sites. To expand wind/solar to 100% would require 39,854 PSPs. The round-trip efficiency of storage is about 75%.

The “Norwegian solution”—relying on Norway’s huge hy- droelectric dams for backup—has several constraints. The trans- mission capacity would have to be increased 60-fold relative to today and 20-fold relative to what has been planned. Also, hy- droelectric plants can’t run in reverse (ibid.).

Sinn also believes that the cost of the Energiewende will end up far exceeding the earlier government estimate of 1 trillion eu- ros. Moreover, he says that Germany is also transforming its idyl- lic landscape into a large industrial park. Journalist Holger Doug- las commented: “In the ensuing discussion [after Sinn’s presenta- tion] one of the gravest consequences of the Energiewende emerged: the credibility of science. At almost every single re- search institute experts have been making every effort to dodge the fundamental laws of physics and nature in order to justify the Energiewende after the fact” (https://tinyurl.com/y8e2dspt).

Endangerment from Wind Power

  • Toxic spill. Four giant batteries, installed to help the Royal Adelaide Hospital in southern Australia meet its emissions stan- dards while providing power when the wind wasn’t blowing, ex- ploded, spilling 80 liters of sulfuric
  • Ice Throws. A wind turbine can throw a 400-pound chunk of ice 1,000 feet. The American Wind Energy Association calls the danger a myth, but large chunks of ice are seen on the ground and steel steps leading to the turbine have been broken. Uses of property—such as children’s swings—are restricted. Some call it “trespass zoning” (https://tinyurl.com/yaxadvcr).
  • Sleeplessness: In diaries kept by families near a wind farm in south Australia, sleep disturbance was the most common symp- tom. Some awakenings were from “sensations,” not audible noise. Disturbances did not occur during 10 days when turbines were shut down. More events occurred during changes in power level (https://tinyurl.com/y6vgv6dx).