If you read this blog regularly, you likely are a follower of the global warming wars — the ongoing political struggle over government-led efforts in the US and elsewhere to transform the energy economy to get rid of fossil fuels and their associated “carbon emissions.”
Lately, those wars have been focused less on what might be called the “science” of global warming — that is, the extent to which human carbon emissions may be causing atmospheric warming and whether that warming might be dangerous — and more on issues of practicality and cost of the proposed energy transition. [bold, links added]
After all, as to the “science” issues, we are instructed endlessly by our politicians and media that the science of global warming is “settled.” So what’s the point of debating that anymore?
In the real world, the “science” behind the claim that human carbon emissions are heading us toward some kind of planetary catastrophe is not only not “settled,” but actually non-existent.
Nevertheless, debating that subject can quickly lead to arguments couched in technical jargon and mathematics that very few people will try to follow.
By contrast, almost anybody can quickly grasp why wind and solar electricity generation can’t work to power a modern economy and will multiply electricity bills by an order of magnitude.
But don’t get the idea that everybody has just given up on exposing the fake “science” behind the global warming scare.
In fact, the Manhattan Contrarian is on the job — along with a hardy band of intrepid warriors with whom I am associated.
On Friday of this week, my co-counsel and I, on behalf of a small group of plaintiffs, will be filing an opening appeal brief in the DC Circuit challenging the 2009 “finding” made by the EPA that emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases constitute a “danger” to human health and safety.
I’ll use this post to give a brief preview, with more detail to follow after the brief becomes public.
You’ll have to wait for Friday to get the full story. But for today, I’ll start with an appetizer of some background on where we are, plus some information on the serious nature of our team and support.
The night of June 3, 2008, was the occasion of Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic convention accepting the party’s nomination for President.
The famous line from the pompous megalomaniac that night was “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
After Obama became President in 2009, his EPA got right to work on the job of “healing the planet” (really, how foolishly arrogant can a person get?), and in December of that year, it issued a document known as the Endangerment Finding, declaring CO2 to be a “danger” to human health and safety.
The Endangerment Finding, by its own language, claimed to be based on three “lines of evidence.” (Two of the three are not actually lines of evidence at all as that term would normally be understood, but that’s a story for another post.).
Over the course of the Obama administration, a team of scientists led by a guy named James Wallace investigated the things that the EPA claimed as the basis for its finding, and began publishing a series of Research Reports on the results.
On January 20, 2017, (the first day of the new Trump administration), a group of plaintiffs called the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council (CHECC), represented by myself and my excellent co-counsel Harry MacDougald, submitted a Petition to EPA asking that the Endangerment Finding be rescinded.
The Petition, which you can read at the link, was based on the research findings of Wallace and his co-authors up to that time, as well as on publicly available economic data showing that the increasing amount of wind and solar electricity generation was driving up costs and making energy unaffordable for low-income people.
But the Trump administration never took the opportunity to review and rescind the Endangerment Finding.
During the course of Trump’s term, the CHECC group submitted no fewer than seven supplements to its Petition, citing new and increasingly definitive scientific research as it became available.
But we were never able to motivate the Trump EPA to act on the EF. Even after President Biden took office, our Petition and many supplements languished without action.
Finally, in April of this year, the Biden EPA denied the Petition. We filed a timely appeal, and the briefing of that appeal is currently underway.
And that’s how it comes to pass that only now, almost 13 years after the Endangerment Finding was issued, we are headed to a court hearing on whether that finding has any scientific basis, or, as we assert, is “arbitrary and capricious.”
I’ll save a review of the arguments made in our brief until after it becomes public. But meanwhile, I’m learning of some of the eminent scientists who are putting together an amicus brief in support of our position.
The CO2 Coalition is a group of real scientists who advocate for the position that CO2 is a beneficial gas. Its Chair is William Happer, the senior atmospheric physicist at Princeton.
Tom Sheahen is the head of the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) and also a member of the CO2 Coalition. Sheahen and the Coalition are collaborating on a brief.
SEPP’s October 8 newsletter contains a summary of a major 2021 paper by Happer and co-author William van Wijngaarden that completely undermines the fake “science” of the IPCC and EPA used to support the case of climate alarm.
It would be a reasonable bet that some of this might make it into the amicus. Some pithy quotes:
Sheahen specifically discusses the efforts of Professors William van Wijngaarden and William Happer in their pioneering work in calculating the real-world Global Warming Potentials (GWPs) of the five most common Green-House Gases (GHGs) and explains why the approach used by IPCC is faulty but nonetheless is used by its followers such as the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the EPA. These faulty methods lead to great exaggeration of the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide, methane, and other minor greenhouse gases…
Sheahen shows the stunning agreement between the calculations of van Wijngaarden and Happer (W & H) with satellite observations of outgoing infrared radiation emitted by the earth going to space…
Sheahen’s major point is that, because of the exceptionally good agreement between observational data and the calculations of W & H, we conclude that their model has now been validated. That embodies the scientific method. In that case, it is reasonable to use it to study other hypothetical cases. It is not possible to do so with IPCC models, which have never achieved agreement with observation…
The gist of the Happer/van Wijngaarden work is that the greenhouse effect of CO2 in the atmosphere is almost entirely saturated, such that additional CO2 can have almost no warming effect.
