Archive for March, 2010

nasa_logo1NASA can put a man on the moon, but the space agency can’t tell you what the temperature was back then.

By Blake Snow

NASA was able to put a man on the moon, but the space agency can’t tell you what the temperature was when it did. By its own admission, NASA’s temperature records are in even worse shape than the besmirched Climate-gate data.

E-mail messages obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that NASA concluded that its own climate findings were inferior to those maintained by both the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) — the scandalized source of the leaked Climate-gate e-mails — and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center.

The e-mails from 2007 reveal that when a USA Today reporter asked if NASA’s data “was more accurate” than other climate-change data sets, NASA’s Dr. Reto A. Ruedy replied with an unequivocal no. He said “the National Climatic Data Center’s procedure of only using the best stations is more accurate,” admitting that some of his own procedures led to less accurate readings.

Read the rest at Fox News.

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Michael Mann

Michael Mann

R.I.P. Global Warming 1992-2010

By Dr. Goldstein

2010 will be remembered as the year Global Warming died.  Global Warming was Mann made using clever computer ‘tricks’ and ‘massaged’ data. After slowly developing in the womb of junk science for several years, the primary birth announcement and christening occurred when Al Gore published Earth in the Balance in 1992.  Gore, the self proclaimed genius who had “created the internet” , eagerly adopted Global Warming and put his new baby in the public spotlight.

 Global Warming was a very good earner who attracteded billions of investor’s dollars to Gore’s for-profit corporation called Generation Investment Management.  From day one Global Warming was all about making money. His detractors dared to call him a fraudster and a control freak who wanted to tell everyone how to live.

Gore’s book was really quite boring and it failed to get Global Warming the attention (and money) Gore felt his baby deserved, so Gore followed up with An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. The movie will go down in history as an excellent example of what happens when one person, with a hidden financial agenda, tells one side of a story.

Despite it’s success, the wildly popular movie was the beginning of the end for Global Warming. It triggered a quick and lethal downward spiral. The movie galvanized scientists who recognized a bogus pseuo-scientific scam when they saw one. Powerful opposition groups formed around the world. Books were written by scholars that destroyed the credibility of Al Gore’s pride and joy.

Global Warming was a cash cow, and his opposition had no money, but the opposition (“skeptics”) had something more powerful than money: The Truth.

Read the rest of this piece at TPM.

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south-park-cowBy Gerald Warner

It is becoming difficult to keep pace with the speed at which the global warming scam is now unravelling. The latest reversal of scientific “consensus” is on livestock and the meat trade as a major cause of global warming – one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to eco-vegetarian cranks. Now a scientific report delivered to the American Chemical Society says it is nonsense. The Washington Times has called it “Cowgate”.

The cow-burp hysteria reached a crescendo in 2006 when a United Nations report ominously entitled “Livestock’s Long Shadow” claimed: “The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalents). This is a higher share than transport.” This led to demands in America for a “cow tax” and a campaign in Europe at the time of the Copenhagen car crash last December called Less Meat=Less Heat.

Now a report to the American Chemical Society by Frank Mitloehner, an air quality expert at the University of California at Davis, has denounced such scare-mongering as “scientifically inaccurate”. He reveals that the UN report lumped together digestive emissions from livestock, gases produced by growing animal feed and meat and milk processing, to get the highest possible result, whereas the traffic comparison only covered fossil fuel emissions from cars. The true ratio, he concludes, is just 3 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in America are attributable to rearing of cattle and pigs, compared with 26 per cent from transport.

Mitloehner also makes the deadly serious point: “Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries.” Precisely. The demonising of cows and pigs is just another example of global warmists’ callous indifference to starvation in the developing world, as in the case of the unbelievably immoral and reckless drive for biofuels – pouring Third World resources for subsistence into Western liberals’ fuel tanks – and, notoriously, carbon trading.

Week by week the AGW collapse intensifies. Himalayan glaciers, polar bears, Arctic ice, Amazon rainforests, all discredited. Now it turns out the great cow-burp scare is bovine excrement too. The global warming scam is, to the majority of people, an object of derision. The scientific community has also at last wakened up. They are smelling the coffee in more and more institutions these days.

Read the rest of this article at the London Telegraph.

