NEW YORK — ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson says fears about climate change, drilling and energy dependence are overblown.

In a speech Wednesday to the Council on Foreign Relations, Tillerson acknowledged that burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, but said society will adapt. The risks of oil and gas drilling are well understood and can be mitigated, he said. Dependence on other nations for oil is not a concern as long as access to supply is certain, he said.

Tillerson blamed a public he called illiterate in science and math, a lazy press, and advocacy groups that “manufacture fear.”

The oil executive questioned the ability of climate models to predict the magnitude of the impact, and said that people would adapt to rising sea levels and changing climates that may force agricultural production to shift.

“We have spent our entire existence adapting. We’ll adapt,” he said. “It’s an engineering problem and there will be an engineering solution.”

Andrew Weaver, chairman of climate modeling at the University of Victoria in Canada, disagreed with Tillerson’s characterization of climate modeling, warning that adapting to those changes will be much more difficult and disruptive than Tillerson seems to acknowledge.

Steve Coll, author of the recent book “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power,” said he was surprised Exxon would talk about ways society can adapt to climate change when there is time to try to avoid its worst effects. Coll said research suggests that adapting to climate change could be far more expensive than reducing emissions now. “Moving entire cities would be very expensive,” he said.

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These days, dormant climate policy in Washington DC is like Mitt Romney’s coiffure: seemingly no prospects for change. And, with the 2012 US presidential election on the horizon, it seems there’ll be little federal action for at least another year.

In fact, debates among Republican presidential candidates earlier in January saw climate change mentioned only once. It was Romney himself who invoked “the c-word” when he reminded Newt Gingrich of his mistaken support for climate action in the form of cap and trade legislation (which Gingrich has since recanted).

But beyond the current wedge-issue politics and culture wars on offer with climate and environment issues, the “climate problem” suffers from a more powerful and enduring force: economic stagnation.

As such, immediate worries of job security and economic well-being have taken precedence in the collective conscience and public discourse.

These pressing matters facing citizens today do not mean that they necessarily care less about long-term threats. In fact, a recent Rasmussen poll shows that concern for climate change is at its highest level in years. But they do mean that immediate concerns crowd out more diffuse and often abstract challenges like the causes and consequences of climate change.

These trends are particularly evident when looking at how much attention has been paid to climate change in the finite mass media “news hole” in recent years. In 2011, climate-related stories are published much less frequently than they were just in 2010. In the UK, a look at aggregate 2011 coverage in eight high-circulation newspapers and their sister Sunday editions – the Telegraph, Times, Independent, Guardian, Sun, Mirror, Daily Mail and Express – saw a drop of over a third from 2010 levels.

Clearly, economic woes and political (in)action on climate change has dampened that amount media coverage devoted to the topic in recent years. But this can also be turned on its head: to the extent that policy negotiators, elected officials and their staffers garner public priorities and possible pressure by proxy from public polling and news attention, then media attention feeds policy prioritization amongst political leadership.

I have taken up these issues in my recent book Who Speaks for the Climate?, working to make sense of how media influence ways in which climate science and policy become meaningful in people’s everyday lives, and how media representations shape the spectrum of possibility for action on climate change.

There is a certain stubbornness of the human condition here perhaps, which can be associated with what my University of Colorado colleague Roger Pielke Jr has described as the “iron law of climate policy”. Pielke has argued that “even if people are willing to bear some costs to reduce emissions (and experience shows they are), they are willing to go only so far … the unavoidable reality is that policy makers and those they represent are committed to sustaining economic growth … emissions reduction goals will not be achieved by policies that seek to stimulate innovation by constricting, much less by reducing, economic activity.”

Put simply, this “iron law” is why economic growth is vital for cutting carbon emissions in today’s climate.

In fact, economic contraction has not had demonstrable influence on comprehensive and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. In 2009, GHG emissions actually dropped 1.3%, and this was associated with the global economic meltdown. Glen Peters from the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo (Cicero) posited that this was an opportunity to move the global economy to lower emissions trajectories.

But the time that followed has shown this not to be the case. In fact, in December, the Carbon Disclosure Project reported a massive jump once again, with GHG emissions increasing 5.9% in 2010. Longer term forecasts predict a steady increase of global GHG emissions of around 3% a year over the next decade.

All this shows we need to face the realities that economic growth is a necessary component of realistic and sustained carbon emissions reductions.

Of course, a reversal of economic misfortunes in the years ahead will not remove all barriers to action on climate change. But, less concern for the immediate will foster an atmosphere of more expansive reflection and action on longer term issues, increasing our public caring capacity for interconnected 21st-century challenges such as climate change.

