Archive for the ‘Global Warming’ Category
Dumb policies just keep coming
If 10% ethanol in gasoline is good, 15% (E15) will be even better. At least for some folks. We’re certainly heading in that direction – thanks to animosity toward oil, natural gas and coal, fear-mongering about global warming, and superlative lobbying for “alternative,” “affordable,” “eco-friendly” biofuels. Whether the trend continues, and what unintended consequences will be unleashed, will depend on Corn Belt versus consumer politics and whether more people recognize the downsides of ethanol.
Posted in Global Warming: Our Mistake, Never Mind
In a remarkable monograph, Roy W. Spencer presents hard evidence that 75% of the observed warming since the start of the 20th century is due to natural processes. He offers a detailed model describing how one of these processes, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), operates in the real world. Most importantly, he demonstrates that anthropomorphic global warming (AGW) is a minor contributor to a global climate largely insensitive to man-made CO2.
Destroying biodiversity
By Paul Driessen
Climate chaos is fading as a “central organizing principle for mankind.” However, the United Nations and radical greens have launched a new eco-scare.
The real threat to the planet, they now assert, is the impact of modern energy technologies and civilization on BIODIVERSITY. They intend to counter this new threat by controlling not just land and energy use, but all human activity.
To accept these claims, one would need to believe in the IPCC – and a UN system that will suddenly ensure honesty, transparency, and accountability for misfeasance, misrepresentation, and adverse impacts on people and wildlife. One would also have to ignore this critical fact.
The real threats to the world’s species are environmentalism, misguided environmental policies, and anti-technology zealotry.
The Soviet Union’s demise helped usher in manmade catastrophic global warming as the new “central organizing principle of civilization.” Now, global warming is giving way to a growing recognition that: climate change is primarily natural, cyclical and moderate; China, India and other countries will not sacrifice CO2-generating economic growth to prevent speculative climate crises; and carbon taxes strangle competitiveness, destroy jobs and send families into fuel poverty.
Global Warming Fraud Reflects Too Much Government Money and Power
Government so overwhelmingly funds a cause that it perverts it and makes it a government-supported industry whose purpose is to grow and feed itself like the rest of government. And it grows at the expense of all we hold dear – like freedom, individual rights, productivity – but most especially, truth. This article summarizes this process for the Global Warming fraud and the crisis-driven government-industry complex it has spawned.
Global Warming Fraud Reflects Too Much Government Money and Power
One insidious aspect of huge government is its ability to so overwhelmingly fund a cause that it perverts it. The perverted cause becomes a government-supported industry whose purpose is to grow and feed itself like the rest of government. Its power, control and money grow at the expense of all we hold dear – like freedom, individual rights, productivity – but most especially, truth.
This article summarizes essential points of this aspect for the Global Warming fraud and the crisis-driven government-industry complex it has spawned.
The Global Warming Crisis is only one of several government-sponsored crises that have cut deeply into the rights, social structure, and productivity of the U.S and its citizens. It shows the 4-stage progression to oppression that huge government helps create for the power, control and money it offers itself and its affiliates.
Let me state these steps then tie them to what tyranny the global warming hoax has led us.
4 Stage Progression of Government-Supported Crisis to Tyrannical Control Massive government funding leads through 4 stages to a government and crisis-based affiliated complex that exercises tyrannical control over citizens. These stages are:
Ken Cuccinelli v. 810 academics
Special Bulletin: Academic freedom is not a license to commit fraud
by Paul Driessen
“Scientific debates should be played out in the academic arena,” insists University of Virginia environmental sciences professor David Carr. “If Michael Mann’s conclusions are unsupported by his data, his scientific critics will eventually demonstrate this.”
Carr and 809 other Virginia scientists and academics signed a petition launched by the activist Union of Concerned Scientists, protesting Commonwealth Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s investigation of former University of Virginia professor Michael Mann. The American Association of University Professors likewise opposes Cuccinelli, who is seeking documents from UVA, to determine whether there are grounds to prosecute Mann for violating the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, by presenting false or misleading information in support of applications for state-funded research.
Carr claims Cuccinelli is attempting to “drown out” scientific debate.” Others have accused the AG of conducting a “witch hunt,” engaging in “McCarthyite” tactics, and “restricting academic freedom.”
It’s time to clear a few things up.
Stop the CO2 Madness!
By Alan Caruba
When The New York Times publishes a story, as it did on February 19, regarding the next step in the Obama administration’s intention to destroy the U.S. economy, it’s a very good idea to pay attention.
“E.P.A. Expected to Regulate Carbon Dioxide” was the headline of John M. Broder’s article. “The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to act for the first time to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists blame for the warming of the planet, according to top Obama administration officials.”
Those “top Obama administration officials” are unnamed and so too are the “scientists” claiming that the planet is “warming.” For the record, although you will never read this in The New York Times, the planet is NOT warming. It is COOLING. It has been cooling for a decade now and it is no secret to meteorologists who track the day to day temperatures or climatologists who study long term trends.
