Great Pumpkin soon upon us

FROM-Washinton Times

By Wesley Pruden


The Senate is losing its grip on unreality, so it may be up to whoever can teach manners to cows and pigs to save us from the consequences of global warming. (We're supposed to call it "climate change" now, but some of us, being strict constructionists, remain faithful to the original text as set down by the founding father, Al Gore.)

Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, a leading Democrat, says he now has "serious reservations" about Sen. Barbara Boxer's global-warming bill, and if he deserts Babs and her coterie of climate hysterics there may be no global-warming legislation this year. This would probably suit most senators, even those who would have to vote for it.

Babs and her like-minded Senate colleagues want to get the legislation passed quickly, just like the health care "reform" legislation, and for the same reason. The longer the wait, the more it smells. A lot of legislation, like mackerel and other fishes, must be consumed quickly, or else not at all. Babs, Al and their congressional friends and colleagues must hurry, before the multitudes notice that the sky is still safely overhead.

Certain kooks insist that we don't have much time before everything goes poof, anyway. The year 2012 is often cited as the year the cosmic screen will go dark, perhaps when the Hadron Collider will either swallow our globe whole, like a python breakfasting on the family dog, or reduce the globe to the size of a tennis ball. "Imagine seven billion of us trying to stand on a tennis ball," observes Rod Liddle in the London Spectator. "You just hope personal hygiene standards won't be sacrificed."

But even being swallowed whole in a nanosecond would be less painful than being parboiled over time, as Al Gore predicts. Better swallowed than sauteed. This could be Al's most persuasive argument if he could only think to make it.

Even short of parboiling, bad times lie ahead. Lord Stern of Brentford, identified by the London Times as "a leading authority on global warming," says we must all consider becoming vegetarians to conquer global warming, or earthly cooling, or climate change, or whatever the season's fashionable terminology may be.

"Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases," he says in an interview. "It puts enormous pressure on the world's resources. A vegetarian diet is better."

Direct "emissions" of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases, and methane, Lord Stern says, is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas. Anyone stranded in a crowded elevator on a Friday afternoon, the day Navy bean soup is the special in the cafeteria, would offer no argument to Lord Stern's stern warning.

Teaching cows and pigs to show consideration for their fellow creatures would be only a very long-term solution, perhaps beyond even the persuasive powers of Al, Babs, Barack Obama, John Kerry and others peddling the frantic alarums that somebody has to do something about the weather, even if it bankrupts the nations of the world. Lord Stern concedes that "a successful deal" at the forthcoming Copenhagen conference on global warming, where the United States and the developed nations of the world are expected to answer the altar call to repent and reform, would lead to soaring prices of meat.

Lord Stern, once the chief economist at the World Bank and now a professor at the London School of Economics, predicts that a juicy cheeseburger or a ham sandwich -- not to speak of a tenderloin of beef, medium rare -- will one day be as unfashionable as driving drunk. "People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food." Lord Stern says he is not a vegetarian himself, of course. It is not important to do as he does, but to do as he says do.

Rude as burping sheep, windy cows and flatulent pigs may be, as they go about doing what comes naturally in the rustic innocence of the barnyard, vegetables are sources of bucolic villainy, too. The glorious tomato, the senior partner of bacon and (iceberg) lettuce in that best of all sandwiches, is a source of greenhouse gas, too. So, alas, are many other fruits and vegetables. Beer and booze may have to go, too, since hops and malt generate nearly 2 percent of greenhouse gases in certain countries.

Unless the Hadron Collider can finally get cranked up in time to send us into the safe embrace of an enormous black hole, we may soon be freezing (or parboiling) in the dark, supping on thin pumpkin gruel with Babs and Al. All is woe.



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Wasting Grandpa's money

Rockefellers Fund Global-warming Protests as Earth Cools

FROM-New America

All across the world, collections of global-warming protesters financed by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund gathered on October 24 to call for forceful “climate change” action at the United Nations summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, this December.

Most of the gatherings were minuscule, even in big cities, but the effort did receive widespread publicity. According to organizers cited by Agence France-Presse, over 5,000 demonstrations were held in more than 180 countries.

The protesters rallied around the motif of “350” — the supposed level of carbon dioxide in parts per million that some scientists claim is an acceptable ceiling. They carried signs and unfurled banners reading 350, even forming themselves into giant human numbers to illustrate their point.

"We had no idea we would get the overwhelming support, enthusiasm and engagement from all over the world that we're seeing," explained Bill McKibben, a climate-change activist who founded the Rockefeller-funded organization 350.org that coordinated the day of protests. "It shows just how scared of global warming much of the planet really is, and how fed up at the inaction of our leaders.

"Ironically, recent surveys indicate that most Americans do not believe global warming is a serious problem or even caused by human activity at all. And several other ironies in this saga become immediately apparent as well.

The continual charge that so-called “deniers” are financed by oil companies should finally be put to rest, considering that a significant share of the Rockefeller family fortune came and continues to come from oil. Several oil companies have financed past McKibben efforts as well.

Another ironic occurrence was a group of mountain climbers in Antarctica — an area that scientists claim has been cooling for over 10 years and where 90 percent of the world’s ice is located and continuing to grow — displaying a 350 banner. Similarly, a group gathered on a mountain in Wanaka, New Zealand, to protest the warming of the globe. Meanwhile skilakewanaka.com, the official ski and snowboard resort website for the region, reports: “The 2009 Winter Season is under way with the best early season snow conditions in over ten years.”

But McKibben is adamant about the need to reduce carbon dioxide levels from the current 387 parts per million, even calling the draconian U.S. “cap and trade” bills inadequate. “To get back to the safe level we need a very rapid halt to the use of coal, gas and oil so that forests and oceans can absorb some of that carbon,” McKibben said in a press release, adding that the world should ratify global restrictions at the UN Climate Summit that scientist Lord Christopher Monckton predicted would obliterate American sovereignty and create a communist world government.

McKibben, the activist author, has called for the formation of government “green corps” groups to work on climate-change issues. McKibben’s organization also trains young people in what it calls “climate camps” around the world. But despite the complete media blackout on the connection to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund through the Sustainable Markets Foundation, critics have seized on the funding as evidence that the real goal is not simply to save the planet. “I'm thinking that anything that has to do with Rockefeller's money is never in the best interests of people or the earth,” explained a blogger at Aletho News. “Do these tens of thousands participating in the '350' social engineering 'events' really understand the background of their financial leaders or are they, as Rockefeller's buddy Kissinger might say, 'useful idiots?'“ The writer also points to a myriad of global-warming propaganda grants — each over $200,000 — made by the Rockefeller Fund.

So why is the link troubling? "For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will,” wrote David Rockefeller in his autobiography. “If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it." He also promotes draconian “population control” via global governance, among other highly controversial ideas.

