During high tides, sea water often partially covers the road on Smith Island in Maryland, due to a combination of rising sea levels and sinking land. As Congress begins work on a new global warming bill, the National Science and Technology Council and the US Climate Change Science program release and assessment that concluded there is already evidence of sea-levl rise. (Andy Nelson - staff/file)
Warm-up for a global-warming law
Congress to begin work on a bill the next president would be willing to sign.
By Gail Russell Chaddock | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor/ June 1, 2008 edition
Reporter Gail Chaddock discusses what the Senate debate on global warming could mean for the future of environmental policy.
Reporter Gail Chaddock
Washington
Call this week’s global-warming debate in the Senate a marker in the sea change in public opinion on the issue – and a window on what the next Congress may do to curb carbon emissions.
The top presidential nominees in both parties back a cap-and-trade system to limit US emissions of greenhouse gases. President Bush opposes it, and the White House is expected to detail objections to the 494-page Senate bill on Monday.
While the debate that begins Monday on the Senate floor is unlikely to yield a bill Mr. Bush will sign, it is already realigning prospects for legislating in a new administration.
For Republicans, who face dim prospects in November congressional elections, the bill offers an opportunity to get behind their probable presidential nominee. Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona was an early and outspoken voice for mandatory emission-reduction targets and timetables. Other Republican lawmakers remain adamantly opposed to a big federal role.
For Democrats, it’s a high-profile occasion to target Republican lawmakers who vote against an issue that has been gaining favor with the public and with a widening coalition of business, labor union, and public-interest groups.
“The political landscape on global warming has dramatically changed,” says Jeremy Symons, a spokesman for the National Wildlife Federation (NWF). “We’ve never had union support in the past or this depth of support from business and faith groups,” he adds, citing a letter last week endorsing the bill signed by Alcoa, General Electric, and the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, as well as the NWF, Trout Unlimited, and the Interfaith Power and Light Campaign.
The Senate bill would mandate that US emissions of greenhouse gases be cut to 19 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and up to 71 percent by 2050. The bill also proposes a $800 billion “tax relief fund” over the next four decades to help Americans pay energy bills.
“Senators have come together across party lines to write a law that will not only enable us to avoid the ravages of unchecked global warming, but will create millions of new jobs and put us on the path to energy independence,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D) of California, in the Democratic response to Bush’s weekly radio address on Saturday.
Senator Boxer, who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, is presenting an amended version of a bill first sponsored by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I) of Connecticut and John Warner (R) of Virginia.
The bill proposes establishing a trading system for carbon-emission credits that supporters say will give companies a market incentive to reduce greenhouse gases. Critics say it creates a vast new federal bureaucracy at a high cost to the US economy and taxpayers.
In the House, Rep. Edward Markey (D) of Massachusetts, chair of a Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, is introducing a “cap and invest” bill this week that also aims to cap emissions and use some $8 trillion in revenues expected to be collected from polluters to invest in clean technologies.
“The chorus for change is deafening,” he said at a press conference at the Center for American Progress last Wednesday. “Today we must start the clean energy age.”
Many Senate Democrats were wary of introducing a bill identified with Senator Lieberman, who switched his party affiliation to Independent after losing his 2006 primary race and is endorsing McCain for president.
At the same time, Republicans are expected to fall out over the size of the federal role in curbing the problem. Sen. James Inhofe (R) of Oklahoma, who is leading opposition to the bill in the Senate, says the bill will increase household costs for an Oklahoma family of four by $3,298 a year and raise taxes on Americans by $1 trillion over the next 10 years.
White House objections pertain, among other things, to the bill’s timetable for achieving reduction targets.
“The goals that it sets for carbon-emissions reductions would require a technological leap to achieve those reductions, but does not have at all a realistic time frame for allowing technological advances to emerge,” says White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto. The president also opposes “burdensome new requirements” and “extremely high costs.”
In an April 16 address on global warming, Bush announced a new national goal: to stop the growth of US greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025, by accelerating the development of new technologies.
