Now it’s not just the sunspots that predict a 23-year global cooling. The new Jason oceanographic satellite shows that 2007 was a “cool” La Nina year—but Jason also says something more important is at work: The much larger and more persistent Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has turned into its cool phase, telling us to expect moderately lower global temperatures until 2030 or so.For the past century at least, global temperatures have tended to mirror the 20-to 30-year warmings and coolings of the north-central Pacific Ocean. We don’t know just why, but the pattern of the last century is clear: the earth warmed from about 1915 to1940, while the PDO was also warming (1925 to 46). The earth cooled from 1940 to 1975, while the PDO was cooling (1946 to 1977). The strong global warming from 1976 to 1998 was accompanied by a strong and almost-constant warming of the north-central Pacific. Ancient tree rings in Baja California and Mexico show there have been 11 such PDO shifts since 1650, averaging 23 years on length.

Researchers discovered the PDO only recently—in 1996—while searching for the reason salmon numbers had declined sharply in the Columbia River after 1977. The salmon catch record for the past 100 years gave the answer—shifting Pacific Ocean currents. The PDO favors the salmon from the Columbia for about 25 years at a time, and then the salmon from the Gulf of Alaska, but the two fisheries never thrive at the same time. Something in the PDO favors the early development of the salmon smolts from one region or the other. Other fish, such as halibut, sardines, and anchovies follow similar shifts in line with the PDO.

The PDO seems to be driven by the huge Aleutian Low in the Arctic—but we don’t know what controls the Aleutian Low. Nonetheless, 22.5-year “double sunspot cycles” have been identified in South African rainfall, Indian monsoons, Australian droughts, and rains in the United States’ far southwest as well. These cycles argue that the sun, not CO2, controls the earth’s temperatures.

Dr. Henrik Svensmark’s recent experiments at the Danish Space Research Institute seem to show that the earth’s temperatures are importantly affected by the low, wet clouds that deflect more or less solar heat back into space. The number of such clouds is affected, in turn, by more or fewer cosmic rays hitting the earth. The number of earthbound cosmic rays depends on the extent of the giant magnetic wind thrown out by the sun.

All of this defies the “consensus” that human-emitted carbon dioxide has been responsible for our global warming. But the evidence for man-made warming has never been as strong as its Green advocates maintained. The earth’s warming from 1915 to 1940 was just about as strong as the “scary” 1975 to 1998 warming in both scope and duration—and occurred too early to be blamed on human-emitted CO2. The cooling from 1940 to 1975 defied the Greenhouse Theory, occurring during the first big surge of man-made greenhouse emissions. Most recently, the climate has stubbornly refused to warm since 1998, even though human CO2 emissions have continued to rise strongly.

The Jason satellite is an updated and more-accurate version of the Poseidon satellite that has been monitoring the oceans since 1992, picking up ocean wind speeds, wave heights, and sea level changes. Jason is run by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a French team.

How many years of declining world temperature would it take now—in the wake of the ten-year non-warming since 1998—to break up Al Gore’s “climate change consensus”?

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC and is the Director for the Center for Global Food Issues. (www.cgfi.org) He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 2442 or email to mailto:cgfi@hughes.net

Posted by Harry Messenheimer

Posted by Harry Messenheimer

The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from “biofuels” by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The U.S. added to its 51 cents-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a five-fold increase in “biofuels” production by 2022.

The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it’s not “you” who’s got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about.

Heigh-ho. In the greater scheme of things, a few dead natives keeled over with distended bellies is a small price to pay for saving the planet, right? Except that turning food into fuel does nothing for the planet in the first place. That tree the U.S. Marines are raising on Iwo Jima was most likely cut down to make way for an ethanol-producing corn field: Researchers at Princeton calculate that to date the “carbon debt” created by the biofuels arboricide will take 167 years to reverse.

The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death.

ATSRTWT

Hat tip: Newmark’s Door

Posted by Harry Messenheimer

China has already overtaken the US as the world’s “biggest polluter”, a report to be published next month says.

The research suggests the country’s greenhouse gas emissions have been underestimated, and probably passed those of the US in 2006-2007.

Read more here.

The House of Representatives voted to postpone consideration of the U.S.-Colombia free trade pact, which President Bush sent to Congress earlier this week. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama oppose the Colombia deal on the grounds that Bogotá has not done enough to curb violence against trade unionists. This is the same argument we hear from other top Democrats and from senior American labor leaders. Yet it reveals either a total lack of perspective or an indifference to the facts, or both.

Read more about Columbia’s progress here.