Americans need to educate themselves about the facts surrounding the whole “climate change” debate before the nation is saddled with the economy-destroying measures being cheered on by alarmists and other environmental extremists financed by elitists like the Rockefellers. New evidence suggests carbon dioxide levels could even be decreasing as more and more is absorbed by the cooling oceans, so it is important for educational purposes to stay on top of the science.

But at least one point is clear: the stakes are very high. If the globalist climate-change peddlers get their way, humanity could very well enter another dark age, with millions or even billions of people in developing countries feeling the true brunt of these measures. Pursuit of freedom and the truth must be relentless for America to maintain its liberties under the Constitution, and possibly even for human civilization to continue to thrive. Fearmongers and deceivers must be exposed so that the truth can stop the planned carbon regime.

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The real climate change catastrophe

In a startling new book, Christopher Booker reveals how a handful of scientists, who have pushed flawed theories on global warming for decades, now threaten to take us back to the Dark Ages

FROM-UK Telegraph

By Christopher Booker


Next Thursday marks the first anniversary of one of the most remarkable events ever to take place in the House of Commons. For six hours MPs debated what was far and away the most expensive piece of legislation ever put before Parliament.

The Climate Change Bill laid down that, by 2050, the British people must cut their emissions of carbon dioxide by well over 80 per cent. Short of some unimaginable technological revolution, such a target could not possibly be achieved without shutting down almost the whole of our industrialised economy, changing our way of life out of recognition.

Even the Government had to concede that the expense of doing this – which it now admits will cost us £18 billion a year for the next 40 years – would be twice the value of its supposed benefits. Yet, astonishingly, although dozens of MPs queued up to speak in favour of the Bill, only two dared to question the need for it. It passed by 463 votes to just three.

One who voted against it was Peter Lilley who, just before the vote was taken, drew the Speaker’s attention to the fact that, outside the Palace of Westminster, snow was falling, the first October snow recorded in London for 74 years. As I observed at the time: “Who says that God hasn’t got a sense of humour?”

By any measure, the supposed menace of global warming – and the political response to it – has become one of the overwhelmingly urgent issues of our time. If one accepts the thesis that the planet faces a threat unprecedented in history, the implications are mind-boggling. But equally mind-boggling now are the implications of the price we are being asked to pay by our politicians to meet that threat. More than ever, it is a matter of the highest priority that we should know whether or not the assumptions on which the politicians base their proposals are founded on properly sound science.

This is why I have been regularly reporting on the issue in my column in The Sunday Telegraph, and this week I publish a book called The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the obsession with climate change turning out to be the most costly scientific delusion in history?.More...

There are already many books on this subject, but mine is rather different from the rest in that, for the first time, it tries to tell the whole tangled story of how the debate over the threat of climate change has evolved over the past 30 years, interweaving the science with the politicians’ response to it.

It is a story that has unfolded in three stages. The first began back in the Seventies when a number of scientists noticed that the world’s temperatures had been falling for 30 years, leading them to warn that we might be heading for a new ice age. Then, in the mid-Seventies, temperatures started to rise again, and by the mid-Eighties, a still fairly small number of scientists – including some of those who had been predicting a new ice age – began to warn that we were now facing the opposite problem: a world dangerously heating up, thanks to our pumping out CO₂ and all those greenhouse gases inseparable from modern civilisation.

In 1988, a handful of the scientists who passionately believed in this theory won authorisation from the UN to set up the body known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This was the year when the scare over global warming really exploded into the headlines, thanks above all to the carefully staged testimony given to a US Senate Committee by Dr James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), also already an advocate for the theory that CO₂ was causing potentially catastrophic warming.

The disaster-movie scenario that rising levels of CO₂ could lead to droughts, hurricanes, heatwaves and, above all, that melting of the polar ice caps, which would flood half the world’s major cities, struck a rich chord. The media loved it. The environmentalists loved it. More and more politicians, led by Al Gore in the United States, jumped on the bandwagon. But easily their most influential allies were the scientists running the new IPCC, led by a Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin and Dr John Houghton, head of the UK Met Office.

The IPCC, through its series of weighty reports, was now to become the central player in the whole story. But rarely has the true nature of any international body been more widely misrepresented. It is commonly believed that the IPCC consists of “1,500 of the world’s top climate scientists”, charged with weighing all the scientific evidence for and against “human-induced climate change” in order to arrive at a “consensus”.

In fact, the IPCC was never intended to be anything of the kind. The vast majority of its contributors have never been climate scientists. Many are not scientists at all. And from the start, the purpose of the IPCC was not to test the theory, but to provide the most plausible case for promoting it. This was why the computer models it relied on as its chief source of evidence were all programmed to show that, as CO₂ levels continued to rise, so temperatures must inevitably follow.

One of the more startling features of the IPCC is just how few scientists have been centrally involved in guiding its findings. They have mainly been British and American, led for a long time by Dr Houghton (knighted in 1991) as chairman of its scientific working group, who in 1990 founded the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for research into climate change. The centre has continued to play a central role in selecting the IPCC’s contributors to this day, and along with the Climate Research Unit run by Professor Philip Jones at the University of East Anglia, controls HadCrut, one of the four official sources of global temperature data (another of the four, GIStemp, is run by the equally committed Dr Hansen and his British-born right-hand man, Dr Gavin Schmidt).

With remarkable speed, from the time of its first report in 1990, the IPCC and its computer models won over many of the world’s politicians, led by those of the European Union. In 1992, the UN staged its extraordinary Earth Summit in Rio, attended by 108 prime ministers and heads of state, which agreed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; and this led in 1997 to the famous Kyoto Protocol, committing the world’s governments to specific targets for reducing CO₂.

Up to this point, the now officially accepted global-warming theory seemed only too plausible. Both CO₂ levels and world temperatures had continued to rise, exactly as the IPCC’s computer models predicted. We thus entered the second stage of the story, lasting from 1998 to 2006, when the theory seemed to be carrying everything before it.

The politicians, most notably in the EU, were now beginning to adopt every kind of measure to combat the supposed global-warming menace, from building tens of thousands of wind turbines to creating elaborate schemes for buying and selling the right to emit CO₂, the gas every plant in the world needs for life.

But however persuasive the case seemed to be, there were just beginning to be rather serious doubts about the methods being used to promote it. More and more questions were being asked about the IPCC’s unbalanced approach to evidence – most notably in its promotion of the so-called “hockey stick” graph, produced in time for its 2001 report by a hitherto obscure US scientist Dr Michael Mann, purporting to show how global temperatures had suddenly been shooting up to levels quite unprecedented in history.

One of the hockey stick’s biggest fans was Al Gore, who in 2006 made it the centrepiece of his Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth. But it then turned out that almost every single scientific claim in Gore’s film was either wildly exaggerated or wrong. The statistical methods used to create the hockey-stick graph were so devastatingly exposed by two Canadian statisticians, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick (as was confirmed in 2006 by two expert panels commissioned by the US Congress) that the graph has become one of the most comprehensively discredited artefacts in the history of science.