And such a turnaround would force leaders to confront the realities of issue as well. In the meantime, we’ll just continue to face weakly enforced UN agreements, carbon emissions reductions promises that look like failed new year’s resolutions, and recycled cliches on climate action.

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by Joel Gehrke

President Obama’s team of negotiators at the United Nations Climate Change Conference may agree to a tax on foreign currency transactions, designed to pay for a “Green Climate Fund,” that would fall disproportionately on American travellers and businesses, according to a group attending the conference that is skeptical of the UN position on global warming.

Negotiators at the conference are considering “a new tax on every foreign currency transaction in the world,” according to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). “Every time you travel abroad, you’ll have to pay a climate tax,” explains CFACT, the group that released the “Climategate” emails. “More importantly, every time we import goods, every time we export our fine products (think jobs) we will do so with a climate tax skimming off the top.”

European countries would evade much of the tax burden, however, because “transactions within the Eurozone won’t have to pay this new tax.”

CFACT suggests that Obama is open to implementing this tax and similar policies in the absence of a full climate treaty, which would require congressional approval.  “We have learned that while many have discounted this conference, knowing that a full climate treaty is difficult to achieve especially with a U.S. Senate that will not vote to ratify,” CFACT says. “Obama and his fellow climate travelers are working around the Senate and planning to stick America with the bill.”

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BERLIN – JANUARY 23: A snowman is pictured wit…

The mainstream media has been spiking the football in the proverbial end zone ever since a paper released last Friday claimed two-thirds of global temperature stations show some warming occurred during the past century. The media have been claiming the new paper delivers a death blow to skepticism, but the paper itself brings almost nothing new to the global warming debate and instead shows how far global warming advocates are from presenting credible evidence of a crisis. Rather than delivering a death blow to skepticism, the media has merely invented and shredded an insignificant straw man.

University of California, Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller analyzed land-based temperature readings from temperature stations around the world and found two-thirds indicate warming temperatures and one-third indicate cooling temperatures. As a result, “Global warming is real,” summarized Muller in an editorial he wrote in the October 21 Wall Street Journal .

Muller acknowledged that many of the stations produced incomplete temperature records and had poor quality control. He claimed that he nevertheless included them in the study to avoid “data-selection bias.” Scientists such as Anthony Watts have pointed out several additional flaws in the Muller paper. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Muller’s paper is flawless in its conclusion that two-thirds of land-based temperature stations report warming rather than cooling. Even under such an assumption, Muller’s paper does nothing to dispel skeptical objections to the theory that humans are causing a global warming crisis.

The case for a human-induced global warming crisis requires the demonstration of several components. These include (1) that global temperatures are rising, (2) that global temperatures will likely continue to rise in the future, (3) that the rise in temperatures is or will be sufficiently rapid and substantial to cause enormous negative consequences that far outweigh the benefits of such warming and (4) that human emissions of greenhouse gases account for all such temperature rise or enough of the temperature rise to elevate the temperature rise to crisis levels.

In order to justify government action against global warming, advocates must also show that the proposed action will substantially reduce the negative impacts of the asserted crisis and that the costs of such action will not outweigh the benefits.

Muller’s paper merely addresses the first component necessary to support the theory of a human-induced global warming crisis. Moreover, this first component hasn’t been in dispute, even before publication of Muller’s paper.

Very few if any skeptics assert that the earth is still in the Little Ice Age. While the Little Ice Age raged from approximately 1300 to 1900 AD, it is pretty well accepted that the Little Ice Age did indeed end by approximately 1900 AD. The mere fact that the Little Ice Age ended a little over 100 years ago, and that temperatures have warmed during the course of recovering from the Little Ice Age, tells us absolutely nothing about the remaining components necessary to support an assertion that humans are creating a global warming crisis.

Muller himself admits, “How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.”

So we have a paper merely claiming that two out of three global temperature stations report the Little Ice Age is over. This supports the media spiking the football and proclaiming the death of skepticism regarding a human-induced global warming crisis?

Even prominent global warming advocate Eric Steig admits, “Anybody expecting earthshaking news from Berkeley, now that the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group being led by Richard Muller has released its results, had to be content with a barely perceptible quiver. As far as the basic science goes, the results could not have been less surprising if the press release had said ‘Man Finds Sun Rises At Dawn.’”

“Overall, we are underwhelmed by the quality of [the] Berkeley effort so far,” Steig adds.

Far from marking the death of skepticism, the media’s over-the-top sensationalism of the Muller paper shows just how far global warming advocates are from supporting their assertions of a human-induced global warming crisis. The straw man may be dead, but skepticism of a human-induced global warming crisis is alive and well.

James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at and managing editor of The Heartland InstituteEnvironment & Climate News.