Meanwhile, critics of the bill aim to discourage Republicans from breaking with the White House on the issue. “The economic consequences are devastating,” says former Rep. Pat Toomey (R) of Pennsylvania, now president of the conservative Club for Growth, which launched a TV and radio ad campaign against Democratic senators in Montana and West Virginia and Republican Sens. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, who are seen as likely to back a cap-and-trade system.
“Democrats don’t expect to pass this bill,” says Mr. Toomey. “They want to demonstrate to their core constituents that this is what they want to do and Republicans won’t let them. It will be a useful political ploy for them.”
Last week, the National Science and Technology Council and the US Climate Change Science program released a long-awaited assessment of the effects of climate change on the United States. The report concluded that there is already evidence of sea-level rise and an increase in hurricanes, forest fires, insect outbreaks, and heat waves.
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Comments
2. Steve | 06.02.08
What eveidence would do it for you? You seem to have already made up your mind, so it really doesn’t matter who sends you what, does it?
Everybody gather `round and listen up, there is no global warming, Mike Higgins says so…We can all go home now.
3. Stan Reeder | 06.02.08
I have to agree with Mike Higgins comment. I keep wondering when this lie of man-caused global warming is going to end. Most people don’t even realize that there is only .3% of CO2 in the atmosphere at any given time, and any increase in it is only in the hundreths of a percent, yet people are ready to believe that this causing temperatures to rise. As a geology major I can tell you that climates have risen and fallen in the past and its not from anything that man has done, just like oceans transgress and regress. I just wonder when people are going to wake up and realize that they are being lied to while some people are making a hefty profit from all the lies. Just look at all the big buck that Al Gore has racked up.
4. Tony Safroni | 06.02.08
Ah, so many grasshoppers, so much to learn. It’s not about whether or not global warming is real; it’s about promoting “global awareness” of the need for ever greater social control to achieve the great economic and standard of live leveling on a global scale such that there are no longer the obvious inequities of the First World/Third World situation now in existence. There will be only Second World, or perhaps they’ll call it New World wherein the miseries of hunger, disease, and general squalor are shared equally around the world amongst the masses. It’s a beautiful thing to watch unfold. Only the Elites will live in comfort, a la Al Gore and his mansion and his private jet and his fat belly filled daily with real meat and real vegables.
6. Stan Reeder | 06.02.08
If everyone recalls back in the 70’s all these “so-called” experts were predicting the next iceage. All that I am saying is that these people are always preaching gloom and doom and its the average American working taxpayer that ends up paying for it like we are now and we’ll pay even more if they pass this stupid legislation. We have had the technology for years to be energy independent and environmentally aware at the same time, but the politicians and all the “powers that be” won’t allow it. They would rather sit back and preach that the world is going to end while their busy stuffing their pockets.
7. Steven Haddock | 06.02.08
The relationship between carbon dioxide and atmospheric temperatures was worked out as early as 1896 in this article by Arrhenius, the father of the current science of global warming. It clearly indicates that the higher the concentration of CO2 and water vapor in the atmosphere, the higher the temperature will be, all other things being equal. A copy of the original article can be found here:
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/1/18/Arrhenius.pdf
No one on either side of the debate seriously will say that Arrhenius’s basic conclusions are incorrect. There is also no debate that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising every year. The only debate is what is leading to the higher carbon dioxide levels and what the ulimate result of those higher levels will be.
I also said “all else being equal”. Climate scientists are now starting to realize that despite rising temperatures, the amount of sunlight reaching the earth is also dropping, primarily due to atmospheric pollution. This may somewhat offset the rise in temperature.
8. Stan Reeder | 06.02.08
Exactly how much is this CO2 suppose to be rising? Can you break that down into percentage of the atmosphere? If you take a sample of air and have it analyzed you’ll find that the CO2 level is .3% of the atmosphere. Any increases have only been in the hundreths of a percent. I have read other articles that have said that the temperatures have been decreasing over the last few years. I don’t think that anyone really knows for sure, I believe that these weather patterns are cyclic and they are nothing out of the ordinary. I think its pretty foolish to suggest that the earth is always going to stay the same anyway. The earth is a dynamic system and some things are more complicated and are very hard to predict. As sophisticated as we are tody we still cannot predict earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, or any of these types of things. We only know when and where they have happened in the past, and that is all we can go by.