Here is a chart prepared by Sheahen to illustrate the Happer/van Wijngaarden results [click to enlarge]:
I would not expect much if any mainstream media coverage of our submissions, but you never know. It’s going to be a fun next couple of years.
Read more at Manhattan Contrarian
Even under the presidency of Trump the EPA did not rescinded the Endangerment Finding. This is one example of Trump’s incompetence. For the EPA, NOAA, NASA, and the US representatives to the UN COP meetings, he failed to purge those organizations of the climate activists and replace them with competent people. He could have at least done that for the top positions. At the COP meetings the representatives for other nations were pleasantly surprise when they were dealing with the same US representatives that we had under Obama. Under President Trump NOAA and NASA continued their fraud and altered historical data to match the climate change narrative. Under Trump the Federal Government continued to give hundreds of millions of dollars to junk science where the only motivation was to validate that narrative.
Given the choice between Trump and Biden (or Harris), Trump is still by far the best choice. I just wish that the Republican Party would come up with a better candidate.
Ron DeSantis of Florida appears to be a contender.
From the article: “But the Trump administration never took the opportunity to review and rescind the Endangerment Finding.”
First term presidents rarely take on the really big problems. Those they leave till their second term, when they’re no longer concerned about reelection.
Gosh golly, gee whiz what’s wrong with you? The settled science says GHG’s will cause Apocalyptic Global Warming. We must switch to sustainable wind and solar. It’s obvious they will work and supply all of our energy needs.
The latest GHG horror is Nitrogen based fertilizers. (0.03122ppm) Gotta go. Then Schwab, Gates et al will have their dreams realized, mass starvation to their prime target of 500m world population. With that number the sustainables will easily support world energy needs.
It’s time for a worldwide Boston Tea Party.
And you don’t know the half of it yet, Francis Menton. The two most important ingredients of our carbon-based life on earth are CO2 and water. Yet you will hear nothing in politics or television about this basic biological fact of life. I’m a farmer with a B.Sc. Advanced (biology). Biology is the science of life – of the living part of the environment. All life dies without CO2. Because all life is composed of little carbon sacks of water called cells. That carbon all comes from CO2. Any level of CO2 lower than 2,000ppm is a starvation level low. Any process that adds more CO2 to the environment (like fossil fuel use) is a green process. Because, as greenhouse growers know, adding up to 1600ppm CO2 to their operations makes life greener, stronger, more abundant, and drought tolerant. That is the science of CO2 fertility. That science applies just as much to the atmosphere as it does to greenhouses. Because life is literally made of CO2. The most abundant element in every species on earth is oxygen (from cellular H2O). The second most abundant is carbon (making the cellular sack structure of cells). In us, and every species on earth. Yet the vice president of the US just called the dangerously low levels of CO2 “pollution”! What colossal ignorance! And that ignorance is shared by the entire television media! A few decades ago the public got excited about the aspect of biology called “Ecology” (Dr. Patrick Moore’s – cofounder of Greenpeace) PhD. The basis of the modern environmental movement. Which is simply about the interrelationships of species and their environment in “ecosystems” of life. The most important process in life’s ecosystems, all of them, is photosynthesis. Whose green pigmented enzyme chlorophyll paints the “environment” green. Which converts solar energy into high energy sugar bonds (yes all of life’s energy is solar powered – directly or indirectly) and 100% of our atmosphere’s oxygen. (Without photosynthesis, including CO2, animal life could not exist) In my humble opinion, the next step necessary in politicians’ and the public understanding of the environment is the unbreakable relationship between the vast majority of the world’s energy (85%) – fossil fuels – and the living environment. The energy that has made us the best fed, longest living, most prosperous human beings that have ever existed. The colossally foolish believe that the energy that comes from life, and whose use recycles the basic ingredients of life – CO2 and water – can be replaced by energy that doesn’t work when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. Fossil fuels are our only green energy. I’ve just explained how. There is nothing green about solar panels and windmills. All they do on the grid is drive up energy costs and contribute more to inflation than any other deluded left-wing dreams. That is the very expensive technology our woke joke political leaders are trying to foist on the world. Bringing energy poverty deaths back to some of the richest nations on earth. And calling it “progress”.
Don’t you 200 ppm not 2000 ppm?
I think you made an error.
You are right.
Good initiative on rescinding the endangerment finding. I’m not a “STEM” guy, but I’m thinking the more scientific & technical data that is brought to light in the courts, the better. Facts & evidence MATTER in a courtroom as opposed to the alarmists “go to” of using hype in the court of public opinion.
These environmentalist are missing the mark. They should get back to basics, for instance, and tout better trash management. It is poor trash management that allowed rivers (which flow to the oceans) to become dumping grounds.