"Notable Quotes"

"For all its scientific-sounding pronouncements, Climate Science is anything but a real science. Real science is a process: first you make a hypothesis, then you make a prediction based on that hypothesis, then you conduct an experiment as a test of the hypothesis. If you made a good prediction, you publish your results and refine your hypothesis; if your prediction was bad, you throw out the hypothesis and start over.

Climate Science has morphed into Climate Religion. There are no testable hypotheses; we have instead a consensus and a “science” that is impossible to disprove. Skepticism is heretical. Any and all results support the theory, once you move the goalposts far enough and boldly enough. Is the weather warmer? “We told you so.” Is the weather cooler? “Weather is not climate.” More hurricanes? “Just as we said.” Fewer hurricanes? “African dust storms.” And so on."

source

Vladimir


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The Al Gore Comedy Hour

FROM-Pajamas Media

Roger Kimball

Admit it: you can’t think of Al Gore any more without tittering, can you? Even some Apple shareholders are disgusted with the former VP turned eco-nut moneybags. He’s become “a laughing stock,” declaimed one disgusted shareholder, and no wonder.

True, Al Gore has positively cleaned up by exploiting the business opportunities that have come his way from the Chruch of Gaia, I’m Greener-than-thou, Inc. The London Telegraph describes him as our “first carbon billionaire.” “There’s gold in them there faked studies, pardner!” Gore’s successful gaming of the system argues for a certain cunning and eye for the main chance. The guy has hauled in an impressive pile of pelf these last few years.

But that success says nothing about his sanity. Alas, the chap is clearly bonkers. I submit as exhibit A the interminable Op-Ed column that his PR-firm, a.k.a. the New York Times, issued today. Here’s the first paragraph:

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of
global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity
requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we
know it.

“Unimaginable calamity,” eh? “Large-scale, preventive measures,” you say? “Human civilization as we know it”? Chicken Little time, what?

Yes, but the part to pay special attention to, of course, is the bit about “Large-scale, preventive measures,” i.e., the heavy, heavy hand of government bursting in to tax and regulate the U.S. economy to death. That’s the goal — or, rather, the goal is putting the government in charge against what Gore later calls “market triumphalism, i.e, the free, you know, market — while various energy enterprises in which Al Gore just happens to have a stake get the red carpet treatment.

A nice question: does Al Gore actually believe the rubbish he spouts? Or is it merely opportunism on the march? I don’t know, but if I were a betting man, I’d say that he has successfully melded credulity and opportunism in to one bloviating whole. Never mind the fact — that’s “fact,” Kemo Sabe, as in “what is actually the case, no foolin’” — never mind that the entire Climate Hysteria Industry is in full-scale retreat since the East Anglia University fraud was revealed last year. Phil Jones will not, repeat not, be attending any environmental rallies until further notice.

It is just lovely that the New York Times — the world’s most discredited newspaper — would give so thoroughly discredited a mountebank this lavish soapbox upon which to make a fool of himself. Next stop, Hyde Park Corner — or maybe a padded cell.


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"Notable Quotes"

"Now that we know Al Gore is a hoaxer, can we please get back to drilling for oil and gas? We have huge supplies of oil and gas under our control, but our oil companies--which by international standards are tiny in terms of the quantity of petroleum to which they have access--are legally prevented from developing it and, in some cases, even exploring for it. (Congress doesn't want the American people to understand how much wealth and how many jobs we are forgoing by being the only country in the world that perversely refuses to develop its own energy resources.)"

Source

John Hinderaker

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We Are Doomed -- Again

FROM-American Thinker

By John Dietrich

Global warming is far from the first apocalyptic prediction, or even the first based on computer models. The belief that the world is coming to an end appears to be a universal concept based on an innate psychic need. All major religions -- Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism -- have a version of the end of the world. While the major religions' visions may be traced back to ancient Persia and Zoroastrian teachings, the Mayan and Hopi Indian visions of the end times are unlikely to have originated in the Middle East. While we still have religion-based suicidal groups (Heaven's Gate, the Branch Davidians, the Peoples Temple), these groups now have a competitor. In a secular society, we no longer put our faith in ancient revelations. The apparent psychic need for an apocalyptic myth may not have disappeared. The new apocalyptic visions are not based on revelation, but on "science."

In the 1960s, Paul Ehrlich's bestseller, The Population Bomb, predicted the end of civilization by 1983 as a result of overpopulation. Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies in the department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University and president of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology, claimed that "the battle to feed all of humanity is over ... In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." He was the first to base his conclusions on computer modeling. In the 1970s, the Club of Rome predicted the depletion of many of our necessary resources, including the depletion of oil by 1992. Its report, "The Limits of Growth," sold 12 million copies.

During the Cold War, the West was gripped by the fear of a nuclear apocalypse celebrated (among others) by Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth and the TV program "The Day After." "Thermonuclear education" became an important part of the school curriculum. Commentary magazine described this indoctrination as "gratuitous sadism." It elicited comments from young students such as, "Do you really think anyone will make it? If they do, will they want to? I pray I am lucky and die."

If famine or nuclear annihilation doesn't kill us, perhaps diseases will. In 1987, the New York Times headlined an article titled "AIDS May Dwarf the Plague." The Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala, told a congressional panel, "We could spend our energy on research and immunization and education and still not have any Americans left unless we're prepared to confront the crisis of AIDS." Oprah Winfrey announced that "one out of five heterosexuals will be dead of AIDS by 1990." The swine flu "pandemic" nearly devastated the tourist industry in Mexico. In October 2009, President Obama declared a state of national emergency because of the swine flu. It is quite possible that more people perish by falling in their bathtubs than have died of swine flu. So far, the president has not declared this a national emergency.

