Why enforce AB 32 when new studies show no global warming?

April 7, 2013

By Warren Duffy

Just a few years ago…

In 2005, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proclaimed of the alleged threat of global warming, “I say the debate is over. . . . We know the science, we see the threat, and we know the time for action is now.”

Along with then-Assembly Speaker Fabio Nunez, Schwarzenegger drafted legislation that became AB 32, the  California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.

In 2006, former Vice President Al Gore produced “An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary about global warming’s supposed threat. The subtitle in the advertisements punned, “A Global Warning.” It won an Academy Award and garnered a Nobel Peace Prize for Gore.

Turn the page to 2013, and the evidence shows that there has been no global warming. A recent headline in The Australian highlighted, “Twenty year hiatus in rising temperatures has climate scientists puzzled.” The sub-headline, “DEBATE about the reality of a two-decade pause in global warming and what it means has made its way from the sceptical fringe to the mainstream.” 

NASA report

A new NASA report reveals, “NASA’s Langley Research Center has collated data proving that ‘greenhouse gases’ actually block up to 95 percent of harmful solar rays from reaching our planet, thus reducing the heating impact of the sun.” This revelation debunks the greenhouse gas (GHG) theory about pesky carbon dioxide (CO2) trapping heat in the earth’s atmosphere, causing the planet to warm.

But AB 32 specifically was designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, a 25 percent reduction. The California Air Resources Board was tasked with implementing AB 32. Yet if the NASA report is correct, increasing such gases as carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide actually protected the planet from solar rays, reducing temperatures.

Despite these recent reports, the global-warming alarmism continues from some quarters.

The Daily Caller recently wrote that earthworms, of all things, are causing accelerated global warming. And you thought those wiggly little buggers simply aerated your garden soil. The report said, “Earthworms play an essential part in determining the greenhouse-gas balance of soils worldwide, and their influence is expected to grow over the next decades. They are thought to stimulate carbon sequestration in soil aggregates but also to increase emissions of the main greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide.”

(Wasn’t sequestration about Washington, D.C. budget economics?)

Despite the earthworms, the consensus lately is one of a 180-degree-turn against the popular notion of the threat of global warming. In March, The Economist published a lengthy article that concluded, “If climate scientists were credit rating agencies … climate sensitivity would be on negative watch — but not yet downgraded.”

If that is the case, have views changed in the U.S. and California governments?  Apparently not.

Carbon auction

CARB continues to move forward with yet another cap-and-trade carbon credit auction, scheduled for May 16, 2013.

In addition, any California businesses using vehicles such as trucks or buses now must comply with CARB’s latest emission standards.  The CARB police are in full force to make doing business in the state all pain and no gain.

At the federal level, President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union Address claimed the last 12 out of 15 years the planet had warmed. He issued an authoritarian warning, “If Congress won’t act to protect future generations — I will.  I will direct my cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take to reduce pollution, prepare our community for the consequences of climate change and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.”

Although federal and state officials so far have not change their policies, one thing they have changed is their rhetoric. In his 2009 Inaugural Address, Obama attacked “the specter of a warming planet.”

But in his 2013 address, that has morphed into “the threat of climate change,” with no mention of global warming. The regulations and the budgets have to be justified somehow.