On March 8-10, more than 500 of those scientists who dispute the vast global warming hoax will meet in New York for a second international conference on climate change sponsored by The Heartland Institute, a non-profit, free market think tank.
Joining those scientists and others will be Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic and current president of the European Union. Also participating will be Jose Maria Aznar, the former prime minister of Spain, along with American astronaut, Dr. Jack Schmitt, Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other leading scientists who have led the effort to shed the light of truth on the global warming hoax.
You can be sure of one thing. They will all continue to be attacked as crazies denying the “consensus” that Al Gore is always braying about. Science is not about “consensus”, it is about reproducible facts. All the “facts” about melting glaciers, dramatically rising sea levels, and other claims by the GW crowd have been refuted.
The claims of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the basis for the Kyoto Protocols to limit carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have been demolished repeatedly but the mainstream press refuses to report this, nor the fact that the IPCC is a political, not scientific, entity designed to advance the global warming hoax. Many of the scientists initially enticed to participate have since resigned. The vast bulk, easily 80% or more of those cited as IPCC members are not scientists who deal with issues of climate.
The IPCC’s claims have been based entirely on computer models. This in itself should have raised flags long ago. These models, as Hans Schreuder, an analytical chemist, has pointed out, “regard the earth as a flat disk bathed in a constant 24 hour haze of sunlight, without north and south poles, without clouds, and without any relationship to the real planet we live on.”
The claim that rising levels of carbon dioxide are responsible for a global warming that is not happening is entirely without scientific merit and, if for no other reason, should not be the basis for implementing EPA regulation of so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions under the Clean Air Act.
While it is true that there has been an increase in CO2 since the end of the last mini-ice age that lasted from 1500 to 1850, there is no research that demonstrates CO2 and an increase in the Earth’s temperature has any relationship. What warming occurred was entirely natural. Indeed, CO2, at less than 400 parts per million by volume, cannot influence atmospheric temperature or climate in any measurable way.
CO2 represents just 0.038% of the Earth’s atmosphere. The dominant factors in the Earth overall temperature are the Sun, the oceans, and even clouds.
If the U.S. weather service climate models are unable to predict changes in the weather by more than a week’s time, why would anyone believe that the IPCC’s models could predict it twenty, fifty or a hundred years from now?
Despite this, the EPA is tasked to impose regulations on CO2 emissions that would wreck the economy by requiring a “cap-and-trade” of “carbon credits” that would impact every single business and industrial activity. The European Union tried this and it has proved a massive failure and a huge drag on its economy.
Carbon dioxide is not a “pollutant” as the Supreme Court has ruled. How can the Earth’s second most vital gas, other than oxygen, be a pollutant? Not one single piece of vegetation on Earth could exist without CO2. Without vegetation, no animal life including our own could exist on Earth.
The notion that the EPA would regulate it is preposterous. It is absurd. It is criminal. It is immoral. It has no basis whatever in the actual science of the world’s climate. It is based on a massive, global hoax masterminded by the United Nations and carried out by charlatans such as Al Gore and NASA’s James Hansen.
It is, however, the vehicle for the political control of the world’s economy that would fulfill the United Nation’s global government schemes and, if enacted here in America, would mark the destruction of an economy that is the engine of the world’s economy, despite its current difficulties.
The Earth has existed for 4.5 billion years. The assertion that human beings and/or industrial activity have any effect on its atmosphere is an instrument of fascism.
Alan Caruba writes a daily blog at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. Every week, he posts a column on the website of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com.
Stupid Answers to Serious Issues
By Alan Caruba
On “Jeopardy”, the popular quiz show, they have a category called “Stupid Answers” in which the answer is so obvious, posed in the question, that it is virtually impossible to get it wrong.
Unfortunately, we are afflicted by too many stupid answers to very real issues and needs, the most fundamental of which is energy. At the very heart of our society and economy is the dependence upon and need for uninterrupted and increased energy, primarily electricity.
The answers we have been hearing are the worst possible. Over and over again we are told that the U.S. must become more dependent on “alternative, clean” energy, meaning solar and wind energy. These represent about 1% of all the energy the nation consumes at present. Neither comes close to the energy produced by coal which represents over 50% of all the electricity we consume daily. Nuclear produces an additional 20%.
The utility that serves much of New Jersey, my home State, Public Service Electric & Gas recently ran an advertisement headlined “Caution: Blackouts Ahead…” The ad said that “The experts responsible for maintaining reliability on our electric grid flatly predict that we are risking catastrophic power outages in New Jersey if we don’t upgrade our system.”