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jerry-lewisBy “Mostly Harmless”

A new study suggests that the IPCC is losing 10% of it’s credibility mass every month, and could have completely disappeared by Christmas.”It’s shrinking faster that we thought” said Anthony Watts the renowned skeptical blogger, who led a small team of dedicated bloggers, analysing over 10,000 news articles and blogs on the Internet. “Not one of them contained the phrase ‘The IPCC is innocent’”, explained Mr. Watts, “Not even their unofficial web-site RealClimate.org

Intrepid Spoof reporters sought comments worldwide. Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, the eminent Himalayan glacier expert, was interviewed as he emerged from his hairdresser’s salon in downtown Delhi. “It’s a travesty!” he exclaimed, “I have newspaper cuttings and a 1988 photograph to prove it”.

Dr. Pachauri posed for photographs before he continued. “There was just one small error” he explained. “They wrote their reports in English. If they’d used Sanskrit, none of this would have happened”.

Dr. Pachauri spoke briefly to other reporters before posing for more photographs, and was then whisked off in his motorcade to a special meeting of the Railway Engineers Society of India, where he’s to be given a lifetime service award.

AGW skeptic Viscount Monckton of Brenchley commented “It doesn’t surprise me – if you’re striving for a New World Order you can expect a few minor scandals, though they’ve had a lot of major goofs. There’s probably a world lecture tour in this for me – privately, I’m laughing my socks off”.

This reporter sought out climate expert Dr. James Hansen in his office, surrounded by computer screens, charts and bottles of Tipp-ex and Liquid Paper.

“You shouldn’t believe these people” he fumed, waving his arms about. “They don’t use any peer-reviewed sources”.

When asked what he was currently working on, Dr. Hansen outlined his past work on eliminating the Inconvenient Warm Period -

“What did the Vikings know? They couldn’t even write, let alone submit an article to a mainstream journal. I’ve just proved that the last decade was the warmest since NOAA’s flood, and that the Arctic saw record temperatures, using interpolated gridded data based on minimal evidence. I’m currently working on LIAR – that’s Little Ice Age Redaction, and I’ll show you my work in progress” he said, knocking over a bottle of correcting fluid as he reached for a large chart.

Dr. Hansen is currently slated to be nominated for an Albert award this year, the supreme accolade for climate scientists and statisticians. This is awarded by the Gore-Bull Warming Institute, on the first day in the year that the temperature exceeds 85 Fahrenheit, as measured by the sensor located next to the engine-testing area at Dulles International airport. Because of this, nominees have to be prepared to travel at very short notice.

Head of the UK Met Office, John Hirst, said “This is nonsense, though we could have forecast a lesser effect if we’d not abandoned our long-range forecasts last month because of lack of interest”. He continued “We believe in openness and accountability, which is why we’re making available all our temperature data, along with the Sinclair ZX80 Basic program we use to adjust the data whenever we feel like it”.

Read the rest of this SATIRE at The Spoof.

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james-delingpoleBy James Delingpole

The Royal Society (Motto: Nullius in Verba Unless It’s About Global Warming In Which Case We’re Happy To Believe Whatever Unsubstantiated Drivel We’re Fed By Michael Mann, Phil Jones, et al) has announced who’ll be chairing its “independent” inquiry into the science behind the Climategate scandal.

And guess what? The man could scarcely be more parti pris if they’d given the job to Al Gore.

His name is Lord Oxburgh and, as Bishop Hill reports, he is:

  • President of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association
  • Chairman of wind energy firm Falck Renewables
  • A member of the Green Fiscal Commission

So the chairman of this “independent panel” has a direct financial interest in the outcome.

Read the rest of this article at the London Telegraph.

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antarctic_tempBy Ben Webster

The Science Museum is revising the contents of its new climate science gallery to reflect the wave of scepticism that has engulfed the issue in recent months.

The decision by the 100-year-old London museum reveals how deeply scientific institutions have been shaken by the public’s reaction to revelations of malpractice by climate scientists.

The museum is abandoning its previous practice of trying to persuade visitors of the dangers of global warming. It is instead adopting a neutral position, acknowledging that there are legitimate doubts about the impact of man-made emissions on the climate.

Even the title of the £4 million gallery has been changed to reflect the museum’s more circumspect approach. The museum had intended to call it the Climate Change Gallery, but has decided to change this to Climate Science Gallery to avoid being accused of presuming that emissions would change the temperature.

Last October the museum launched a temporary exhibition called “Prove It! All the evidence you need to believe in climate change”. The museum said at the time that the exhibition had been designed to demonstrate “through scientific evidence that climate change is real and requires an urgent solution”.

Chris Rapley, the museum’s director, told The Times that it was taking a different approach after observing how the climate debate had been affected by leaked e-mails and overstatements of the dangers of global warming. He said: “We have come to realise, given the way this subject has become so polarised over the past three to four months, that we need to be respectful and welcoming of all views on it.”