On July 13, 2001 the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that Beijing had beaten out Toronto and Paris for the rights to host the 2008 Summer Games. Joy immediately spread across the Mainland, first and foremost amongst the members of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC). Plans were being set in motion to “dump sand” at Tiananmen Square for a beach volleyball arena, the site where 12 years prior Chinese tanks rolled in and brutally extinguished a blossoming democracy movement. Seven years after the IOC’s announcement, the decision to host the Olympics is turning into a colossal strategic blunder that is “dumping sand” on China’s hopes of shedding its police state label.To be honest, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) deserves a lot of credit. In the late 1970s the communist grip over the economy started to ease and the shift to an open-door and reform policy has led to a period of real and substantial economic growth. With the highest growth rate in the world, averaging about 10% a year over the last few decades, the PRC is rapidly climbing up in the world’s economic power rankings.

In light of China’s achievements, it is not surprising that they want to show their progress off to the rest of the world. However, does China really need the world’s spotlight shining into its closet — a closet that has the skeletons of Tibet, “re-education camps,” Darfur, and Burma lurking inside?

Read the rest here.

Just in time for Tax Day (a day when flags should be be flown at half staff to mourn the income we lose to government bureaucracy), the Hoover Institution has released a fascinating history of taxes in America.

Think filing taxes is a pain?  No kidding.

According to one source, the current tax code and its associated regulations “contain almost 5.6 million words–seven times as many words as the Bible.” One website that provides access to the tax code and its related documents notes that the complete tax code is 24 megabytes in size and, if printed 60 lines to the page, would fill more than 7,500 letter-size pages.

Contempt for the current tax system is rampant. In The Flat Tax, Hall and Rabushka note that President Jimmy Carter stated that the income tax was “a disgrace to the human race.” President George W. Bush commented that “the tax code is a complicated mess. You realize, it’s a million pages long.” Even Albert Einstein once quipped, “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”

That’s why this interview with T.J. Rodgers is so refreshing.  Rodgers is the CEO of the company which owns solar-power manufacturer SunPower, and he is proud to be considered “green.”  However, he despises corporate philanthropy, and agrees with Milton Friedman that charity should be an individual endeavor and not a corporate one.  He makes a great case that a company can be pro-environment without hurting its profits.  He also separates fact from fiction in the global warming debate; analyzes the greenhouse gas plans of McCain, Gore, and Obama; and compares different alternative energy sources (to quote Rodgers, “Ethanol?  Total waste.”).

France is planning to push forward plans for a common EU company tax base during its six-month term at the bloc’s chair, starting in July.

“It has been going on for a long time but this is one issue that we are determined to push,” French economy minister Christine Lagarde told reporters on Monday (7 April), following a tax forum organised by the European Commission.

The corporate tax base idea has been advocated by EU tax commissioner Laszlo Kovacs as a way to simplify cross-border business and cut red tape for European companies by setting up a single system for calculating taxes across the 27 member states.

But it has been so far strongly opposed by a bunch of countries, mainly the UK, Ireland, Estonia, Lithuania and Slovakia. They fear such a common tax base would be the first step towards harmonisation of tax rates, an area defended by EU states on national sovereignty grounds.

But both Paris and the EU executive deny this assumption. “Whether you have 12 percent in Ireland, or 33 percent in France, or 15 percent in Germany is irrelevant,” argued Ms Lagarde.

“What matters is what is the ultimate taxation paid by companies. That depends on two things, the tax rate and the basis. Agreeing on the basis would be extremely positive. So we will push for that,” she added.

The commission has set up a special working group which includes national experts to work on calculations of a base which would be acceptable by all countries. Brussels is also awaiting results of an impact assessment study before it tables concrete legislation.

Tax-related issues need to be agreed by unanimity but Mr Kovacs argues the corporate tax base could be kicked off and function even without the group of states which are opposed to the model.

Still, some commission officials suggest presentation of the plan by Brussels has been delayed until the second part of the year due to fears it could negatively influence the referendum on the EU’s new Lisbon treaty in Ireland, scheduled for 12 June.

Doubts over green taxes
Meanwhile, the incoming French presidency is still also hoping to make headway with its joint initiative with Britain on the introduction of reduced VAT rates for energy efficient products, such as light bulbs or refrigerators.

While EU leaders asked the commission to look into the matter at their March summit, several states expressed objections to the idea, with the commission also doubtful about its chances to push it through.

“While in principle everybody would agree, then you run into the issue of what is green and what is not green,” Ms Lagarde admitted, adding: “What is a green product today and what is a green product tomorrow?”

Apart from such technical complications, Mr Kovacs said some countries favour other types of instruments for supporting energy-saving products.

“I think the essence of the French-British proposal is to promote environmentally friendly and energy saving materials, products and appliances. We do agree with that. What is technically the best solution is another question,” the commissioner said.

Also speaking at the tax forum, EU industry commissioner Gunter Verheugen announced he would introduce some basic rules and criteria for all products to prove they are energy-efficient and become eligible for tax incentives.