The supporters of the hockey stick, highly influential in the IPCC, hit back. Proudly calling themselves “the Hockey Team”, their membership again reflects how small has been the number of closely linked scientists centrally driving the warming scare. They include Philip Jones, in charge of the HadCrut official temperature graph, and Gavin Schmidt, Hansen’s right-hand man at GISS –which itself came under fire for “adjusting” its temperature data to exaggerate the warming trend.

Then, in 2007, the story suddenly entered its third stage. In a way that had been wholly unpredicted by those IPCC computer models, global temperatures started to drop. Although CO2 levels continued to rise, after 25 years when temperatures had risen, the world’s climate was visibly starting to cool again.

More and more eminent scientists have been coming out of the woodwork to suggest that the IPCC, with its computer models, had got it all wrong. It isn’t CO₂ that has been driving the climate, the changes are natural, driven by the activity of the sun and changes in the currents of the world’s oceans.

The ice caps haven’t been melting as the alarmists and the models predicted they should. The Antarctic, containing nearly 90 per cent of all the ice in the world, has actually been cooling over the past 30 years, not warming. The polar bears are not drowning – there are four times more of them now than there were 40 years ago. In recent decades, the number of hurricanes and droughts have gone markedly down, not up.

As the world has already been through two of its coldest winters for decades, with all the signs that we may now be entering a third, the scientific case for CO₂ threatening the world with warming has been crumbling away on an astonishing scale.

Yet it is at just this point that the world’s politicians, led by Britain, the EU and now President Obama, are poised to impose on us far and away the most costly set of measures that any group of politicians has ever proposed in the history of the world – measures so destructive that even if only half of them were implemented, they would take us back to the dark ages.

We have “less than 50 days” to save the planet, declared Gordon Brown last week, in yet another desperate bid to save the successor to the Kyoto treaty, which is due to be agreed in Copenhagen in six weeks’ time. But no one has put the reality of the situation more succinctly than Prof Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technolgy, one of the most distinguished climatologists in the world, who has done as much as anyone in the past 20 years to expose the emptiness of the IPCC’s claim that its reports represent a “consensus” of the views of “the world’s top climate scientists”.

In words quoted on the cover of my new book, Prof Lindzen wrote: “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly exaggerated computer predictions combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a rollback of the industrial age.”

Such is the truly extraordinary position in which we find ourselves.

Thanks to misreading the significance of a brief period of rising temperatures at the end of the 20th century, the Western world (but not India or China) is now contemplating measures that add up to the most expensive economic suicide note ever written.

How long will it be before sanity and sound science break in on what begins to look like one of the most bizarre collective delusions ever to grip the human race?

Mocking Global Warming

FROM- Freedom's Lighthouse

Canadian Tourism Federation Mocks Global Warming in New Ad - Video


Here is a great new ad by the "Canadian Tourism Federation" that mocks "Global Warming" by saying Canada's "C02" emissions are rising faster than any other G8 country. But, "the bright side" they said is, "A warmer Canada is the perfect place for your next family holiday."

NOTE: The whole thing is becoming a total joke. If they were real believers in the dangers of Global Warming, they would not mock it like this.

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China-India Accord to Scuttle UN Climate Treaty

FROM-American Thinker

By William R. Hawkins

On October 22, an accord was signed by Xie Zhenhua, China's vice minister at the National Development and Reform Commission, and Jairam Ramesh, India's environment minister, in New Delhi. The memorandum provides an alternative framework to counter pressure from America and Europe to adopt mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions in a new UN treaty. The two Asian powers will collaborate on the development of renewable power projects and improved energy efficiency programs, while rejecting any outside mandates that would slow economic growth.

The United Nations has been holding forums around the world to build support for a new climate treaty to be drafted in Copenhagen in December to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto document did not require the developing countries to do anything about reducing emissions. The United States and European Union have been trying to find some formula that would persuade the developing countries to sign on to the new treaty. China and India, along with Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, have been adamant about staying out of any global requirement. By forming regional alignments that keep policy in the hands of national governments, the developing countries expect to be able to resist Western and UN pressure.

It is easier to stay independent of the climate paranoia if one does not believe the planet is in peril. Xiao Ziniu, director general of the Beijing Climate Centre, told the British Guardian newspaper recently that "There is no agreed conclusion about how much change is dangerous....Whether the climate turns warmer or cooler, there are both positive and negative effects....In Chinese history, there have been many periods warmer than today." He disputed the disaster warnings of the UNIPCC, saying, "The accuracy of the prediction is very low because the climate is affected by many mechanisms we do not fully understand."

An article published in China's Science Times on September 7 cited a study done by Ding Zhongli, vice president of the Science Academy of China. It argued that there is no solid scientific evidence to strictly correlate global temperature rise and CO2 concentrations. Professor Ding noted that some geologists believe that global temperature is related to solar activities and glacial periods, meaning human activity is only one factor that can cause climate change. "Up to now not a single scientist has figured out the weight ratio of each factor on global temperature change," he wrote.

The author of the Science Times article, Wang Jin, used Ding's study as part of his larger argument that, "the massive propaganda ‘human activity induced the global temperature increase' has been accepted by the majority of the society in some countries, and it has become a political and diplomatic issue. Why do the developed countries put an arguable scientific problem on the international negotiation table? The real intention is not for the global temperature increase, but for the restriction of the economic development of the developing countries." The problem for Beijing is, according to Wang, "How can China fight for its right to emit while continuing to develop its economy?"

The answer is to confront the issue head on. At a UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting in Thailand Oct. 5, China and the Group of 77 developing nations reiterated their opposition to any binding commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from "poor" countries and countries with "economies in transition." They were prepared to walk out of the climate talks if there was any language in the drafts leading to Copenhagen that would limit their actions. As a result, the two weeks of talks in Bangkok ended "without a consensus" on how to proceed.

The danger is that the West will draft a treaty that will only apply to America and Europe, crippling their economies. This was certainly the hope of the Nobel Committee when it awarded its Peace Prize to President Barack Obama. "Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting," said the Nobel proclamation.

It was also on President Obama's mind when he accepted the award, "We cannot accept the growing threat posed by climate change, which could forever damage the world that we pass on to our children -- sowing conflict and famine; destroying coastlines and emptying cities. And that's why all nations must now accept their share of responsibility for transforming the way that we use energy," said Obama, whose alarmist rhetoric was almost verbatim with what he had said at the UN Climate Summit September 22.

In 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize was shared by former Vice President Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC), "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change." The 2007 award was also a slap at the Bush Administration which had refused to accept the Kyoto Protocol. Shortly after the award to Obama was announced, Gore said he was optimistic that a new treaty will be approved in Copenhagen.

The work of the UNIPCC is cited in the "cap and trade" American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) passed by a narrow vote in the House last June. On September 30, Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) introduced the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (S. 1733) which will be the vehicle for climate legislation in the Senate. The bill states, "the United States should lead the global community in combating the threat of global climate change and reaching a robust international agreement to address global warming under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change."

