In what could be one of the most significant regulatory changes since its founding, the EPA has moved toward imposing limits on greenhouse gases with a finding that such gases now present a “serious problem . . . for future generations.” The move could have widespread environmental benefits apart from climate change in forcing more fuel efficient cars and greater limitations on power plants and industrial sources.
The EPA finding of endangerment prepares allows for the EPA to act if Congress fails to do so. The finding will unite powerful industry lobby groups for utilities, car manufacturers and others in seeking to delay or stop the change. More worrisome is the fact that such regulations take a ridiculously long time — even without such concerting opposition. That would mean that the new Administration could easily stop the process. The Bush Administration previously opposed moved to use the Clean Air At to address climate change, but the Supreme Court found that such regulations is allowed — requiring, however, the “endangerment finding” issued by the EPA.
Here is the release from the EPA:
WASHINGTON – On January 1, 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will, for the first time, require large emitters of heat-trapping emissions to begin collecting greenhouse gas (GHG) data under a new reporting system. This new program will cover approximately 85 percent of the nation’s GHG emissions and apply to roughly 10,000 facilities.
“This is a major step forward in our effort to address the greenhouse gases polluting our skies,” said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson. “For the first time, we begin collecting data from the largest facilities in this country, ones that account for approximately 85 percent of the total U.S. emissions. The American public, and industry itself, will finally gain critically important knowledge and with this information we can determine how best to reduce those emissions.”
EPA’s new reporting system will provide a better understanding of where GHGs are coming from and will guide development of the best possible policies and programs to reduce emissions. The data will also allow businesses to track their own emissions, compare them to similar facilities, and provide assistance in identifying cost effective ways to reduce emissions in the future. This comprehensive, nationwide emissions data will help in the fight against climate change.
Greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, are produced by burning fossil fuels and through industrial and biological processes. Fossil fuel and industrial GHG suppliers, motor vehicle and engine manufacturers, and facilities that emit 25,000 metric tons or more of CO2 equivalent per year will be required to report GHG emissions data to EPA annually. This threshold is equivalent to about the annual GHG emissions from 4,600 passenger vehicles.
The first annual reports for the largest emitting facilities, covering calendar year 2010, will be submitted to EPA in 2011. Vehicle and engine manufacturers outside of the light-duty sector will begin phasing in GHG reporting with model year 2011. Some source categories included in the proposed rule are still under review.
More information on the new reporting system and reporting requirements: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/ghgrulemaking.html
It is a great holiday gift for environmentalists and public health advocates. It is a particularly wonderful gift for our children who will bear the costs of these pollutants to a greater degree than ourselves.
Source:PhySorg
“Whoever chose Gore as the GW spokesperson…”
I think the person who made that decision goes by the name of Albert Arnold Gore Jr.
I don’t think he’s as bad as he’s painted, but he has proven to be a handy target for a certain kind of political opposition to science. I’m quite surprised at the number of people who don’t recall Mrs Thatcher’s speech to the UN General Assembly over 20 years ago, in which she eloquently advocated international action to curb the threat of global warming.
Bdaman,
I think that your mostly anecdotal, often pseudoscientific posts are necessary to illustrate all sides of this important issue.
However, since you are not a scientist, your advocacy and spokesperson’s position against global warming are as questionable as nonscientist Al Gore’s position of championing that global warming is fact, not fiction.
Whoever chose Gore as the GW spokesperson made an egregious, *gory* error—he is as big a buffoon as any of the most stringent GW deniers.
“1934 has long been considered the warmest year of the past century.”
Not on this planet! The United States only occupies a small proportion of the earth’s surface, and 1934 is something like the 47th hottest year on record, way down the list.
I long ago tired of unwinding the misconceptions, misrepresentations and outright lies of the entrenched science deniers, but it’s occasionally fun to point out the most blatant and egregious falsehoods.
Now kindly stop embarrassing yourself like this and visit a sensible website such as Skeptical Science where your many, many misconceptions will be corrected in the minutest detail by people who have mastered an almost saintly patience which I, to my shame, lack.
