Who makes clouds? Man or the sun? And what is the effect of clouds?

It is confirmed. Global-warming believers think man is more powerful than the sun. Read Dennis Avery's take on the issue.

DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on August 28, 2011 by CGFI

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Regular readers of this column will recall our prediction (July 19th) of a climate debate bombshell in the form of Denmark’s Henrik Svensmarks’ theory on clouds, cosmic rays and the earth’s temperature standing up to intensive laboratory scrutiny. We also predicted the results would not be welcomed by those who have a vested interest in man-made warming.

Well, the verdict is in: More cosmic rays do indeed produce more low, wet clouds that cool our planet—implying that the sun is in charge of our climate, not CO2. The big, new experiment, done by the world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory, CERN in Geneva, is now published in Nature.

Almost predictably, the results were greeted by Michael Lepage of New Scientist as confirmation that humans control the earth’s clouds! “Organic vapors, released by organisms such as trees, marine bacteria and livestock, appear to play a far more important role in cloud formation than suspected,” LePage wrote. “‘This was a big surprise,’ says Jasper Kirkby at CERN, whose team made the finding. ‘Since our activities have such a huge impact on the biosphere, this hints at a previously unknown way in which humans can affect the climate.’ he says.”

Wait a minute. Humans only began to raise cattle, build cities, and burn charcoal about 6,000 years ago. For eons before that, the planet itself had lots of dust from droughts and winds, sea spray from the oceans, and ammonia emitted as deer and antelope played.

Cosmic rays create the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle, a moderate 2–4 degree kink in earth’s temperatures every 1,500 years on average. Svensmark found this cycle correlates with a solar cycle found in the Carbon 14 in trees and Beryllium 10 in ice. Those “cosmic particles” are created when cosmic rays strike our atmosphere. We’ve also found a strong link between the extent of the low, wet clouds and the earth’s temperature.

CERN found the secret—the earth’s trace emissions of ammonia help to stabilize the cloud seed clusters created by the cosmic rays. Thus the world’s biggest particle physics lab confirms cosmic-cloud connections found in earlier experiments by Svensmark and by Denmark’s Aarhus University.

If humans were putting up that much more pollution than nature did, CERN shows in fact it would currently mean more cooling of the earth, not warming: more “pollution;” more clouds; and a colder earth.

CERN proved that the solar-varied cosmic rays increase the number of “cloud seeds” a thousand-fold! Clouds in the real world, however, seem to respond only to larger “cloud seeds,” and this is where the natural ammonia emissions become important. CERN is planning another CLOUD experiment to focus on larger particles but says the global climate models will have to be extensively revised.

The variable that touches off the 1,500-year cycle is crucial, however, and that seems to be external. Over thousands of years, the cycles have shifted abruptly and repeatedly, which doesn’t sound like a Pittsburgh steel plant opening in 1948. The sun remains the only likely trigger.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is issuing regulations that would shut down many of our power plants and destroy our coal industry to “save the planet.” In Europe, steel and chemical industries say they’ll take millions of jobs to non-Kyoto countries. President’s Obama’s own jobs council chief, Jeffrey Immelt, is taking GE to China.

Why are we so fixated on blaming humans for a million-year-old process? Why do we insist we’re more powerful than the sun?

Is this the world’s all-time biggest ego trip?

Playing the "word" game to put oil companies and other producers out of business

That's what mainstream media, political pundits and the Obama administration are doing to promote their non-economic products, such as solar and wind energy, and reward their friends, who are NOT friends to the United States. Read on to discover CARE-blog favorite Paul Driessen's take on what could give the country much-needed jobs.

Spreading “Big Oil subsidy” disinformation

Meanwhile real subsidies are driving real businesses, energy and jobs out of America

Paul Driessen

Every American manufacturing company gets tax deductions that help it create jobs and strengthen our economy – whether it produces newspapers, furniture, cars or fuel. Eliminating those deductions would increase unemployment and further slow our nation’s desperately needed economic recovery.

Yet that is precisely what President Obama wants to do when oil companies want to use the deductions. It is one of many ways the Obama administration is undermining the oil industry and 9.2 million Americans whose jobs it supports. It is part of the administration’s strategy for replacing fossil fuels with heavily subsidized “alternatives” that taxpayers cannot afford, and consumers will not purchase on their own.

Newspapers that benefit from the same genre of tax deductions as oil companies nevertheless sometimes join attacking the oil industry, and the jobs and benefits it creates. This is rank hypocrisy.

“If Republicans are truly determined to slash the budget and end government waste,” the New York Times editorialized, “they will start [by] ending the web of tax breaks enjoyed by the rolling-in-dough oil industry and terminating the ethanol subsidy. Together these cuts would save up to $100 billion over 10 years.”

