North by Northwest

Two congressmen introduced the “Moratorium on Uncontrolled Power Plants Act of 2008″ (H.R. 5575) on March 11th, which will place a moratorium on either EPA or states issuing permits to new coal fired power plants without state-of-the-art control technology to capture and permanently sequester the plant’s carbon dioxide emissions. You can find more details on Chairman Waxman’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee page.

“If we lose control of coal, we will have lost control of the climate,” said Markey. “This bill will make companies prepare for the future and prevent them from building low-tech coal-fired power plants before a global warming bill is passed that will necessitate the use of the newest, most climate-friendly technology.”

Without emissions controls, a new coal-fired power plant will emit hundreds of millions of tons of global warming pollution over its 50 year lifetime, the lawmakers said. Over 100 new plants have been proposed, and even if just a portion of these are built, they will emit over a 100 million tons of carbon dioxide a year.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs, discusses the latest climate data and temperature trends. She points out that NASA’s Aqua satellite, launched in 2002, and the results of other recent climate models show that global temperatures have plateaued over the past eight years and that the earth’s climate has shown signs of being able to regulate its temperature more effectively than previously thought.

Here’s an excerpt of the interview:

Duffy asked Marohasy: “Is the Earth stillwarming?”

She replied: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.”

Duffy: “Is this a matter of any controversy?”

Marohasy: “Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued … This is not what you’d expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you’d expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up … So (it’s) very unexpected, not something that’s being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it’s very significant.”

Duffy: “It’s not only that it’s not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there’s any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it’s put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary.”

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