The Kerry-Boxer draft aims to reduce CO2 emissions 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 compared to the 17 percent cut set in the House bill. As Bradford Plumer noted in a blog at The New Republic Sept. 30, "thanks to the recession, we'll be 8.5 percent below 2005 levels by the end of this year, which is why Boxer stumped for a steeper reduction." In other words, economic ruin is an integral part of the Green agenda.

The Congressional targets are still less than the goal of a 40 percent cut in emissions from 1990 levels by 2020 being pushed by the UNFCCC.

The most controversial part of the Nobel Committee's award statement was the assertion that Obama's "diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population." Basing American policy on foreign opinion is not the proper duty of a President of the United States whose job is to lead his own nation to greatness. But the Nobel Committee was also being delusional in an ironic way. The majority of the world's population wants to progress and improve its material standard of living. The governments which represent them outside America and Europe reject the notion that they should give up their aspirations for a better world to appease an unfounded climate paranoia among Western liberals. And they are right.


William R. Hawkins is a consultant specializing in international economic and national security issues. He is a former economics professor and Republican Congressional staff member.


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"Hey it's only people.....

they'll find green jobs"

FROM-Wheeling News-Register

Global Warming’ Issue Questioned

WHEELING - As a fifth-generation "coal guy," Rob Murray knows the importance of coal to the nation's future.

But with coal under attack through the cap-and-trade legislation before the U.S. Senate, Murray now is out questioning whether carbon emissions really are causing harmful global warming effects.

He says with certainty, though, that many coal jobs will be lost is the proposed climate control legislation meant to improve air quality standards is made into law.

Murray, vice president of business development and external affairs for his family's company, Murray Energy Co., spoke on cap-and-trade legislation during a forum at the Ohio County Public Library Tuesday sponsored by We The People - Ohio Valley.

Murray's father, Murray Energy President and Chief Executive Officer Robert Murray, initially was slated to speak at the event. But the younger Murray told the crowd of about 100 that his father was presently involved with plans to "restructure" the company, and was unable to attend.

Murray spoke on the issue of global warming, and referenced a recent study by the International Panel on Climate Change that questions whether the concept of global warming is real.

The study shows that the use of coal has increased in the nation and around the world over the past decade - but also notes that there has been no subsequent change in average temperatures.

"Is global warming man-made or natural?" he asked. "I have my own feelings about that."

Cap-and-trade legislation would establish financial incentives for businesses that work to reduce carbon emissions in the atmosphere by paying them for "carbon credits" that result from the reductions.

Other businesses with a need to burn fossil fuels - such as utility companies - would be able to purchase the "carbon offsets," which would be auctioned by the federal government.

Utility companies also could make environmental improvements to their plants, resulting in considerable financial investments.

The costs would likely be passed on to consumers, and could severely harm the coal industry in Ohio and West Virginia, Murray noted.

Murray Energy employees 1,326 in the Ohio Valley, he said.

And Murray cited a Penn State University study that found that each mining job leads to 11 more ancillary jobs in the community around it.

As such, he set the number of jobs dependent upon Murray Energy's local operation at about 15,000.

"This is not a political or partisan issue," said Murray, who noted he personally has visited the offices of 50 U.S. senators in recent weeks. "It's a human issue.

"I know I can give you the names of the 15,000 people who will lose their jobs if this legislation passes the Senate. I don't want these people to lose their jobs," he said.

He frequently referred to "cap and trade" as "cap and tax," adding that "anything that increases cost to consumers is a tax. Simple."

Murray next showed data compiled by the Congressional Budget Office depicting what the Cap and Trade legislation would cost each individual state by 2012, based on allocation formulas in the current bill.

Among states expected to be hit the hardest, according to the information, is West Virginia. The allowances the state would receive would not cover the amount of coal-fired emissions in the state, resulting in an expected cost to West Virginia residents of $734 million.

Ohio and Pennsylvania, likewise, are projected to experience a projected $707 million energy cost deficit. Only Texas, at about $1.27 billion, and Indiana, at $820 million, would have higher losses.

Energy companies in these states would would pass on the costs they incur to consumers.

The National Association of Manufacturers and other sources sets the additional burden on consumers at about $800 per household per year.

Murray also pointed out in the CBO data which states are expected to incur no additional costs because of climate change legislation - California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho in the west, and Massachusetts and other New England states in the East.

"I'm a coal guy, and coal has put food on my family's table for five generations," Murray said. "But I care about America."



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B.O.B. Presents

Best Of the Blogs

The Migrant Mind: The Prevarications about Greenland

Christopher Booker: Meanwhile, back in cold reality...

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Or any of the other 64 colors.

FROM-Irish Independent
The book that will make the Greens turn puce

You have to wonder how much more humiliation the Greens can actually stomach. Their decision to cling to power at all costs last weekend led to a wave of scathing criticism and accusations that the stench of hypocrisy would never leave them. Their credibility, it seemed, was sinking faster than a polar ice-cap.

There was one small glimmer of consolation mid-week when a leading expert on global warming predicted that the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free in summer in less than a decade but their cries of 'we told you so' were short-lived, tempered by a BBC report suggesting global warming might not be so hot after all.

Paul Hudson, the channel's climate- change correspondent, threw a spanner in the works when he revealed that the recorded temperature of the planet has not increased at all during the past 11 years and that the Earth's temperature has in fact been cooling down since 1998.

And just when environmental whistle-blowers thought things couldn't get any worse, another indignity is heading their way -- this time in the form of a book which will be released in America next week.

Its title doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but SuperFreakonomics raises some deeply uncomfortable questions for conventional green wisdom on how to solve the planet's woes. Worse still, it's tipped to be the publishing sensation of the year.

The sure-fire Christmas blockbuster is a follow-up to the groundbreaking Freakonomics, which took the dry theory of economics into refreshingly unknown territory and has sold more than three million copies worldwide since its publication in 2005.

Its authors Steven Levitt (42), a professor of economics at the University of Chicago who was once hailed as having America's most interesting mind, and Stephen Dubner (46), an award-winning journalist with the New York Times, set the dismal science alight with their intriguing insights into the world and how it works.

From San Francisco to Sydney, their first book became staple conversation fodder at dinner parties and water coolers -- its common-sense theories acquiring the status of conventional wisdom almost overnight.

The key to its runaway success lay in its simplicity. Rather than poring over unemployment rates and GDP, Levitt and Dubner held a microscope over some of our most deeply held beliefs about everyday life and turned them on their heads.

They showed us, for example, that far from living in bling-laden mansions, most drug dealers are poor and still live with their mothers; and why naming a boy DeShawn instead of David is setting him up for a bleak future.

They calculated that parental income and status is a far more reliable measure of how a child will fare compared to what parents actually do for their offspring.

And, most controversially of all, they cited the legalisation of abortion in America in the 1970s as a reason for the dramatic drop in crime in the 1990s on the basis that unwanted children are more likely to turn into criminals so when they don't get born, crime falls.