The Times is right about ending ethanol subsidies. But it and other “progressives” are wrong on every other argument they present to justify their job-killing, economy-crippling energy agenda.

1) Oil industry tax deductions cover costs incurred in exploration, drilling, production, transportation and refining. They aren’t subsidies or special tax breaks. They are essentially the same deductions claimed by all manufacturers, in conducting their business under our complex tax code. They ensure that businesses recover their costs and get taxed only on net income, in the process of making essential products.

Refineries and petrochemical manufacturers play an especially vital role in the oil industry – transforming crude oil and natural gas into fuels and raw materials used to make fabrics, plastics, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, fertilizers, carpets, paints, roofing, siding, and myriad other products that improve and safeguard our lives. Solar panels and resins for fiberglass wind turbine blades are also petroleum-based.

The NY Times itself enjoys similar tax breaks, and hasn’t offered to give one of them up, to help end government waste. Nor have other newspapers, some of which have even sought to benefit under the “failing newspaper act,” which would let them operate as “educational nonprofits,” and pay no taxes. Others have sought exemptions from antitrust laws, so that they can set online subscription prices.

In truth, in this Internet and online-media age, we could live without newspapers. But as an American Express advertising executive might say, Oil: You can't leave home without it. Nor can you have modern civilization or improved health and living standards without it.

2) Most petroleum companies aren’t “Big Oil.” They’re small independents. And the entire industry operates under government policies and regulations that keep many of America’s best oil and gas prospects off limits and make leasing, exploration and drilling needlessly expensive and time-consuming. Between 1981 and 2008, the largest consolidated oil companies (“Big Oil”) alone paid $1.95 trillion in severance, property, excise, sales and corporate income taxes, the Tax Foundation reports.

Eliminate the tax deductions amid the current regulatory and political climate, and fewer wells will be drilled, fewer deposits will be profitable enough to develop, fields will be abandoned prematurely, royalty revenues will decline, refineries will close or move overseas, workers will lose their jobs, their income tax payments will morph into welfare checks, and we will import still more oil and refined products.

3) A primary reason oil and gasoline prices are so high, unemployment is stuck at 9% and our economic growth is anemic is that government has made most of our western states, Alaskan and Outer Continental Shelf energy prospects off limits. It raises unfounded concerns about hydraulic fracturing, and drags its feet on permits for lands that supposedly are “available” for leasing and drilling. In short, it chokes off supplies.

Meanwhile, politicians stoke demand – with legislation like the NAT GAS Act. That bill would obligate U.S. taxpayers to pony up some $14 billion annually in subsidies (AKA, tax credits and rebates), to encourage motorists to buy natural gas-fueled cars and trucks, and service stations to install natural-gas fueling stations.

Eliminate oil company tax deductions: “save” $4 billion. Subsidize car and truck purchases: spend $14 billion. It’s unsustainable. It’s insane.

4) Real subsidies take money taken from society’s productive sectors, and transfer it to legislators and bureaucrats, who give it to companies that “deserve” funding, because they provide politically favored products or could not remain in business without perpetual infusions of Other People’s Money. You support our reelection, our “catastrophic manmade global warming” thesis and our commitment to a renewable energy future, and you’ll continue receiving taxpayer cash – until the OPM runs out.

Evergreen Solar received $486 million in federal and state subsidies – but still closed its doors and fired 850 workers, when the subsidy well ran dry. The same thing happened to five of six solar companies in Germany. The jobs went to China and Malaysia, which have lower costs and fewer regulations.

5) Even with subsidies, wind and solar still can’t compete, unless they are also exempted from endangered species and other environmental laws. If you shoot an eagle, or birds die in an uncovered oil company waste pit, fines and possibly prison terms are meted out. But wind farms slaughter bald and golden eagles, falcons, hawks, curlews, bats and other threatened, endangered and just plain majestic sky dwellers with no consequences. They even get fast-tracked through the environmental review process by the same Interior Department and EPA that routinely delay or deny oil and gas applications.

6) Then there’s ethanol. Producing 13.2 billion gallons of it in 2010 required one-quarter of all the corn grown in the United States – monopolizing 23 million acres (Grade A cropland the size of Indiana) and consuming 1.2 trillion gallons of water, along with prodigious amounts of petroleum in the form of fertilizer and tractor, truck and distillery fuel … for $6 billion a year in subsidies. While corn growers get rich, higher corn prices mean pork and chicken producers pay more for feed, meat producers are driven out of business, manufacturers pay more for corn syrup, consumers pay more for food, and jobs disappear.