In the great national debate about the nation’s infrastructure, perhaps no other issue is of more importance, other than the way electricity is produced, than the way it is delivered. Those power lines are the very heart of the way our nation functions. PSE&G is ready to spend $750 million to upgrade its part of the grid, estimated to begin suffering overloads in 2012. Opposing those upgrades is a phalanx of environmental organizations and a regulatory approval process that borders on the insane.
In the meantime, the cost of solar energy credits in New Jersey has jumped to as much as $675 a megawatt-hour for 2009. The credits are paid to solar developers for the energy they produce over a year. The purpose is to boost solar energy production despite the fact that it is the least efficient and most costly way of providing electricity.
$8.6 Billion of Stimulus Plan Earmarked for Pet Causes of Environmental Activists Should Be Jettisoned
$8.6 Billion of Stimulus Plan Earmarked for Pet Causes of Environmental Activists Should Be Jettisoned
Washington, D.C. – At least $8.6 billion of President Obama’s proposed $1.2 trillion stimulus plan is meant to fund dubious special interest policy initiatives of environmental activists and should immediately be jettisoned, says Deneen Borelli, full-time Fellow with the Project 21 national black leadership network.
"It's outrageous that taxpayer money is slated to be used to fund the agenda of environmental special interest groups. These special interest groups are using global warming alarmism to fund dubious projects while discouraging the use of fossil fuels," says Borelli. "If liberal lawmakers really cared about stimulating the economy, they would remove rules and regulations that block the development of more fossil fuels. This would provide good-paying jobs and lower energy costs for Americans. Instead, they appear only interested in using their combined force of money, power and influence to fleece taxpayers of their money and their freedom."
Among the green earmarks in the bill legislation cited by Borelli:
Playing God with “Endangered” Species
By Alan Caruba
In mid-August Barack Obama had this to say about a White House decision regarding the Endangered Species Act: “After over 30 years of successfully protecting our nation’s most endangered wildlife like the bald eagle, we should be looking for ways to improve it, not weaken it.”
The White House executive order would eliminate the need for the advice of government scientists and permit the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of the Department of the Interior and NOAA Fisheries of the Department of Commerce to determine whether to list or de-list an alleged endangered or threatened species.
Here’s an example why this decision was issued. In an effort to ensure that no exploration or drilling for oil could occur anywhere in the habitat of the polar bear, this species was put forward for listing as “endangered” even though its population has been growing steadily since the 1950s.
The reason cited, however, involved the projection of melting sea ice over the course of the next fifty years resulting from global warming. That’s right. A perfectly fine population of polar bears that have been around for millions of years is deemed “endangered” based on computer models for something that is not happening. As Interior Secretary Dick Kempthorne delicately put it, “It is not possible to draw a link between greenhouse gas emissions and distant observations of impacts on species.”
Well, no. It is possible if you are a government scientist with lots of time on your hands, a commitment to the idiotic and discredited notion of global warming, and a need to justify your existence. Or dare I say your survival?
The Earth is not warming. It has been cooling for a decade and many scientists have concluded that the Earth is heading into either another mini-Ice Age or a full-scale one that will pretty much ruin everyone’s plans for anywhere between the next fifty or few thousand years.
A Spotless Sun
By Alan Caruba
There’s a wonderful irony in the fact that, back in the 1970s, the Greens were issuing warnings and even writing books about the coming Ice Age. They would abandon this issue, based in well-known and accepted solar science, in favor of a vast international hoax alleging man-made global warming.
As the global warming hoax begins to lose its power to influence public opinion and policy, the Greens are not likely to be heeded for a long time to come because they were right about an Ice Age and lying through their teeth about global warming.
Scientists and laymen who follow the Ice Age cycles have been warning that, if not a full-fledged Ice Age, at the very least a Little Ice Age comparable to one that lasted from 1300 to around 1850 is on its way
Amidst all the media coverage of Hurricane Gustav and the Republican Convention, a report in DailyTech.com was not likely to get much attention, but it forecast a very cold world in the years to come. The Earth has already started to cool and scientists date the change from 1998.
Headlined, “Drop in solar activity has potential effect for climate on Earth”, the news is that, for the first time in 100 years, “an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.” The author, Michael Asher, noted that “The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity—which determines the number of sunspots—is an influencing factor for climate on Earth.”
My friend, Robert W. Felix, wrote an excellent book on this titled “Not by Fire, but by Ice” ($15.00, Sugarhouse Publishing, softcover, second edition) which can be purchased from his website at IceAgeNow.com.
“We’re beginning to realize that Earth is a violent and dangerous place to live,” wrote Felix. “We’re beginning to realize that mass extinctions have been the rule, rather than the exception, for the 3.5 billion years that life has existed on Earth.”
Felix has a new book soon to be published that addresses magnetic reversals, another cyclical factor affecting life on Earth. “During the last 4.5 million years, at least six out of nine radiolarian extinctions occurred at magnetic reversals.” They appear to be a factor in the sudden emergence of new species so Darwin’s theory is likely to be reexamined.