Their portrayal of abortion as a socially beneficial tool of law enforcement caused fury within America's religious Right but Levitt and Dubner claimed they have no agenda to push. They are just neutral number-crunchers, they say, with a rather different take on how the world works.

This time around they've turned their attention to the eco-conscious liberal left, the global-warming lobby in particular, posing a series of cutting questions about whether the planet really is on the way out and, if so, are the solutions put forward to save it the right ones?

The cumbersome sub-title of the book -- Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance -- gives a hint at what lies within its thought-provoking pages.

The book suggests that the current "war" against climate change is mired with difficulties not least because it assumes that politicians can alter people's polluting habits.

"Behaviour change is hopeless," says Levitt. "It's just completely pointless to think that you're going to get six billion people, the poorest people around and the richest people around, to work together when every individual person has no impact on the problem. That's a fundamental issue that economists have thought about and recognised the hopelessness of, for hundreds of years ...

"One thing we know is that I'm not going to sacrifice materially my own life to help an anonymous person in Bangladesh who might not even have been born yet, when I know that there will be no help for that person anyway. Calling on people to reduce their carbon emissions is a noble one, but as incentives go it's not a very strong one, especially when the burgeoning economies of China and India have no intention of depriving their people of the life-changing pleasures of cheap electricity."

Calling upon a team of experts in the field including Nathan Myhrvold, a former chief of technology at Microsoft whom Bill Gates once described as "the smartest person I know", they question whether carbon really is the problem.

A generation ago, children were taught that CO2 was the lifeblood of the planet and vital for biodiversity in the plant kingdom. Today's schoolbooks portray it as a poison.

In the book, Myhrvold ponders why so-called warmists lose sleep about the rise in CO2 levels in the atmosphere from 280 parts per million (ppm) to 380ppm when our mammalian ancestors comfortably evolved when the concentration of CO2 was much higher at over 1,000 ppm.

And in a claim that will make his name dirt in the eyes of environmentalists the world over, he has the temerity to point out that atmospheric carbon dioxide does not necessarily warm the earth. He says: "Ice-cap evidence shows that over the past several hundred thousand years, carbon dioxide levels have risen after a rise in temperature, rather than before it."

SuperFreakonomics is particularly taken with one of Myhrvold's current projects, which some scientists believe could be a low-cost, straightforward solution to global warming.

His company Intellectual Ventures is exploring the possibility of pumping large quantities of sulphur dioxide into the Earth's stratosphere through an 18-mile hose, held up by helium balloons.

This freezing liquid would then wrap itself around the North and South Poles in less than a fortnight, reflect the sun's rays back into space and send a cooling chill over the planet. It might sound preposterous but it's an experiment already proven by nature, its proponents say, citing the eruption of a Filipino volcano as an example.

When Mt Pinatubo exploded in 1991, it spewed millions of tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, lowering average global temperatures by half a Celsius degree for two years.

This quick-fix plan has been derided in green circles as gimmickry of the highest order and an offence against nature. But one British commentator in the London Independent suggested this week that this knee-jerk rejection of the idea might be more to do with the fact that there's little glory to be had in spending €6m a year "squirting sulphur dioxide around the poles".

What would become of all those international summits, global treaties and press conferences to the world's media, he asked.

For heaven's sake, we mightn't even need a Green Party any more.



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Carbon: Passive rider on the Earth/Space Machine

FROM-American Thinker

By James R. Fencil

Earth operates a network of molten upwellings from deep seams in the planet's crust which act to shove tectonic plates across the seafloors where these plates bump into continental land outcroppings. There the spreading plates subduct beneath the continental rims and simultaneously thrust mountains upward from sea level. Such crustal movements continue to alter our global topography today. Atmospheric composition is largely unaffected by these tectonic movements except during volcanic eruptions which emit gasses that are subsequently diffused about the globe by wind action.


Space operates a system of radiant inputs to the earth: both continuous cosmic rays from deep space and variable solar rays from our nearby sun. From time to time the sun produces solar winds having magnetic effects that perturb the incoming cosmic rays causing them to vary in intensity. The primary solar rays vary also but to a lesser extent than the solar-perturbed cosmic rays. Atmospheric composition is largely unaffected by these radiant inputs but one component of the atmosphere undergoes reversible change-of-state to an extent that is dependent on the intensity of the incoming cosmic rays. This component is water.


Water evaporates from the earth's surface as a clear vapor. Each water vapor molecule has a diameter of 1.5 angstroms. Incoming solar radiation contains wavelengths ranging from 1000 angstroms to 10,000,000 angstroms. Much of this incoming solar radiation passes over and through the clear water vapor, warming it in transit and continuing downward to the earth where it proceeds to warm the planet's surface. The cosmic rays, erratically constrained by the solar winds, convert some portion of the clear water vapor to liquid droplets ranging in size from 20,000 to 400,000 angstroms. Incoming solar radiation cannot pass readily through these large droplets and instead is scattered and partially redirected back into space. So incoming solar radiation can be either absorbed and transmitted (as with clear water vapor) or scattered and reflected (as with cloud droplets.) When the sun permits the cosmic rays to do their job of forming clouds then the planet will be cooled. When the solar winds withhold enough of the cosmic rays to restrain cloud formation then the planet will be warmed.


Down at the earth's surface water mediates life's processes. In watered terrestrial regions gaseous carbon feeds photosynthesis-powered carbon chain growth as life converts CO2 into solid carbonaceous plant matter, with some reoxidized to CO2 and some buried. In coastal shallows life additionally converts CO2 into the solid CaCO3 component of animal matter, with some redissolved and dissociated and some buried. These active life zones act as CO2 sinks, depleting the local atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and drawing additional CO2 from the diminishing reserves elsewhere in the atmosphere.

The accumulated solidified carbon products are then transported by tectonic movements and are either pushed upward into mountainous formations or dragged downward beneath the surface to be heated and pressure-cooked into pockets of fossil fuels. In either case the life-formed carbon-rich solid matter is carried away from the wet biologically active zones into locations where life processes are arrested and the carbon is forcibly sequestered.


Over time the earth has seen gaseous CO2 levels fall from the original 0.80% to our current 0.04%. Photosynthesis has been busily productive but the relentless tectonic conveyances have carried away and stored life's solidified carbon-containing products, leaving them in limitedly accessible locations awaiting mankind's efforts to disinter some fraction of these vast stores to use as fossil fuels and thus to regenerate CO2. The assertion that neither the mammoth tectonic mechanism nor the immense space radiant mechanism is overawed by either life's maladaptive CO2 burials or by mankind's trifling energy use is surely one of the greater understatements of all time. These primordial earth/space processes acted to warm and to cool the planet and to rearrange its surface features long before life began and they will continue to perform their accustomed activities long after life completes its self-extinguishing sojourn.


