Global Warming Stopped 16 Years Ago

With newly released data clearly demonstrating that global warming stopped 16 years ago, why does the Environmental Protection Agency’s Carol Browner claim that, by “reducing our dependence on fossil-fuels we can lessen the growing threats posed by global warming?” Perhaps facts are not of interest in light of her agenda to “change our country’s future,”¹ a task that the EPA seems to be doing quite well. One should ask, just what kind of change does Browner want?

Pushing to go green regardless of the consequences is not an isolated opinion in the EPA, the recently resigned Region 6 administrator Al Armendariz publicly admitted that the EPA’s “general philosophy” is to “crucify” and “make examples” of oil and gas companies.²

The EPA Clean Air Act (CAA) is one of the main regulations that the EPA is using to further this agenda. It is a law that will be financially more ruinous than the defeated cap-and-trade legislation and place an enormous financial burden upon the U.S. These new rules will cost the public in the vicinity of $300 to $400 billion a year by significantly increasing the price of energy for everyone. Coal plants are not the only ones that will be affected; under the CAA, churches, schools, restaurants, hospitals and farms will eventually be regulated. Yes farms.

Any farm with aggregate emissions exceeding the CAA permitted threshold will be required to purchase costly permits for each ton of greenhouse gas emitted annually. This insanity is known as the “cow tax,” which means taxing every animal. The EPA estimates approximately 37,000 farms will be subject to the new greenhouse gas permits averaging fees of $23,000 per permit annually. This new penalty will cost an estimated $851 million, which will add to the financial burden of already skyrocketing food costs. All of this and more will be implemented immediately after the 2012 elections.

The worst things about these regulations is that they are based on flawed data attempting to support global warming claims, coupled with wild assumptions of possible catastrophic consequences. To date, there are no credible data revealing a trend of global warming let alone that it is man-made. The Met Office in the United Kingdom has been an outspoken alarmist on global warming and has just quietly released a report revealing there has been no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures for the past 16 years. The current data covers 1997 to 2012, which balances the previous period from 1980 to 1996, a period that demonstrated a slight rise in temperature. In other words, there have always been fluctuations in global temperatures and even isolated spikes, but nothing substantial has changed.

Much of the hype spread by the media in recent years has only included data up until late 2010, which was in fact a very warm year. It is interesting to note that from that point in time until today, temperatures have been much cooler, thus cancelling the much-exaggerated warming trend bantered about by the go-green crowd and dutifully reported by the media.

In light of this information, one must ask why EPA Region 9 administrator Jared Blumenfeld stated that the current administration is focused on killing fossil fuels: “What the EPA and primarily the Department of Energy have been tasked to do at the agency level is really come out with transition pathways away from a fossil fuel economy, both for the peak oil reason and because of climate change, and because of all the other issues related to oil itself.”³

Even professor Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and center of the Climategate scandal, has had to agree with the Met Office’s report that there is no global warming. Flawed scientific models that have been used to predict global warming are riddled with poorly conceived algorithms coupled with incomplete notions as to what exactly influences global temperatures in the first place. Jones admits that, “he and his colleagues did not understand the impact of ‘natural variability’ — factors such as long-term ocean temperature cycles and changes in the output of the sun. However, he said he was still convinced that the current decade would end up significantly warmer than the previous two.”⁴ Expectation tends to formulate outcome.

Everyone would like to see the development of clean and cost-efficient energy sources. However, such desires should not lead to the shutting down of our present infrastructure of fuel and electricity that provide us with the energy we depend on, especially when we have no viable alternative. Such goals will only succeed in crippling the U.S. economy, and thus, the global economy. But then again, perhaps this is what our radical environmentalists really want.