Read the rest of this story at the London Times.

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Cooling WorldBy Paul Hudson

I am indebted to Dr Jarl Ahlbeck, from Abo Akademi University, Finland, who contacted me about his fascinating new piece of research relating to this winters severe cold across much of Europe, and a possible link to the very low solar activity we have been experiencing.

I am aware that there is a hugely varied readership of my blog; those who are very well informed about weather and climate, and others that have an interest in the subject but would struggle with some of the details contained in scientific papers. I have thus asked the author to summarize the main points of the research, and will include a link to the paper for those that feel brave enough to look into it themselves.

Dr Ahlbeck writes:

Historically, low solar activity periods like the Dalton and Maunder Minima have been connected to cold winters in Europe. It seems very possible that the low solar activity forced areas of low pressures into a southern route or caused a negative Arctic Oscillation, AO, which in turn allowed cold air from the North Pole to flow across Europe. But can we obtain from real measurements that low solar activity really is able to do that?

I found that the mechanism is statistically significant, but it is not very simple to prove. There is no direct statistical relationship saying that low solar activity always should cause a negative Arctic Oscillation (which caused cold air to push further south than normal). But if we consider a second natural parameter, the strength and direction of the stratospheric wind in the Tropics (the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation index, QBO) I found a very interesting result: During periods of low solar activity (few or no sunspots) an easterly QBO causes a negative AO, but a westerly QBO causes a positive AO.

However, during low solar activity the easterly QBO causes a considerably stronger negative AO than the westerly QBO is able to cause a positive AO. Furthermore, easterly QBO is more common than westerly QBO during the Nordic Hemisphere winter.

The conclusion of my work is clear. If the sun goes into a new Dalton and Maunder minimum, we can therefore expect extremely cold winters in North America, Europe and Russia – which is exactly what was experienced during both the Maunder minimum (1600′s) and the Dalton minimum (early 1800′s).”

Read the rest at BBC – Paul Hudson.

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obama-200From Breitbart News:

After a hard-fought victory on health care reform, President Barack Obama’s allies in Congress are pledging to move forward on climate change — but some environmentalists remain skeptical.
Twenty-two Democratic senators have signed a letter calling for climate legislation within the year, although some observers question whether the White House will want another divisive vote as November midterm elections approach.Senator John Kerry, the chief architect of climate legislation, said White House officials can now “pour their energy and attention” into the issue after Sunday’s down-to-the-wire vote on expanding health care coverage.

“In the wake of health care’s passage, we have a strong case to make that this can be the next breakthrough legislative fight,” the Massachusetts Democrat argued on Monday.

“Climate legislation is the single best opportunity we have to create jobs, reduce pollution and stop sending billions overseas for foreign oil from countries that would do us harm,” Kerry said.

“If we sell those arguments, we’ve got a winning issue on jobs, on security and on public health. This can happen.”

Read the rest at Breitbart News.

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1uxfqdhta4beoz8uus5m1tuieb3y1r2In climate-change discussions, two Princeton professors go against the grain

By Mark F. Bernstein

The issue of climate change, or global warming, has become a rallying cry: The Earth’s surface temperatures are ­rising due to increased levels of carbon dioxide and other ­greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, much of it produced by human activity. Unless action is taken, and soon, global warming could cause crops to fail and sea levels to rise, leading to ­widespread social disruptions and endangering many species of life on the planet. President Obama, who has renewed the American commitment to combating this problem, declared at the recent United Nations ­climate-change conference in Copenhagen: “Climate change threatens us all.”

That’s one thing scientists agree on, right? Well, not everyone.

In some quarters, climate change has become almost a civic religion. Like any religion it has its priests — Al   Gore, perhaps — and its holy books — think Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth or his more provocatively titled best-seller, Earth in the Balance. It also has its heretics — doubters — and not all of them are outside the scientific community. Even among scientists, there are a few who dispute the certainty that global warming is a looming catastrophe. Two of the most vocal dissenters are professors in the Princeton physics department: William Happer *64 and Robert Austin.  

One person’s skeptic is another person’s crackpot, of course, and so climate dissenters have come in for much public abuse. Happer, the Cyrus Fogg Bracket Professor of Physics, got into a contretemps with Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, while testifying last year before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Boxer derided Happer’s testimony as “the most extraordinary argument I have ever heard” and warned, “I will fight you.” The exchange, which ended up on YouTube, was seized upon by bloggers on both sides of the debate, many of whom added their own, decidedly ad hominem, comments.