9. Mike Higgins | 06.02.08
Steven Haddock,
Thank you for the link… I can’t help but think that Arrhenius would be forced to change his theories if he had access to the ice core temperature records of the last 400,000 years, as we do now. I am still waiting for an explanation of how there can be a cause and effect relationship between CO2 and temperature when temperatures rise 400 to 800 years BEFORE levels of CO2 rise.
The ice core records tell us that there has been NO time in the past 400,000 YEARS that CO2 levels have increased before temperatures have risen. Common sense tells us that the relationship, if any, must be the other way around. One perfectly sound explanation for this is that the oceans emit CO2 when temperatures rise and absorb CO2 when temperatures fall.
In the past 10,000 years (remember that the ice age was 15,000 years ago), the earth’s temperatures have remained in a narrow range or 2-3 degrees C, having risen and fallen many times during that period without the assistance of mankind pumping CO2 into the air. After all the warming of the past 150 years, the earth’s temperature is now only in the middle of that range and forecasted by the IPCC to increase in the next 100 years to the upper end of that range.
So, if the earth’s temperature, even after another 100 years of warming, is still within its normal range of the past 10,000 years, why is that cause for alarm? Why must we have our property taxed and our prosperity destroyed? Why must those who are much worse off in the world be confined to their current standard of living? I think the more prudent thing to do is to wait and see if these forecasts prove to have any validity. The truth is that these forecasts have a VERY POOR track record.
10. Ted VanHolland | 06.02.08
Global warming for now has decent evidence. Where is the evidence for its anthropogenic causes. Most media like to fall back on “general consensus in the scientific community”. Problem with this is that Science is not based on consensus. It’s based on evidence. Good science strives to disprove it’s hypotheses through experimentation and more evidence. The IPCC mission states that anthropogenic climate change is an assumption, and then sets out to “prove” it! Someone please answer me this: who stands to profit from adopting the mandate to curb “greenhouse” gas emmisions?
11. A Lady | 06.02.08
I haven’t read this bill (494 pages, did you say?), so I’m not sure whether the policies outlined in it are the best possible for curbing GHG emissions, but I like the general principle. I’m glad that more people seem to be behind this sort of thing (the evidence of message boards aside).
However, I don’t know that I like the cap-and-trade method of emissions reduction over a simple carbon tax, because C&T requires so many rules and so many layers of complexity compared to a tax. But, I guess people prefer the idea of a new market to that of a new tax, even if it isn’t any better for them personally. Oh well.
12. A Lady | 06.02.08
Also, to Stan Reeder, the percentage of the atmosphere made up of carbon dioxide is unimportant (and I think it’s more like .038%, as it is measured as 380 parts per million). Mercury can cause bodily harm when a mere 0.00000015% of body weight is ingested in a day. It’s not the amount itself, it’s the fact that it’s more than the body can handle. Likewise with carbon dioxide, the important thing is whether the levels increase to a level beyond what the earth can handle through the usual carbon cycle. And carbon isn’t the only problem — methane emissions need to be capped as well.
And while global temperatures may have leveled off for the past couple of years, they are rising overall and are projected to continue to do so by climate scientists.
13. Stan Reeder | 06.03.08
Most geologists will tell you that we are still coming out of the last iceage. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence to show that temperatures have been hotter in the past, long before mankind had anything to do with it. Look at all the coal that we have in this country. What were the conditions like when it was formed? I can tell you it was a lot hotter than it is now. As for CO2 emissions; more CO2 is put into the air through volcanic eruptions then man could ever hope to compete with. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try and create clean energy, what I am saying is that we shouldn’t have policy based on bad science that hurts our country and our people. We have enough sources of energy in this country now to be completely self sufficient, the question is why aren’t we using it? Corporate greed and greedy politicians is what’s hurting this nation.
14. John D. | 06.03.08
As another “geologist” I too can assure all the “man-made globalwarming” believers that you are being scammed! Yes there is global warming…and cooling and warming and cooling, etc. again and again and again! Wake up!
