Obama admin memo: Greenhouse gas limits will hurt economy

They did leave off one very major greenhouse gas off that list… water vapor

Canadian Imperialist Running Dog on May 12, 2009 at 1:47 PM

Excellent point! The whole “CO2 causes global warming” argument is based on the fact that CO2 absorbs infrared waves reflected from the earth very well over a narrow band of wavelengths, roughly from 14 to 16 microns. Water vapor, whose concentration in the air is 10 to 100 times higher than that of CO2, absorbs over the entire infrared spectrum. Nobody can seriously limit water vapor emissions when 70%+ of the earth’s surface is covered with water!

From a heat-absorption point of view, man-made CO2 emissions only account for about 0.03% of the total infrared heat-trapping effect (without which the oceans would freeze), so that trying to limit CO2 emissions is like using a sledgehammer of solid gold to kill a fly on the elephant of the water-vapor effect.

In reality, global climate is driven much more by sunspots (warming), volcanic eruptions (cooling), and El Nino (mixed regional effects) than by CO2 content, and mankind cannot alter the first three variables. Although CO2 levels continue to rise in the atmosphere, global temperatures have cooled since 1998, and the cooling trend has accelerated since 2006.

But don’t bother cap-and-traders with the facts! Their computer models say that high CO2 levels will cause sea levels to rise 60 cm (about 2 feet) in 100 years, and that would be so horrible that we need to cripple the entire world economy to prevent it! (Wouldn’t it be cheaper to build sea walls two feet high over the next century?). The best weather-forecasting models diverge from eventual reality after about 5 DAYS–how can anyone believe predictions from a computer model for 100 YEARS from now?

I attended a meeting of the Boston chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers last Thursday, where a panel of “experts” were blatantly pushing cap-and-trade, and asking people from deep-blue MA to call midwestern Senators from “greedy” coal states to back cap-and-trade, despite its horrific impact on local economies. But, when questioned, the “experts” had no real plan for encouraging nuclear power plants (which do not emit CO2), and said that taxing CO2 emissions would send money to the U.S. Treasury “instead of” sending hundreds of billions of dollars to overseas oil sheiks.

But wait a minute! The United States only gets about 3% of its electricity from oil, so that cap-and-trade on power companies would have little effect on oil imports, most of which are used for transportation and home heating. Do they plan to impose a “cap” on CO2 emissions from cars and home heating, or the equivalent of rationing fuel? I could just imagine, every December, the Government telling people, sorry, you’ve used up your CO2 quota for this year–you’re not allowed to drive to the mall to go Christmas Winter Solstice Holiday shopping, and you can’t heat your home during the snowstorm, to prevent global warming!

They also said that “peak oil production” would probably occur around 2030, after which oil supplies would decline. But when I suggested the use of shale oil to push that date farther into the future, to buy time for developing alternative energy (and reduce oil payments to foreign governments), they said that using shale oil would cook the planet for our children!

Have any of these people bothered to do some simple math? It is estimated that there are about a trillion barrels of shale oil under the Rockies, enough to eliminate America’s oil imports for about 200 years. Assuming that shale oil weighs 8 pounds/gallon, burning this much shale oil would produce about 480 gigatonnes of CO2 in 200 years, or about 2.4 gigatonnes per year, which is about 10% of world’s current emission rate of CO2. Since the shale oil would displace consumption of imported oil from foreign countries, the net effect would be less than 10%. How is an additional 10% of less of CO2 going to “cook” the planet?

But the “experts” lecturing us engineers rely on IPCC predictions–the same people that write the conclusions to their reports before examining the data. They tell us that open water absorbs more heat than sea ice, but they don’t say that melting SEA ice doesn’t raise sea levels, because floating ice displaces its weight in water! Have any of these “experts” looked at weather data from far-north stations near large bodies of water, which get more snow in autumn (with open water nearby) than in midwinter or early spring, when the water is frozen? Extend that north to Greenland, and open water along the coast increases summer snowfall on the interior ice cap, at over 2,000 meters altitude and below freezing all zummer. Greenland ice may melt along the edges, but it’s getting THICKER in the interior!

But this is what we’re up against–”experts” who conveniently cherry-pick data for their own agenda, who try to lure gullible young engineers into lobbying midwestern Senators to killing their states’ economy with cap-and-trade, and a few subsidized “green” industries get rich, everybody else gets MUCH poorer, and the earth may be 0.001 degree cooler, until a sunspot rears its ugly head.

To stop “global warming”, cooler HEADS must prevail.

Steve Z on May 12, 2009 at 3:56 PM