Temperatures indeed have risen, so to speak — at least in the world of physics. Happer says he’s been attacked verbally over the issue both inside and outside academia, including at Princeton. He claims that climate-change orthodoxy has had a chilling effect that has made some junior faculty around the country reluctant to voice support for his position out of fear of hurting their chances for tenure. Austin, however, says that in his experience, the Princeton physics department “has been great” and very tolerant of climate skeptics.

In an interview last year with The Daily Princetonian, Happer characterized hostility toward climate skeptics in harsh terms. “This is George Orwell,” he said. “This is ‘the Germans are the master race. The Jews are the scum of the earth.’ It’s that kind of propaganda.” In an e-mail following an interview for this article, he warns against “the capture of U.S. society” by a “scientific-technological elite.”

Although Happer credits some of his willingness to brave personal and professional criticism as an expression of his Huguenot ancestry, he adds that he has spent much of his career studying the interaction of visible and infrared radiation with gases, one of the driving forces of the greenhouse effect, which posits that CO2 in the atmosphere absorbs and redirects infrared radiation, causing temperatures to rise. Happer joined the Princeton faculty in 1980, leaving in 1991 to become director of energy research at the U.S. Depart­ment of Energy, where one of his responsibilities was to supervise the department’s work on climate change. In 1993, however, shortly after President Clinton took office, Happer testified at a House hearing that he believed that “there has been some exaggeration” concerning the dangers of ozone and climate change, an act of apostasy that he says led to his being replaced.

Since returning to the faculty, Happer has gained distinction for his work in other fields. He helped patent an invention that provides high-resolution images of the human lung. From 1995 to 2005, he led the University Research Board, which advises the University president on all research conducted at Princeton. He currently runs a lab in atomic physics and is chairman of the board of directors of the George C. Marshall Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based think tank founded by Frederick Seitz *34, himself a climate-change dissenter before his death in 2008.

Austin, a biophysicist, says that he had always “bought the party line” on climate change until he began talking to Happer. “I’ve always known Will Happer as a guy who usually has creative and insightful things to say that are not part of the mainstream,” Austin explains. Happer explained his disagreements with the climate-change consensus and brought Austin around to his position. Austin has since visited the Greenland glaciers with physicist Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study — another ­climate-change skeptic — and says that while some glaciers may be shrinking at the edges, evidence suggests that they may be getting thicker in the middle.  

Much of the climate-change debate centers on a 2007 statement adopted by the American Physics Society (APS), a leading professional association of physicists: “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security, and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, beginning now.”

Austin, Happer, and a handful of other scientists urged the APS to rescind this statement in favor of one stating, “While substantial concern has been expressed that emissions may cause significant climate change, measured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20th- and 21st-century climate changes are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today.” It goes on to say that other forces, such as ocean cycles and solar variability, also might account for rising temperatures. “Current climate models,” it concludes, “appear insufficiently reliable to properly account for natural and anthropogenic contributions to past climate change, much less project future climate.” More than 160 past and present members of the APS signed their petition, including two other Princeton faculty members: Salvatore Torquato, a professor of chemistry, and Syzmon Suckewer, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

Read the rest of this article in Princeton Alumni Weekly.

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rainforestBy Gerald Warner

Oops! There go another two bricks, tumbling out of the IPCC wall of deceit on man-made global warming – there is not a lot left now; even the Berlin Wall (to which the AGW construct is ideologically allied) has survived better. Unhappily for Al, Phil, Michael, George and the rest of the scare-mongers, these two discredited components are among the most totemic in the AGW religion.Firstly, a new study, funded by Nasa (which may be feeling the need to rehabilitate itself post-Climategate) has revealed that the ridiculous claim in the notorious IPCC 2007 report that up to 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest could be drastically affected by even a small reduction in rainfall caused by climate change, so that the trees would be replaced by tropical grassland, is utter nonsense. That assertion has already been exposed as derived from a single report by the environmentalist lobby group WWF.

Now Dr Jose Marengo, a climate scientist with the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research and himself a member of the IPCC, says: “The way the WWF report calculated this 40 per cent was totally wrong, while (the new) calculations are by far more reliable and correct.” These calculations were done by researchers at Boston University and were published in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters. They used satellite data to study the drought of 2005, when rainfall fell to the lowest in living memory, and found that the rainforest suffered no significant effects.

Read the rest of this article at the London Telegraph.

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Al Gore hunts manbearpig in South Park

Al Gore hunts manbearpig in South Park

By Rich Trzupek

It’s time to wrap up The Heretics series. We haven’t come close to covering all of the scientists and researchers who question the tenets of global warming alarmism, but the small sampling of prominent skeptics featured on these pages should be enough to make it obvious that significant, sincere and scientifically valid arguments exist that refute the Gorethodoxy of so-called “climate change.”