Lets put it another way.
If 9 months out of a year show no increase or a slight decrease in global temperature and you have three months that were abnormally hot is this the same as 12 months in a row of warmer temperatures?
Another one for you Dr.Slarti
SCOTLAND’S wind farms are unable to cope with the freezing weather conditions – grinding to a halt at a time when electricity demand is at a peak, forcing the country to rely on power generated by French nuclear plants.
http://news.scotsman.com/news/39Green39-Scotland-relying-on-French.6672024.jp
Bdaman,
If you want to discuss ‘temperature’ as a metric, then you need to define what is meant by it. Consider a function which tells us the total energy of any region of the atmosphere (as well as the temperature and energy absorption/reflection characteristics for every location on the surface of the Earth) – this function would essentially tell us the state of the climate. Now what does saying
“If global temperatures are plus one degree for six months because of warming and minus 1 degree for six months because of cooling, what does that equal.”
mean in that context? Like I said, you’re applying a naive understanding and complaining that it doesn’t make sense – that’s like trying to argue against the quantum tunneling of electrons on the grounds that Newtonian mechanics says it’s impossible.
The year 2010 is likely to be recorded as the warmest ever recorded in terms of global average temperature
See this post above
Bdaman 1, December 29, 2010 at 6:55 pm
and read this and you might get a clue.
1934 has long been considered the warmest year of the past century. A decade ago, the closest challenger appeared to be 1998, a super-el nino year, but it trailed 1934 by 0.54°C (0.97°F). Since then, NASA GISS has “adjusted” the U.S. data for 1934 downward and 1998 upward (see December 25, 2010 post by Ira Glickstein) in an attempt to make 1998 warmer than 1934 and seemingly erased the original rather large lead of 1934 over 1998. The last phases of the strong 2009-2010 el nino in early 2010 made this year another possible contender for the warmest year of the century. However, December 2010 has been one of the coldest Decembers in a century in many parts of the world, so 2010 probably won’t be warmer than 1998. But does it really matter? Regardless of which year wins the temperature adjustment battle, how significant will that be? To answer that question, we need to look at a much longer time frame‒centuries and millennia.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/28/2010%E2%80%94where-does-it-fit-in-the-warmest-year-list/
It’s unfortunate that discussions like this always seem to attract die-hard denialists. The year 2010 is likely to be recorded as the warmest ever recorded in terms of global average temperature, and is part of a continuing trend that is almost impossible to account for without the quite large increase in industrial and agricultural greenhouse has emissions and associated feedback cycles–known colloquially as global warming.
The EPA was ordered to take action under the Clean Air Act by the Supreme Court, should the greenhouse gas emissions pose a hazard to general health. It has been determined beyond all reasonable doubt that they do.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/no-correlation-between-arctic-ice-and-northern-hemisphere-snow-extent/
There has been amazing amounts of noise from the climate science community claiming that the extensive snow cover this year is due to a lack of Arctic ice. But as you can see in the graph above, there is no correlation between Arctic ice extent and snow cover. Some years have more snow, some years have less snow. Arctic ice has nothing to do with it.
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/table_area.php?ui_set=0&ui_sort=1
You can continue to tell yourself that your posts are good arguments for your point of view, but I think it is readily apparent to most people reading that the opposite is true…
And you can make all the excuses you want, but if you are going to argue the contraction of Northern Hemisphere sea ice is a sign of warming, since the continents are warmed because of previous ocean cycles, then you can’t walk away from the reality of what has to be going on in the southern hemisphere with the most ocean, and hence a higher energy consideration where sea ice is increasing! Only in a world of fantasy can you think you can have it both ways!!! And the physics of the situation argues against you trying to use the temperature as a metric to determine whether the climate is actually warming in a permanent fashion, or there is simply a distortion of where temperatures are being measured higher, since the amount of energy DECREASES rapidly with temp loss. It takes next to nothing to raise temps that much in the Arctic; it takes a heck of a lot to drop them in the tropics!!!
it is you that is so intellectually lazy that you decide whether or not you believe it based solely on what Vice President Gore said.
he’s the one who said the science is settled there will be no more debate.