Since controversies abound in this matter you may consult: Goethe Universitat-Cloud ITN; Journal of Geophysical Research-Vol.110-Nir J Shariv; and the CERN Cloud Project. Expect to witness increasingly rational parsing of the relative importance of all the change agents intrinsic to this geophysical system. But however continuing research evolves we can already confidently state that the baseless claims of the CO2 is a pollutant crowd are insupportable on their face in light of the indisputable evidence of life having flourished throughout a 95% decline in atmospheric CO2 concentrations as documented in the scientific record. Disaffected humans will just have to find something else with which to flagellate themselves and their betters. We can take comfort however in the knowledge that their need is great, their determination unabashed and their perverse imaginations sufficient to the task.

James R. Fencil is the technical director of a Midwestern corporation, and an alumni scholar at the U. of C. Graham School in Chicago.
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The Liberal Faith

FROM-RCP



By Jack Kelly

Most liberals aren't very religious. But they are people of faith. When reality clashes with a cherished belief, they cling to the cherished belief.
It snowed in Minnesota over the weekend. In Denver, too. Record cold temperatures were set in Idaho and western Montana.

It was unseasonably cold in Madison, Wisconsin over the weekend, too. But those who attended the annual meeting of the Society of Environmental Journalists didn't notice.

The keynote speaker was former Vice President Al Gore. Mr. Gore is the world's most famous advocate of the theory of anthroprogenic (man-made) global warming. In his book, "An Inconvenient Truth," and his movie of the same name, Mr. Gore warned mankind faces catastrophe if drastic steps aren't taken immediately to slash our emissions of carbon dioxide.

Mr. Gore predicted the Senate would pass a "cap and trade" bill before a UN conference on climate change in Denmark in December. Most of the 500 journalists who heard him speak applauded.

Mr. Gore is someone only a liberal could regard as an expert on climate change. He took exactly two science courses as an undergraduate at Yale, scoring a D in Natural Sciences 6, and a C in Natural Sciences 118.

Mr. Gore's paucity of qualifications may be why he refuses to debate scientists who challenge his thesis. And he rarely answers questions after giving one of his alarmist speeches. Mr. Gore did so in Madison, perhaps because he assumed the audience was friendly.

But in the audience was Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer, who asked him about a 2007 finding by a British judge that "An Inconvenient Truth" is riddled with scientific errors.

Justice Michael Burton had to rule on the veracity of Mr. Gore's claims because a parent objected to having the film shown in schools. He found nine "significant errors" made in "the context of alarmism and exaggeration." Screening the film in British secondary schools violated laws barring the promotion of partisan political views in the classroom, Justice Burton said.

When Mr. McAleer asked Mr. Gore what he was doing to correct the errors Justice Burton identified, Mr. Gore, after much stammering, said: "the ruling was in favor of showing the movie in schools."

That response was technically true, but evasive. Justice Burton said "An Inconvenient Truth" could be shown, but only if Mr. Gore's "one-sided" views were balanced.

When Mr. McAleer pressed Mr. Gore on his evasion, the Society of Environmental Journalists cut off his microphone and escorted him away.

There was a time when journalists applauded when one of their own spoke truth to power. But in the Society of Environmental Journalists, relevant facts must be suppressed if they clash with the party line.

But reality is making it more difficult for journalists to protect Mr. Gore and other alarmists from scrutiny, and there are defections from the Praetorian Guard. As the Society of Environmental Journalists was silencing Mr. McAleer, Paul Hudson, climate correspondent for the once firmly alarmist BBC, was asking "What happened to global warming?"

The warmest year on record, Mr. Hudson noted, was 1998, 11 years ago. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing, but temperatures have not. This is something the computer models on which Mr. Gore and other alarmists rely said was impossible.

Satellite data indicate the planet cooled significantly from 2007 to 2008, said Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville. This winter figures to be the coldest in decades, says the Farmer's Almanac. The ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctic are getting thicker. Dr. Mojib Latif, a scientist on whom the UN relied heavily for its original alarmist forecasts, now says the planet will cool for the next 20 years.

As the evidence moves decisively against them, alarmists are escalating their rhetoric. Britain's Prince Charles -- whose academic credentials are even weaker than Al Gore's -- told business leaders in Brazil we have less than 100 months to avert climate catastrophe.

But opinion polls in Australia, Britain and here indicate people no longer are buying what they're selling. The Society of Environmental Journalists may not notice, but ordinary people can tell when it's cold outside.


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Media Redemption in Unmasking Global Warming Scam?

The mainstream press might just reclaim some of its tarnished reputation by investigating the climate change charade.

FROM-Pajama Media

Every time the mainstream media shoots itself in the foot (RatherGate, ACORN’s pimp scandal, the biased coverage of the 2008 presidential elections) conservatives proclaim the industry’s death knell.

And every time they do, such talk is premature.

But there is one story that could strike a mortal blow to the biased MSM beast: the global warming meme.

Virtually every media outlet, from major newspapers to niche magazines like Men’s Health, have been sounding the alarm over global warming. Each warns us what will happen if we don’t reduce our collective carbon footprint while describing in detail ways to reduce said footprint.
Those who deny the earth is warming … well, you simply don’t invite those people into your home.

Now we learn the Earth may not have a fever after all:

“The world leaders who met at the United Nations to discuss climate change on Tuesday are faced with an intricate challenge: building momentum for an international climate treaty at a time when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.”

“Official government measurements show that the world’s temperature has cooled a bit since reaching its most recent peak in 1998.”

“For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.”

Must be Faux News’ slanted reporting, right? Try the New York Times, McClatchy, and the BBC, respectively.
Naturally, none of these stories is couched in a “we goofed, our bad” spirit. Instead, the data is introduced and then explained away by scurrying scientists out to protect their image — and their storyline.
I’m no scientist, and some of the global warming news reports could have elements of truth behind them. But clearly what we’re currently experiencing doesn’t match the frightening picture painted by climate experts over the past decade. We’ve been sold a bill of goods that, if it isn’t totally inaccurate, is still deeply flawed and needs additional study.

So how will media consumers, who already are registering record lows when it comes to trusting the media, react if current temperature figures overtake the global warming narrative?
Hard to imagine television viewers won’t tune out news shows in record numbers and believe even less of what they read in their hometown newspapers.

The anecdotal evidence against global warming has been building for some time now. Fewer major hurricanes than predicted. Snow in spots where snow rarely falls — or rarely falls so early in winter.

It doesn’t help that our global warming guru, former Vice President Al Gore, refuses to engage in vigorous debates on the subject. Just days ago Gore fumbled an answer to an inconvenient question during a Q&A while someone mercifully cut the microphone on the inquisitor.

That someone? Likely a person connected with the Society of Environmental Journalists, which sponsored the event.

The media doesn’t deserve complete blame here. Journalists routinely receive press releases from environmental groups and universities claiming one set of facts, like global warming is on the rise, and many come from trustworthy sources.

And when reporters call up sources to flesh out climate change stories, they’re likely to find a global warming believer on the other end of the line.