This is a global effort to LOWER the standard of living in America and it will not accomplish a thing. For God’s sake, we exhale CO2!. We are part of this world, not some alien creature detroying nature. WE ARE NATURE! As CO2 is emmitted plant florish, more food is produced and peolples lives are improved.
Also, the global warming models do not account for the variations in the output of the sun nor the effect of plate techtonics, which creates volcanos. It was a model built to keep the FUNDING coming to global warming researchers, not to accurately forecast future climate events. How could you leave out the effects of the sun if accuracy was your goal?
Ignorance is so very costly.
15. Stan Reeder | 06.03.08
Well said John D. I have also heard that the global warming models don’t take convection into account either. I just can’t believe people are so gullible on this, on both sides of the political aisle, I have a brother that buys into that crap as well. I guess it goes back to the old saying that if you tell the same lie to same people over and over again, they will accept it as the truth. But this is a very costly lie that is being told and I don’t know how people are going to get buy if they pass this stupid legislation, it is absolutely ridiculous!! These same people were talking about the next iceage during the 70’s, I remember it well. I just wish people would do a little research on their own without believing everything that comes off the CNN as being the gospel!!! WAKE UP PEOPLE!!!!!
16. Al | 06.28.08
1. The latest climate science shows that the global warming crisis is already here. The evidence about global warming is more alarming than ever. It is likely that critical “tipping points” once believed to lie in the future have already been passed (see Climate Change and Trace Gases, by James Hansen et al, 2007, available at http://www.carbonequity.info):
• Arctic ice loss reached 20% by extent over the past two years as against 7% a decade over the period between 1979 and 2005; the volume of Arctic summer ice is estimated to have fallen by 80% over the last 40 years; glacier movement in Greenland is speeding up, producing massive “ice quakes”; in Antarctica the 2002 collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf and the recent splitting of the Wilkins ice shelf raises the spectre of the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet (and sea levels rising 5 meters).
• The feedback sources of global warming are accelerating, with declining reflection of solar radiation, falling carbon absorption capacity of soils, forests and oceans and increased forest fires and methane release from Siberian tundra permafrost. By 2006 global annual human CO2 emissions were 9.9 gigatonnes of carbon, with only 4 gigatonnes being absorbed by the Earth’s “carbon sinks”. Some scientists project this figure to fall to 2.7 gigatonnes of carbon a year by 2030.
• As a result, according to James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Science, “the Earth is gaining more heat than it is losing: currently 0.5 to 1 watts per square metre. This planetary imbalance is sufficient to melt ice corresponding to a 1 meter of sea level rise per decade, if the extra energy were used entirely for that purpose—and the energy imbalance could double if emissions keep growing.”
2. A 2º maximum average increase in world temperature probably won’t stop destructive climate change
A 2º increase in average global atmospheric temperature above pre-industrial levels has been widely accepted (for example, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) as the maximum allowable if uncontrollable global warming is to be avoided. The chance of a 2º increase has been rated at between 38% (IPCC) and 78% (Hadley Centre) if greenhouse gas concentrations reach 450 parts per million of CO2 equivalent (CO2e). But these have already reached 459ppm CO2e, producing a 0.8º increase and “locking in” another 0.6º. Clearly, an upper limit of 450ppm is too high, risking further destructive climate feedbacks.
Climate crisis—urgent action needed now!
Statement initiated by participants in the Climate Change/Social Change conference, Sydney, Australia, April 11-13, 2008
It is being distributed to environmental, trade union, Indigenous, migrant, religious and community organisations to help build the movement against global warming.
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1. Mike Higgins | 06.02.08
When is this nonsense going to end? … Why are we willing to support a trillion dollar tax increase when NO EVIDENCE exists that shows that increases in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere causes temperature to rise. Would someone please send me a link to the evidence.
The ice core records and the deep sea records show that temperatures increase 400 to 800 years BEFORE the increase in CO2 levels. We have seen a constant increase in the levels of CO2 during the past 10 years but the temperature has been constant or decreasing slightly. From 1945 to 1975, amid constant increases in CO2, temperatures actually DECREASED. When are we going to wake up from this madness?
Visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcI for an excellent presentation from a scientific expert.