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Lawrence Solomon  Aug 26, 2011 – 11:37 PM ET | Last Updated: Aug 27, 2011 10:08 PM ET

New, convincing evidence indicates global warming is caused by cosmic rays and the sun — not humans

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

The hypothesis that cosmic rays and the sun hold the key to the global warming debate has been Enemy No. 1 to the global warming establishment ever since it was first proposed by two scientists from the Danish Space Research Institute, at a 1996 scientific conference in the U.K. Within one day, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bert Bolin, denounced the theory, saying, “I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naive and irresponsible.” He then set about discrediting the theory, any journalist that gave the theory cre dence, and most of all the Danes presenting the theory — they soon found themselves vilified, marginalized and starved of funding, despite their impeccable scientific credentials.

The mobilization to rally the press against the Danes worked brilliantly, with one notable exception. Nigel Calder, a former editor of The New Scientist who attended that 1996 conference, would not be cowed. Himself a physicist, Mr. Calder became convinced of the merits of the argument and a year later, following a lecture he gave at a CERN conference, so too did Jasper Kirkby, a CERN scientist in attendance. Mr. Kirkby then convinced the CERN bureaucracy of the theory’s importance and developed a plan to create a cloud chamber — he called it CLOUD, for “Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets.”

But Mr. Kirkby made the same tactical error that the Danes had — not realizing how politicized the global warming issue was, he candidly shared his views with the scientific community.

“The theory will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth’s temperature that we have seen in the last century,” Mr. Kirkby told the scientific press in 1998, explaining that global warming may be part of a natural cycle in the Earth’s temperature.

The global warming establishment sprang into action, pressured the Western governments that control CERN, and almost immediately succeeded in suspending CLOUD. It took Mr. Kirkby almost a decade of negotiation with his superiors, and who knows how many compromises and unspoken commitments, to convince the CERN bureaucracy to allow the project to proceed. And years more to create the cloud chamber and convincingly validate the Danes’ groundbreaking theory.

Yet this spectacular success will be largely unrecognized by the general public for years — this column will be the first that most readers have heard of it — because CERN remains too afraid of offending its government masters to admit its success. Weeks ago, CERN formerly decided to muzzle Mr. Kirby and other members of his team to avoid “the highly political arena of the climate change debate,” telling them “to present the results clearly but not interpret them” and to downplay the results by “mak[ing] clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.” The CERN study and press release is written in bureaucratese and the version of Mr. Kirkby’s study that appears in the print edition of Nature censored the most eye-popping graph — only those who know where to look in an online supplement will see the striking potency of cosmic rays in creating the conditions for seeding clouds.

CERN, and the Danes, have in all likelihood found the path to the Holy Grail of climate science. But the religion of climate science won’t yet permit a celebration of the find.

Financial Post

LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

- Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

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By Scott Horsley

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman formally kicks off his presidential campaign Tuesday, with New York’s Statue of Liberty as a backdrop. He’s hoping some tired and poor Republicans are yearning for a different kind of candidate. Huntsman holds moderate views on immigration and same-sex civil unions, and he wasn’t afraid to serve in the Obama administration, as U.S. ambassador to China.

As governor, Huntsman was also a leader in a regional effort to control greenhouse gases, by capping carbon emissions and trading pollution permits.

“Until we put a value on carbon, we’re never going to be able to get serious about dealing with climate change,” Huntsman said during a 2008 gubernatorial debate.

Since then, the political climate has changed.

“Our economy’s in a different place,” Huntsman told Time magazine last month. “The bottom fell out of the economy, and until it comes back, this isn’t the moment” to pursue cap and trade.

Huntsman’s GOP rival Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, has also backed away from cap and trade, after supporting the idea years ago.

“A lot of people have talked about cap and trade,” Romney said during a town hall meeting in New Hampshire this month. “We cannot, as America, enter into agreements that cause our energy to become more expensive if we let the big emitters of the future like China and Brazil off the hook.”

Another Republican White House contender, Tim Pawlenty, has backpedaled furiously on climate change, an idea he supported when he was governor of Minnesota.

“I was wrong,” Pawlenty said during a GOP debate on Fox News. “It was a mistake. And I’m sorry. It was ham-fisted and it’s going to be harmful to the economy.”

Republican leaders’ interest in global warming has cooled considerably since 2008, when John McCain was the party’s standard-bearer.

“The facts of global warming demand our urgent attention,” McCain said at the time. “Good stewardship, prudence and simple common sense demand that we act to meet the challenge and act quickly.”

McCain’s support for cap and trade was not universal in the GOP, even then. But it wasn’t a huge stretch, either. After all, the idea of controlling emissions with a market-based trading system has a Republican pedigree. The first President Bush used cap and trade to combat acid rain.

