The latest argument being given by supporters of the cap-and-trade climate bill is that senators must act to prevent even worse action by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Daniel Whitten and Simon Lomax at Bloomberg.com report:
The Senate remains under pressure to pass a cap-and-trade bill because failure to act would leave regulation in the hands of the Environmental Protection Agency, which has asserted its right to do so under the Clean Air Act, said Kevin Book, a Washington analyst with Clearview Energy Partners, an energy consulting firm. Senate action to head off the EPA is the most likely outcome, he said.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gave themselves jurisdiction over carbon dioxide emissions through an April 24 endangerment finding. They wrote:
Today the Administrator is proposing to find that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere endanger the public health and welfare of current and future generations. Concentrations of greenhouse gases are at unprecedented levels compared to the recent and distant past. These high atmospheric levels are the unambiguous result of human emissions, and are very likely the cause of the observed increase in average temperatures and other climatic changes. The effects of climate change observed to date and projected to occur in the future—including but not limited to the increased likelihood of more frequent and intense heat waves, more wildfires, degraded air quality, more heavy downpours and flooding, increased drought, greater sea level rise, more intense storms, harm to water resources, harm to agriculture, and harm to wildlife and ecosystems—are effects on public health and welfare within the meaning of the Clean Air Act...
Based upon the Clean Air Act, an act designed to restrict pollutants, the EPA gave itself the power to restrict emissions of one of the purest-of-pure compounds. Carbon dioxide is one of the three chemical compounds (along with oxygen and water) needed to sustain life on earth.
The EPA based its power grab upon the discredited theory that global warming is caused by changes in the miniscule percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In order to draw this conclusion, they had to ignore an internal report from some of their own employees.
Here is a selection from this internal report:
We have become increasingly concerned that EPA and many other agencies and countries have paid too little attention to the science of global warming. EPA and others have tended to accept the findings reached by outside groups, particularly the IPCC...
- Global temperatures have declined -- extending the current downtrend to 11 years...
- The concensus on past, present and future Atlantic hurricane behavior has changed....
- A new 2009 paper finds that the crusial assumption of the GCM models used by the IPCC concerning strongly positive feedback from water vapor is not supported by empirical evidence and that the feedback is actually negative.
- A new 2009 paper by Scafetta and West suggests that the IPCC used faulty solar data in dismissing the direct effect of solar variability on global temperatures....
B. There appears to be a strong association between solar sunspots/irradiance and global temperature fluctuations. It is unclear exactly how this operates, but it may be through indirect solar variability on cloud formation. This topic is not really expored in the Draft TSD but needs to be since otherwise the effects of solar variations may be misattributed to the effects of changes in GHG levels...
Point B above refers indirectly to the new field of cosmoclimatology which holds that climate change is caused by extra-terrestrial forces, especially cosmic rays and solar activity:
- Cosmic rays cause low-lying clouds to form which reflect solar energy back into outer space, resulting in global cooling. They increase and decrease periodically as a result of the movement of the solar system through the spiral arms of the nebulae, resulting in a predictable cycles between greenhouse ages and ice ages on the Earth.
- Solar activity not only results in more heat reaching the earth, but it also blocks cosmic rays from reaching the earth. As a result, when the sun is less active, as it has been since 1998, more cosmic rays get through, causing more clouds to form, causing global cooling, except over Antarctica, where clouds cause slightly less cooling because the ice cover causes even more reflection of sunlight into outer space.
So far, this new theory has been shown to be very highly predictive of global temperatures whether the time scale be eons, years, or days.
In contrast, carbon dioxide concentrations have only been shown to be predictive at the grossest level.
As more data on cosmic rays and solar activity is collected, it should become possible to determine what variance in global temperatures is left, after eliminating the contributions of extra-terrestrial activity, that the carbon dioxide theory could possibly explain.
It is clear that the carbon dioxide theory is old science that is no longer the strongest theory in the field. In fact it may turn out to be completely bogus.
Nevertheless, it lives on as a religion being forced upon our government by the unelected bureaucrats at the EPA. Instead of passing a cap-and-trade bill, the Senate should revise the Clean Air Act in order to end this power grab by the EPA.
Disclosure: No Positions