America could produce far more gasoline from a mere 2,000 acres in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (1/20 of Washington, DC), if anti-oil zealots would end their opposition to drilling in the frozen tundra.

And still ethanol enjoys fuel pump mandates, $6 billion in annual subsidies, and tariffs against foreign competition – so that consumers can “choose” a fuel that gets a third fewer miles per gallon than gasoline.

Meanwhile, the Defense Department is doing a theirs-not-to-reason-why Light Brigade charge into the jaws of biofuel R&D – and extolling the virtues of camellia-based jet fuel that costs $67 a gallon, versus $5 per gallon for aviation gas that could also come from ANWR, the OCS and other off-limits U.S. lands.

The bottom line is simple. The worst thing we can do is what President Obama is intent on doing: use the mythical revenues he expects from eliminating oil company “subsidies and tax breaks” to increase federal wind, solar and ethanol subsidies by another 50% (to $18 billion a year) – so as to “foster the clean energy economy of the future and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels that contribute to climate change.”

As should be abundantly clear by now, these energy sources are not so clean or eco-friendly. They can’t exist without perpetual subsidies. They are simply not sustainable.

To provide reliable, affordable, ecological, sustainable energy … put people back to work … rejuvenate our economy … and generate trillions in new government revenue – we need to do three things.

Open America’s public lands for responsible hydrocarbon development. Take the boot off the neck of American businesses. And get rid of all the subsidies, bailouts, targeted tax breaks, selective tariffs, mandates to purchase ethanol and other products, and other corporate welfare gimmicks that make tax lawyers and lobbyists more important than researchers, trained workers and top-flight CEOs.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

Maybe climate change isn't manmade?

Maybe natural causes, such as warming oceans, bring it on? Read on to find what Dennis T. Avery thinks, after he read a paper that will be released in about six weeks.

ENVIRONMENTAL VIEWS

August 7, 2011

Our Colossal Ignorance on Global Warming

BY DENNIS T. AVERY

CHURCHVILLE, VA—“It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO₂ levels.”

That’s the incredible message Dr. Murry Salby, Chair of Climate Science at the respected Macquarie University in Australia, presented recently to the Sydney Institute. Professor Salby’s paper, with all the graphs, will be released in about six weeks. His book Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate will be released later this year. Don’t expect an easy read—but if his research holds up, it could well change the direction of the entire climate debate.

Salby suggests that the Earth’s own warming since the depths of the Little Ice Age (1680) has produced the higher CO₂ levels in our atmosphere today. Not the other way around. He notes that humans emit about 5.5 gigatons of CO₂ each year, but the oceans emit about 90 gigatons, and plants about 60 gigatons. Salby says that many scientists have assumed the net flows of carbon to and from the natural sinks cancel each other out, but there’s no reliable data to confirm this. If there’s been even a fractional change in natural emissions that would overwhelm the human emissions blamed for our warming.

Salby looked at the longest CO₂ record we have, Mauna Loa in Hawaii—and graphed the changes from year to year. Some years, the CO₂ concentration rose not at all. Some years, it rose by 3 parts per million by volume. He reasoned that if the CO₂ increases were due to man-made CO_2, we should have seen faster increases with global industrialization.

Instead, Salby found that the world warmed fastest during the warm El Nino years—our hottest time periods. The CO₂ increased least during the years after volcanic eruptions, when volcanic dust blotted out much of the sunlight—and cooled the earth.

Salby also found that the big sources of CO₂ don’t seem to be the industrialized areas such as Western Europe and North America. The sources appear to be more concentrated over the Amazon and tropical Africa. Perhaps the book will tell us wh

If the planet has been warming since 1680 AD, might that be time enough for the Earth to reinforce its own heating with extra CO₂ from warming seas and more vegetation growing and decaying in the heat? Certainly the warming oceans would be releasing more CO_2, and they hold 70 times as much CO₂ as the air. The White Cliffs of Dover are calcified CO₂ that was up-thrust from the sea bottom by geologic activity, and there is lots more where that came from

Tom Quirk, a fellow of three Oxford colleges, has also written on the worldwide mixing of CO_2. He used the carbon¹⁴ emitted by nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s to check the mixing time between hemispheres—as a test for the global atmospheric mixing time of carbon dioxide. It took several years. Measuring the CO₂ at Mauna Loa against CO₂ measurements at the South Pole, Quirk concluded, “There does not appear to be any time difference between the hemispheres. . . . The annual increases may be coming from a global or equatorial source.”

Such as the oceans?

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421, email to cgfi@hughes.net, or comment on www.cgfi.org.