In 2008, the biggest difference between McCain’s plan to fight global warming and the Democrats’ plan was how much each side wanted to rein in greenhouse gases: 65 percent or 80 percent. To environmentalists, that now feels like the good old days.

“Everyone agreed the sun rose in the east and set in the west,” said Navin Nayak, senior vice president of the League of Conservation Voters. “Suddenly we emerge four years later, with a field of Republicans that are trying to tell us that the sun rises in the west, and we’re not sure if it sets.”

Some Republican White House hopefuls — notably Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota — question the scientific consensus that greenhouse gases are likely a leading cause of climate change.

“Carbon dioxide is natural. It occurs in earth,” Bachmann said during a 2009 floor speech, as the House was considering cap and trade legislation. “Carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas. It is a harmless gas.”

Environmentalists give Huntsman and Romney some credit for at least acknowledging the science behind climate change. But they say simply admitting there’s a problem is not enough.

“It would be like a presidential candidate saying, ‘Yes, the debt is a serious crisis. But I’m not going to introduce any plan to deal with it,’” Nayak says.

Republican candidates aren’t the only ones who have changed their tune in recent years. The Pew Research Center points to a sharp decline in the number of Americans who even believe that global warming is happening, let alone that it’s a serious problem.

In 2006, 77 percent of Americans agreed there is “solid evidence” of global warming. By this year, that number had fallen to 58 percent. And just over a third believe that man-made carbon emissions are to blame.

“Most of that decline has occurred among Republicans and Independents,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the research center. “The partisan gap is huge.”

Of course, these are the primary voters that Republican candidates need to appeal to. And they’ve been encouraged in their skepticism of climate change by fossil fuel interests, which have bankrolled an aggressive campaign against cap and trade.

Even among Democrats, fighting global warming is not a high priority. So it’s little wonder, in tough economic times, that GOP hopefuls have taken the public’s temperature, and given this issue a pass.

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By Paula Dittrick

HOUSTON, June 20 — The National Petrochemical & Refiners Association lauded the US Supreme Court’s decision on June 20 to reject attempts to address greenhouse gas emissions through the use of common law “nuisance” lawsuits.

In the case of American Electric Power Co. vs. the State of Connecticut, the nation’s high court reversed a 2009 decision by a New York City federal appeals court that permitted litigation to move forward.

Previously, attorneys suggested a climate change litigation threat appeared to be looming for the oil and gas industry in the wake of a 2007 Supreme Court decision allowing the regulation of greenhouse gases as air pollutants (OGJ, Nov. 2, 2009, p. 32).

On Apr. 2, 2007, the Supreme Court ruled the US Environmental Protection Agency has authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate GHGs. That ruling came in a lawsuit filed by Massachusetts and several other states, US cities, and environmental groups.

On Sept. 21, 2009, the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit allowed a coalition of eight states, New York City, and environmental groups to sue coal-burning utilities over climate change.

NPRA and the American Petroleum Institute filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in February supporting AEP.

The June 20 unanimous 8-0 decision was the Supreme Court’s first ruling on a GHG nuisance suit, NPRA said in a news release.

NPRA Pres. Charles T. Drevna said, “The court’s ruling is a logical and just decision and should send a signal to those attempting to use arcane legal rules to advance their political agendas. NPRA has stated unequivocally that discussions regarding the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions should take place in Congress and not in the courts through ‘nuisance’ or ‘public trust’ lawsuits and certainly not at the Environmental Protection Agency through the Clean Air Act.”

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By TENNILLE TRACY

Dow Jones—The head of the U.S. House of Representatives’ energy committee is weighing in on the debate over greenhouse gas rules and plans to introduce a draft bill Wednesday that blocks the administration from regulating the emissions under the Clean Air Act, an aide says.

Rep. Fred Upton (R. Mich.), chair of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, will introduce a bill that is “narrowly drawn” and “prevents the Clean Air Act from being transformed into a regulatory vehicle to impose a cap-and-trade energy tax,” a Republican aide on the committee said Tuesday night.

Sen. James Inhofe (R., Okla.), the ranking Republican on the U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee, plans to introduce the same bill in that chamber, the aide said.

Several lawmakers have introduced legislation in the last month to block or cripple the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. They assert Congress should be the government body to develop a global warming policy – not EPA.

Earlier this week, Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wy.) introduced a bill with several other Senate Republicans that imposed such restrictions on the EPA.

In the House, there have been at least three bills introduced in previous weeks that seek similar aims.

But Upton’s position, as chair of the House energy committee, gives his legislation a better chance of moving through the legislative process in that chamber and making it to the floor for a vote.

Among the rules Upton is targeting is a requirement for power plants, refiners and other large emitters to obtain greenhouse gas permits before building new facilities or making major changes to existing ones. EPA began to enforce that rule on Jan. 2.

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