Sen. Alexander on Cap-and Trade

Saturday's mail brought me a form letter from Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN). I had been in contact with his office about the cap-and-trade legislation, urging him to oppose it when it reaches the Senate. Here is what Sen. Alexander had to say:

July 20, 2009

Dr. Morton A. Goldberg
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Lebanon, TN 37087

Dear Morton,

Thanks very much for getting in touch with me and letting me know what's on your mind regarding climate change.

Every two-year Congress since I was elected to the Senate, I have sponsored clean air and climate change legislation that would place caps on carbon emissions from power plants -- but not caps on fuel used for transportation, because that would drive up the price of gasoline. In 2007, Congress passed into law an energy bill that included an amendment I cosponsored that raised fuel economy standards for the first time in 30 years, to an average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020. Telling automakers in this country that they have to make cleaner cars and trucks that use less fuel is the single best way our nation can start curbing our dependence on foreign oil and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The National Academy of Sciences of the United States – as well as the National Academies of Japan, Germany, China, and other nations – has concluded that human activity is having a significant impact on global temperature increases. While I believe it is appropriate for Congress to take reasonable steps to reduce U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases, I'm very reluctant to impose any sort of cap-and-trade, even on power plants, this year in the middle of a big recession. Now is not the time to put a national sales tax on every electric bill and every gasoline purchase.

As a member of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, I'll be deeply involved in this debate and will be sure to keep your comments in mind as climate change is discussed in Washington and in Tennessee.

Sincerely,
/s/ Lamar

Translation: Despite the fact that that he sits on the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works – of which his colleague, the sainted Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), is the Ranking Minority Member – all of the overwhelming evidence against man-made global warming which Sen. Inhofe has assembled in his ongoing Minority Report impresses him not at all.

Sen. Alexander has already accepted as a given that man-made global warming is real, and is only quibbling about the timing and severity of the "corrective" measures he wishes to impose on us. No doubt, I, as one of his constituents, am supposed to be grateful that Sen. Alexander has only partially caved in to the environmental extremists pressing for draconian CO₂ restrictions regardless of their effectiveness in preventing (imaginary) man-made global warming – or their effects upon our national economy and standard of living.

For whatever reason, Sen. Alexander chooses to ignore these inconvenient facts:

1. The most recent ice core evidence shows irrefutably that during the last 650,000 years of Earth's history, rising CO₂ levels have invariably occurred approximately 800 years AFTER warming temperatures, not before. Therefore, rising CO₂ cannot possibly be causing the warming. Instead, it is far more likely to be caused by the warming.
2. As has become increasingly obvious, average temperatures have not risen since 1998 despite the fact that atmospheric CO₂ continues to increase. Instead, we are experiencing record cold temperatures, and may well be entering a period of dramatic cooling.
3. While CO₂ is unquestionably a greenhouse gas, and has been recognized as such for a century, the relationship between its atmospheric concentration and its greenhouse effect is not linear, but logarithmic. In plain English, that means that the CO₂ in the atmosphere is already doing just about all the warming it can do. Doubling its concentration would cause a temperature increase so tiny as to be unmeasurable. In fact, by far the most important greenhouse gas is not CO₂, but water vapor. Its role dwarfs those of CO₂, methane, and oxides of nitrogen combined.
4. As a direct result of the role of water vapor as the primary greenhouse gas, the theory behind man-made global warming posits the existence of an atmospheric "hot spot" located at the top of the troposphere within the tropical latitudes at an altitude of about 10 kilometers (6 miles). Yet, despite the existence of detailed and accurate radiosonde (weather balloon) data going back nearly 50 years and the increasingly desperate efforts of Global Warmists to massage it to fit their theory, no such "hot spot" has been shown to exist. Here, from a paper by Dr. David Evans (PDF), is a graphical comparison: observed data on the left; theorized data derived from computer models on the right. It's a fine example of that old joke, "Who are you going to believe – me or your lying eyes?"
   
   Of course, the reason the Global Warmists are desperate to prove the existence of the non-existent "hot spot" is simple: without it, their theory is obviously erroneous. If their theory is erroneous, then the entire man-made global warming house of cards collapses.
   

Sen. Alexander, with all due respect, in view of the ongoing controversy among qualified climate scientists about the validity of the man-made global warming theory, as well as the threat to our economy from the consequences of well-intentioned, though misguided, legislation, don't you think it might be wiser to hold off on the passage of any laws aimed at controlling our emission of CO₂ until the relevant science has been settled?