But reporters should be skeptical on every issue they face, be it a politician’s latest promise or a climate debate in which one side deems the science “settled.” And skepticism has been in very short supply when it comes to global warming. Wouldn’t professional cynics give these headlines more than a cursory look?

Surge in fatal shark attacks blamed on global warming”
“Climate change makes island kids bony, stunted”
“Latest threat from global warming: shrinking sheep”
“Warming trends blamed for syrup season change”

Global warming skeptics have been trying to sound the alarm for years that the science behind the movement is uncertain, that the probability we can change our current course is unlikely, and that the issue is being used for political purposes.

The MSM could still save itself and its shaky reputation. Rather than simply reporting the latest facts about current temperatures, why not do a little investigative reporting as to why so many people got fooled? Who funded these alarmist studies? How much money did former Vice President Al Gore stand to make if people bought into his fear mongering?

In short … what happened?

Reporters scolded themselves at length a few years ago for not reporting the truth about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction — or the lack thereof. It was one of the rare times you heard journalists critique each other en masse.

We need reporters to repeat that soul-searching ASAP.

It’s not too late for reporters to start aggressively finding the truth. But if President Barack Obama passes cap-and-trade legislation, it just might be — both for the country and for the media.


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A big chill on global warming

FROM-Washington Examiner

Something important is happening when even the BBC is compelled to ask, as it did this week, "What happened on global warming?" The British news organization has heretofore insisted that the scientific consensus was cemented long ago that global warming is real and is mainly caused by human use of carbon-based fossil fuels. Put simply, what has happened is global temperatures have dropped every year since 1998, recent peer-reviewed research has uncovered the decisive influence of hot and cold cycles in the oceans on land temperatures, and growing numbers of scientists with unquestioned credentials are stepping forward to question the conventional wisdom.

But reaching a new consensus will be exceedingly difficult because the raw data on which the landmark 1996 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change based its conclusion has been destroyed. The University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit acknowledged in August that it discarded data that, in addition to the IPCC report, has been cited by other international studies as the main justification for severe restrictions on carbon emissions worldwide. This development raises more troubling doubts about global warming just as scientists and policymakers are expected to call for harsh new limits on energy use in its name when they meet in December in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Every schoolchild knows that the last step in the scientific method is independent reproduction of results. But lost climate data cannot be reproduced, which is a huge problem for everybody. "Every time CRU massaged the temperature data, they were getting more warming from the same numbers. It's incumbent upon scientists to find out why, but you can't find out if you don't have the data," Dr. Patrick Michaels, senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute, told The Examiner. "The data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared."

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has formally requested that the Environmental Protection Agency, which helps fund CRU, "reopen the record" and allow CEI and others to submit newly uncovered information regarding the East Anglia data destruction. The conservative think tank also wants to submit information about flaws in other data EPA is using as it devises stringent new anti-global warming regulations. Congress should also investigate the dumping of data partially paid for by U.S. taxpayers and other suspicious global warming anomalies, such as the temperature readings taken from "ghost weather stations" like the one at Maine's Ripogenus Dam. It was officially closed in 1995 but allegedly is still transmitting climate data 14 years later. Such questionable data sources must be eliminated if credible policy decisions are ever to be reached.

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The Bean Counters Take

Climate Costs: The CBO’s Take on Cap-and-Trade–and Carbon Taxes

FROM-WSJ

By Keith Johnson

As the Senate wrestles with the climate bill, the cost of curbing greenhouse-gas emissions reigns paramount. Yesterday, a host of officials paraded before a Senate panel to estimate how much similar legislation passed by the House could hurt the economy.

The director of the Congressional Budget Office sparked headlines when he acknowledged that climate legislation could dent GDP growth and lead to a net loss of jobs in the short term. Well, that’s exactly what the CBO said publicly a month ago.

But there are three interesting takeaways from CBO boss Douglas Elmendorf’s testimony.
First, it’s not an either-or question. There are costs to not acting on climate change, too. While the CBO analysis focused on the costs of curbing emissions, the U.S. economy would suffer from rising temperatures and climate change throughout the century: “As a consequence, a relatively pessimistic estimate for the loss in projected real gross domestic product is about 3 percent for warming of about 7°Fahrenheit (F) by 2100,” Mr. Elmendorf said, cribbing directly from last month’s report.

Second, the U.S. isn’t acting in a vacuum. The cost and effectiveness of whatever the U.S. does will be determined by what the rest of the world does or doesn’t do. If the U.S. limits carbon-dioxide emissions while other big economies don’t, for example, economic activity (and emissions) will probably “leak” to those unregulated economies. Which would undermine U.S. efforts, the CBO said: “Such emissions ‘leakage’ would lead countries that were controlling emissions to incur greater costs while achieving smaller reductions in global emissions.”
Third, candy’s dandy but a carbon tax is still nicer. That’s been the CBO’s line back since this whole debate began, championed by former CBO boss and now White House budget director Peter Orszag.

Mr. Elmendorf’s point? A cap-and-trade program, like the one the Senate is considering, offers certainty on the level of emissions reductions—but only by offering a lot of uncertainty about the costs. That makes the whole system less appealing:

In essence, the additional certainty that a cap-and-trade program could provide about the amount of cumulative emissions would be bought at a relatively high cost without yielding corresponding certainty about the amount of climate change that would occur. The greater certainty about the price of emissions in the future that a tax would offer would provide affected firms and households with greater certainty about the conditions they would face in adjusting to restrictions than a cap would provide. That greater certainty would ease planning for capital investments and could lower the risk associated with developing new technologies.

Still, when it comes to cap-and-trade or a carbon tax, it looks like the die’s already been cast in favor of the former—whatever people such as Mr. Elmendorff or Rex Tillerson say.

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The global warming consensus cools

FROM-SF Chronicle



by Debra Saunders

"What happened to global warming?" read the headline - on BBC News on Oct. 9, no less. Consider it a cataclysmic event: Mainstream news organizations have begun reporting on scientific research that suggests that global warming may not be caused by man and may not be as dire and imminent as alarmists suggest.

Indeed, as the BBC's climate correspondent Paul Hudson reported, the warmest year recorded globally "was not in 2008 or 2007, but 1998." It's true, he continued, "For the last 11 years, we have not observed any increase in global temperatures."

At a London conference later this month, Hudson reported, solar scientist Piers Corbyn will present evidence that solar-charged particles have a big impact on global temperatures.

Western Washington University geologist Don J. Easterbrook presented research last year that suggests that the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) caused warmer temperatures in the 1980s and 1990s. With Pacific sea surface temperatures cooling, Easterbrook expects 30 years of global cooling.

EPA analyst Alan Carlin - an MIT-trained economist with a degree in physics - referred to "solar variability" and Easterbrook's work in a document that warned that politics had prompted the Environmental Protection Agency and countries to pay "too little attention to the science of global warming" as partisans ignored the lack of global warming over the past 10 years. At first the EPA buried the paper, then it permitted Carlin to post it on his personal Web site.

