Weekly John Locke Foundation research division newsletter focusing on environmental issues.
The newsletter highlights relevant analysis done by the JLF and other think tanks as well as items in the news.
1. Obama’s "carbophobic" EPA effectively bans new coal fired electricity plants
The first big target for Obama’s EPA under its new carbon dioxide regulations is the coal industry. These CO2 regs are the result of the EPA thumbing its nose at Congress which, on several occasions, even under a totally Democrat controlled House and Senate, has refused to authorize the regulation of CO2, the life giving gas that all animals exhale and all plant life needs to exist and grow. The argument, of course, is not that it is harmful to breathe or that it is causing other kinds of health problems; it is not. Rather, it is that CO2 is the cause of global warming. This is in spite of the fact that, as has been noted here on more than one occasion, the planet has shown no evidence of warming for nearly 15 years.
According to Investors Business Daily, "The proposed rules state that no new plant may emit more than 1,000 pounds of carbon per megawatt generated. The typical coal plant produces more than 1,700 pounds." Of course, IBD doesn’t quite get it right; it is carbon dioxide that is emitted, not carbon. One is a gas; the other is a solid. The paper notes that "EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said the rules were necessary to protect the ‘health and well-being of the American people.’" Unfortunately, the paper didn’t explain how this could possibly be the case since CO2, at anything like the levels that would ever be present in the atmosphere, is completely harmless to breathe and even the EPA is not claiming that the new rule would have any detectable impact on global temperatures.
2. New research shows medieval warming was global: contradicts IPCC
This from the March 23rd online tech publication The Register:
…a new study shows that the well-documented warm period which took place in medieval times was not limited to Europe, or the northern hemisphere: it reached all the way to Antarctica.
The research is published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. These results are important because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has based much of its concern about the warming between the late 1800s and the late 1900s on the idea that it is unprecedented and could only have been caused by increased atmospheric CO2 due to industrialization. But if the medieval warming period was a global phenomenon, then the more recent warming could not be considered out of the range of natural variability. Certainly if the medieval warming extended from Greenland and Northern Europe to the Southern Polar region, then it would have to be considered global.
The research was conducted by a team of scientists led by Professor Zun Li Lu, who is now at Syracuse University but was at Oxford at the time. According to The Register:
The IPCC consensus is that the medieval warming — and the "Little Ice Age" which followed it — only happened in Europe and maybe some other northern areas. They were local events only, and globally the world was cooler than it is now. The temperature increase seen in the latter half of the 20th century is a new thing caused by humanity’s carbon emissions.
Lu and his colleagues’ new work, however, indicates that in fact the medieval warm period and little ice age were both felt right down to Antarctica.
"We showed that the Northern European climate events influenced climate conditions in Antarctica," says the prof.
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