If global temperatures are plus one degree for six months because of warming and minus 1 degree for six months because of cooling, what does that equal.
See what I mean about common sense.
No, it’s not – you just don’t understand that the additional energy in the system (the earth) due to an increase of global mean temperature could result in the destabilization of the system which would result in more extreme weather
It takes much less energy to warm a gas 10 degrees from the surface up when the average temp is let’s say 0, then it does to cool the atmosphere a few degrees where the normal temp is 40. And when you try to quantify the amount of energy being lost in the tropical Pacific by the cooling there, it BLOWS AWAY the warming in the Arctic.
Try this
In the last 25 years there has been an accelerating reduction in thermometer counts globally with the pace of deletion rising rapidly in recent years. Over 6000 stations were active in the mid-1990s. Just over 1000 are in use today.
Many of the thermometers were (and still are) located in Polar Regions. For example, Canada has 100 perfectly usable weather stations inside the Arctic Circle-but only one at Eureka on Ellesmere Island – is used by government-funded climatologists.
The confirmation bias of climate modelers also skews the data for weather forecasters, as succinctly shown by E.M Smith who calls this the Bolivia Effect. Smith tells us that, “There has not been any thermometer data for Bolivia in GHCN since 1990.”
Why is that significant? Well, Bolivia is one of the 5,000 ‘cooler’ weather stations that climatologists have conveniently dumped from the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN).
Artic has been virtually stripped of thermometers.
This thermometer cull is especially worrisome when we learn that U.S. climate scientists as GISS delete Sea Surface Temperature data from the Arctic Ocean, and a third of data from Antarctica. Now polar temperatures have to be based on thermometers 1,200km away!
Bdaman posted:
You can continue to tell yourself that your posts are good arguments for your point of view, but I think it is readily apparent to most people reading that the opposite is true…
try this little experiment
check the temerature of the air above your kitchen counter
now cover the counter with ice cubes.
let the ice cubes melt
now check the temperature of the air off to one side of the melted cubes
colder ain’t it
COPENHAGEN, Denmark, December 14, 2009 (ENS) – Snow and ice across the planet are melting much faster than anticipated, and the cryosphere – the Earth’s ice and snow cover – is very vulnerable to climate change, finds a new report presented today at the United Nations Climate Summit by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.
Snow cover is diminishing, and glaciers from the Himalayas to the Alps are melting rapidly, with the greatest reductions in the Andes and the Rockies, the report shows.
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/dec2009/2009-12-14-02.html
Again nothing about record snows due to global warming
United Nations Environment Programme
IPCC report also highlights effective measures for adapting to the expected impacts of climate change
Geneva, 10 April 2007 – An in-depth assessment of climate change impacts, vulnerability and adaptation in the European region confirms that the continent has already witnessed many of the early impacts of climate change.
?Having just experienced the warmest winter on record, Europeans can clearly see that their climate is changing, and changing rapidly?, said Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, which, together with the World Meteorological Organization, established the IPCC in 1988.
?Many of the additional changes anticipated over the coming decades are disturbing, while those that may at first glance seem attractive to some people ? such as warmer northern winters ? will come with many local drawbacks and at a high price for the world as a whole.?
http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=504&ArticleID=5560&l=en
Didn’t see anything about record snows
record cold weather is evidence against his point of view rather than for it…
Thats a lie, if global warming creates global cooling then they cancel each other out. Also if 1998 and 2005 along with 2010 where was the cold weather then. Why didn’t Al Gore tell us this in his crusade, he made no mention of it except it will continue to get hotter and winters will be warmer with less snow.
We should subsidize alternative energy sources in order to encourage investment in the technology so it improves to the point where it can compete on its own.
It doesn’t matter how much you subsidize, if it doesn’t work it doesn’t work.