In May, Fortune reported on the testimony of John Christy, University of Alabama-Huntsville Earth System Science Center director, before the House Ways and Means Committee. Christy is a 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report signatory who believes human effects have a warming influence, but rejects the disaster scenarios.

As Christy told the committee, climate models rely on land temperature data that are distorted and exaggerated by surface development - that is, asphalt and buildings. In a nice bit of research, Christy, who is also the Alabama state climatologist, debunked the temperature increase predictions made by NASA scientist James Hansen in 1988. "The real atmosphere," Christy testified, "has many ways to respond to the changes that the extra CO2 is forcing upon it."

Add Christy, Easterbrook and Corbyn to the long list of scientists who see climate as a complex issue rather than an opportunity to sermonize and lecture the general public.

Over the years, global warming alarmists have sought to stifle debate by arguing that there was no debate. They bullied dissenters and ex-communicated nonbelievers from their panels. In the name of science, disciples made it a virtue to not recognize the existence of scientists such as MIT's Richard Lindzen and Colorado State University's William Gray.

For a long time, that approach worked. But after 11 years without record temperatures that had the seas spilling over the Statue of Liberty's toes, they are going to have to change tactics.

They're going to have to rely on real data, not failed models and scare stories, and the Big Lie that everyone who counts agrees with them

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SIX DEGREES !

Of seperation





FROM- Fox News

Global Warming Is Like Kevin Bacon, You Can Link Everything Back to It

So on an ABC webcast, Charlie Gibson tossed to a U.S. intelligence report that suggests global warming is helping the Taliban. The logic: temperatures rise, droughts continue, and lo and behold, people become suicide bombers.

This is nothing new, of course. Global warming is the Kevin Bacon of root causes: You can link everything back to it, including "Footloose."

Amazingly, you can even blame terror on global warming, even if the current science suggests the globe may be cooling!

But you know what's causing global cooling?

Global warming.

But you knew that.

So, for this report to work, you need to ignore that for the last 11 years we haven't seen a bump in global temperatures. You also have to ignore that many terrorists aren't destitute farmers — some are scientists who might enjoy a good strip club. And then there's this contradiction: The report mentions how Afghanistan's horrible agriculture boosts the Taliban; but then links Taliban success to enormous poppy crops — which, as Schulz can attest, makes a mighty fine heroin.

Now, let's say global warming is real. That means there are billions of us experiencing it, who aren't resorting to terrorism. Kenya isn't overflowing with Taliban, and neither is Palm Springs. But the fact is, people who willingly accept the term "man-caused disaster" over the word "terror" will also accept any "root cause" explanation.

So blame it on the weather. In the end, it just means we're all capable of being suicide bombers, if the climate changes.

But not for me. When it gets balmy, I don't get bomby.

I get thongy.

And if you disagree with me, then you're probably a racist.


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Climate Myths and National Security

FROM- American Thinker



By Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

The President of the United States recently told the United Nations that "global warming" poses a threat to national security and may engender conflicts as populations are displaced by rising sea levels, droughts, floods, storms etc. etc. etc. However, it is now clear that there is no basis for the notion that the barely-detectable human influence on the climate is likely to prove a threat to climate, still less to national security.

The first principle to which any national security advisor must adhere is that of objective truth. Though he must have an understanding of politics, he is not a politician: he is a truth-bearer. Therefore, he begins by narrowing down the issue to a single, central question whose answer determines whether the suggested threat is real. He then tries to find the truthful answer to that question, and draws his conclusion from that.

Quid enim est veritas? What, then, is the truth? The single question whose answer gives us the truth about the climate question is this: By how much will any given proportionate increase in CO2 concentration warm the world? We now know the answer. The oceans, which must store 80-90% of all heat-energy accumulated in the atmosphere as a result of the radiative imbalance caused by greater greenhouse-gas concentration, have shown no net accumulation of heat for almost 70 years, implying a very small influence of CO2 on temperature (Douglass & Knox, 2009). The devastating analysis of cloud-albedo effects shortly to be published by Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama at Huntsville will show that the UN has wrongly decided that cloud changes reinforce greenhouse warming, when in fact they substantially offset it. Repeated studies of the tropical upper troposphere (e.g. Douglass et al., 2008) show that it is failing to warm at thrice the surface rate as required by all of the UN's models, again implying very low climate sensitivity. The clincher is Professor Richard Lindzen's meticulous recent paper demonstrating - by direct measurement - that the amount of radiation escaping from the Earth's atmosphere to space is many times greater than the UN's models are all told to believe. From this, the world's most formidable atmospheric physicist has calculated that a doubling of CO2 concentration, expected over the next 150 years, would cause 0.75 C (1.5 F) of warming, at most: not the 3.4 C (6 F) that the UN takes as its central estimate.


Most analysts would stop there. Yet some might ask, "Suppose that the single satellite on which Lindzen's results depend is defective. What then?" They might consider the economic cost of attempting to mitigate the "global warming" which, as our Monthly Reports demonstrate, is not actually happening. The figures turn out to be startlingly simple. To mitigate just 1 C (2 F) of warming, one must forego the emission of 2 trillion tons of CO2. The world emits just 30 billion tons a year. So the analyst, as a thought-experiment, would shut down the entire world economy, emitting no CO2 at all. Even then, and even on the incorrect assumption that the UN's exaggerated projections of the effect of CO2 on temperature are correct, it would take 67 years to mitigate 1 C warming. Preventing the 3.4 C (6 F) warming that the UN's climate panel thinks would occur in 100 years would take 225 years without any transportation, and with practically no electrical energy. The national security advisor would at that point advise his head of government that there has never been any security threat less grave, or more expensive to prevent, than the non-problem that is "global warming". It is the fearmongers that are the real national security threat

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Aussies cooling on global warming

FROM-The Daily Telegraph

AUSTRALIANS are becoming less concerned about the threat of global warming, pushing environmental issues down the list of threats.

Climate change is no longer rated the top foreign policy issue for the Federal Government, a Lowy Institute poll will reveal today.

It was top of the list in 2007 but now is ranked seventh out of 10 policy priorities. Out of 12 possible threats, Australians rated global warming the fourth most critical, the survey found.

However a significant majority of Australians, 76 per cent, still saw climate change as a problem.

Details emerged as the Government was reminded just how difficult it would be to get its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation, which would set up an Emissions Trading Scheme, through the Senate. Preliminary negotiations underlined that the Government will need Opposition support if it is to get a moderate version of the Bill approved.

The Greens produced amendments - almost certain to be rejected by the Government - which called for harsher treatment of fossil fuel users, and Family First's Steve Fielding accused the Greens of wanting to send Australia back to the Stone Age.

"If we did what the Greens propose, Australia would no longer exist because there'd be no industries left to drive our economy," he said.

Their amendments yesterday called for limited compensation to emission-intensive industries.





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