In addition to the heretics we have featured, there are legions of others. Atmospheric physicists Fred Singer at the University of Virginia, Richard Lindzen at MIT and legendary meteorologist John Coleman, just to name a few, have been out on the front lines, waging a battle for scientific integrity, for years. The Heartland Institute, a cornucopia of information about global warming, has published the names of hundreds of skeptical scientists. More than thirty thousand scientists, including this one, have lent their names to the Global Warming Petition Project, declaring that they agree with the following statement:

“We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

The myth of scientific consensus on global warming, once so prevalent, has been discredited to the point that only die-hard liberal policy makers still cling to it. About fifty percent of Americans now believes that natural planetary trends are responsible for climate change and public support for greenhouse gas regulation continues to dwindle. The alarmists are scrambling to repackage their message in hopes of rekindling the global warming fire, but they face daunting challenges. One can only cry wolf so many times before people start to tune you out.

When Al Gore’s disciples attempt to discredit skeptics, aka “denialists” in their world, they usually stick to a couple of themes. The first is to label the individual in question as a corporate stooge, usually with alleged ties to Exxon-Mobil, who has sold out science in exchange for a fat paycheck. The second is to declare that the skeptic is a crackpot who doesn’t really understand the science involved and is simply making wild, unverifiable assertions with no basis in reality. Neither claim can survive close scrutiny.

Read the rest of this piece at FrontPageMag.

See the rest of “The Heretics” series here.

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al-gore-bd-suitThe Meltdown of the Climate Campaign

By Steven F. Hayward

It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago-changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media-even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC-are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying “It is too so!” In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.

Read the rest of this article at the Weekly Standard.

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pollMultiple indicators show less concern, more feelings that global warming is exaggerated

By Frank Newport

Gallup’s annual update on Americans’ attitudes toward the environment shows a public that over the last two years has become less worried about the threat of global warming, less convinced that its effects are already happening, and more likely to believe that scientists themselves are uncertain about its occurrence. In response to one key question, 48% of Americans now believe that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated, up from 41% in 2009 and 31% in 1997, when Gallup first asked the question.

Read the rest and see the charts at Gallop.

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epa-200x200By Siobhan Hughes (Dow Jones)

Governors of 18 U.S. states on Wednesday urged Congress to stop “harmful” Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse-gas emissions, saying the agency isn’t equipped to deal with “the very real potential for economic harm.”

The governors, led by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, made their request in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and their Republican counterparts. The letter was also signed by Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican who has been cited as a possible contender in the 2012 presidential election.

“We feel compelled to guard against a regulatory approach that would increase the cost of electricity and gasoline prices, manufactured products, and ultimately harm the competitiveness of the U.S. economy,” the governors wrote. “We strongly urge Congress to stop harmful EPA regulation of greenhouse-gas emissions that could damage those vital interests.”

The Obama administration’s EPA fired back that it “rejects the premise that addressing greenhouse gases threatens the economy,” saying that other EPA actions “have led to innovations and the creation of new markets that can spur economic growth.” The EPA “will continue to follow the law and the science, which overwhelmingly indicates climate change is a real and growing threat to the American people,” spokesman Brendan Gilfillan said in a statement.

The governors’ letter, signed mostly by Republicans, intensifies a battle with the Obama administration’s EPA as it prepares to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from vehicles and stationary sources such as power plants. The rules are due to be finalized by the EPA later this month. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has said the regulations for power plants, factories and oil refineries will be effective on a delayed basis, beginning in 2011, allowing companies extra time to plan ahead.

Coal, oil and manufacturing states have warned of the costs of complying, which could involve equipment purchases and other spending. In Congress, multiple measures are pending to hinder the EPA. One measure, from coal-state lawmakers including Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., W.Va.) would suspend EPA regulations for two years. Another measure, led by oil-state Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska) would overturn the EPA regulations.

“A simple delay of EPA action will do nothing to provide relief to Americans looking for jobs or businesses looking to make new investments in our states,” the governors wrote in urging Congress to stop the EPA outright and to pass comprehensive energy legislation. “Furthermore, such delay of EPA action only creates more uncertainty in a difficult fiscal environment.”

The letter emboldened Republicans already at odds with the EPA. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R, Okla.) said in a statement that the EPA should “stop this tax and the regulatory nightmare it will create, and work with Congress to pass an all-of-the-above energy plan that means more jobs, more energy, and more security for America.”

Read the rest at the Wall Street Journal.

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