California Must Repeal AB 32 after Copenhagen

The much-heralded Copenhagen climate change summit meeting is now over, having accomplished nothing except to highlight the lack of agreement, the presence of mistrust, and the greed of impoverished countries. The utter failure at Copenhagen should provide the impetus for California to repeal the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, AB 32.

In a civilized society, the state should make laws based on sound science, not falsified, twisted, unverified, manipulated or made-up data. What makes California's lawmakers believe the discredited IPCC reports, which are now known to have been part of a polluted peer-review process in which any dissenting view was quashed? The Climategate scandal, in which thousands of emails and other documents pertaining to climate changes over the past hundreds and thousands of years were obtained and released onto the Internet, clearly shows that the entire concept of imminent catastrophe due to greenhouse gases is not true.

When proving his client's case in a court of law, the attorney takes the witness, sometimes an expert witness, through point after point. The wise attorney establishes the broader, fundamental, indisputable points first, then moves on to the more detailed points. Then, in the cross-examination, the opposing attorney has the opportunity to tear down the witness' testimony. Where the detailed points do not conform to the indisputable broader points, the cross-examination can get ugly. The witness loses all credibility and his/her testimony is generally not believed by the jury.

What the climate science has shown is that the detailed points do not coincide with the broader, fundamental points. As examples, a fine point is that, according to the warmists and the IPCC, a modest increase in CO2 in the atmosphere will cause runaway global warming via polar ice caps melting, sea level rise, more numerous and more ferocious tropical cyclones (hurricanes), searing droughts, devastating heat waves, greater geographic range for deadly tropical disease, more acidic oceans, and many others. Yet the fundamental, indisputable point is that CO2 has been much higher in the past than today, and not one of those dire consequences occurred. As has been pointed out before, even when CO2 reached several thousand ppm, the earth did not experience the out-of-control warming that is predicted by the IPCC. Instead, ice ages occurred afterward.

We can also examine the recent record before us, in the case of California and AB 32. The dire predictions were for greater incidence of heat waves, rising sea levels, shrinking snow pack, and some others. All these were blamed squarely on the increase of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. As I make clear in my speech on AB 32, none of the predicted catastrophes is occurring, yet CO2 continues to increase. The past few years shows very few heat waves across the state, defined as several days where air conditioning is so great that the power companies struggle to meet the demand. One can examine the state's power demand at this site. Another site that displays graphs for temperature in Los Angeles shows only one short period in 2007 (September 2 and 3) where temperature reached 100 degrees F. One other hot event occurred in 2008, September 30 and October 1. In 2009, the temperature reached 100 degrees on four days, twice in late August and twice in late September. In contrast, October 2009 for the entire state was one of the coldest for that month in the entire temperature record. November 2009 was only barely above the long-term average (approximately 0.3 deg F above average). December of 2009 is, thus far, much colder than average across the entire state.

Sea levels offshore California are dropping, not increasing as predicted by the global warming alarmists.

The snowpack in the Sierras has alternated between periods of plenty and shortages, with the recent storms packing the snow throughout the Sierras. If rising CO2 was actually the cause of reduced snowpack, how does one explain the recent heavy snows?

Finally, it has been proven that changing CO2 levels will not have any effect on the earth's average temperature, because that would violate the fundamentals of process control.

Had the IPCC reports been based on physics, with due accounting for known events in the past, and with due care to ensure there is a measurable, consistent response of the earth's atmospheric temperature to a change in CO2, then AB 32 could be considered a good law. But the opposite is true. AB 32 was based on bad science, manipulated data, a perverted peer-review process, and therefore cannot be allowed to stand. It must be repealed.

Roger E. Sowell, Esq.