The crisis de jour is global warming. Much of the hysteria generated about global warming is the result of the research done by the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Eastern England. It claims that the world's largest temperature data set and its work in mathematical models was incorporated into the IPCC's (United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Nobel Prize-winning 2007 report. Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, dismissed a report by the Indian government which said that glaciers might not be melting as fast as had been feared. Dr. Pachauri described the report as "voodoo science."

There are several problems with apocalyptic scenarios. For one, a genuine and avoidable crisis may be ignored due to crisis fatigue. Residents repeatedly told to evacuate because of oncoming hurricanes may become complacent in the face of a serious hurricane. Pathological science diminishes faith in genuine science. The world is full of swamis, faith healers, snake oil salesmen, and mountebanks. There are now thousands of professionals whose reputations are invested in maintaining the global warming hoax. Perhaps the most reprehensible characteristic of apocalypse-mongers is that they target children. According to Commentary magazine, thermonuclear education consituted "the most serious abuse of children."

The threat of global warming will eventually recede. The need for an apocalyptic vision, however, will not. The next threat will contain many of the characteristics of the global warming threat. It will predict the end of the world. It will be based on "scientific facts." It will require massive counseling for the psychological distress it will cause. It will require the creation of a massive bureaucracy. And it will require the transfer of massive amounts of money to the hypothesized victims of the future crisis.

John Dietrich is a freelance writer and the author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy (Algora Publishing).

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Raj the new Sexy Sadie?

Well he did have that steamy novel

Rajendra Pachauri: Media went gaga over greenhouse-gas guru

FROM-NJ Star Ledger

By Paul Mulshine/The Star Ledger

At the height of the ’60s silliness, the Beatles flew off to India to seek enlightenment at the feet of a guru named the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Their enchantment didn’t last. After they noticed that this master of the metaphysical had managed to acquire his own helicopter to ferry him around the foothills of the Himalayas, the Beatles bolted. As John Lennon was headed to the airport, he penned a parody titled “Sexy Sadie” about a temptress who “made a fool of everyone.”

Too bad Lennon’s not around to write a song about the latest guru to emerge out of India, Rajendra Pachauri. Pachauri is a railway engineer by training, yet somehow he managed to work his way up to the chairmanship of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

That’s the group of global-warming alarmists that was recently forced to retract a prediction that the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035. It turns out the claim had no more basis than the Maharishi’s claim that his followers could levitate.

The London Daily Telegraph reported the other day that a United Nations committee will shortly be announcing that an independent panel will investigate the IPCC’s role in what has come to be known as “Climategate.” (See the more recent Wall Street Journal article here.)

Though I consider myself a cynic, I confess even I was shocked when I found out that the global-warming guru is a mere railway engineer. I learned that when I was speaking recently to a scientist skeptical of climate-change alarmism, Princeton physicist William Happer.

“I think the best way to restore the credibility of the IPCC is to have some resignations.” said Happer. “Someone has to resign and it has to be Pachauri.”

Maybe Pachauri could get a job at NJ Transit overseeing the tracks that lead to within walking distance of the Happer Laboratory of Atomic Physics in Princeton. One of the odder aspects of the media coverage of the climate-change controversy is that such serious scientists as Happer and fellow Princeton physics whiz Freeman Dyson have been treated as some sort of kooks while the alarmists led by Pachauri go unquestioned.

In fact, says Happer, climate science involves some of the most complicated questions of physics and astrophysics imaginable. The science simply can’t be reduced to the simple formulas promulgated by the IPCC, which he termed “an advocacy group for global warming alarmism that masquerades as a scientific organization.”

Happer points out that the tiny amount of CO-2 that man has introduced into the atmosphere could create only a correspondingly tiny rise in temperature. The climate-change crowd gets around this by contending that the CO-2 results in an increase in the amount of the most important greenhouse gas, water vapor.

But there are experts in that field as well who disagree. Among the most prominent is Don Easterbrook, a scientist at Western Washington University who is an expert on the “Pacific decadal oscillation.” This is the flow of water vapor over the planet’s largest body of water, the Pacific Ocean.

When I called Easterbrook the other day, he said there is evidence that the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is decreasing, not increasing. And while the climatologists are dismissing the blizzards that keep hitting us here on the East Coast as anomalies, Easterbrook predicts we’d better get used to them.

“The next decade is going to be colder, no doubt about it,” he told me.

Easterbrook based that not just on the Pacific currents but on the possibility that we are entering a “grand solar minimum,” a decline in sunspot activity. These seem to come along every 200 years or so, and they create mini ice ages, Easterbrook said.

“And it’s global cooling, not global warming, that’s the real killer,” he said.

Who’s right, the expert in laying tracks for the Chittagong choo-choo or the expert in the Pacific decadal oscillation? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

As for me, I like to focus on something that we journalists should be focusing on: the question of cui bono. That’s a Latin phrase that translates as “in whose interest?” In whose interest is all this alarmism?

Obviously, there are people like Al Gore who trade in carbon credits. Then there are the environmentalists who want to force their agenda on the world. There’s even the nuclear-power industry, which wants to use the threat of global warming against the aforementioned nuke-hating environmentalists.

And then of course there is that railway engineer from India. He is a follower in a long tradition of producing mantras for the masses. And he has performed his task admirably.

ALSO: Now this is funny. Watch as Al Gore proves he's every bit as bad at economics as he is at climatology. Gore tries to cover up the Climategate scandal in the New York Times today, while also preserving the prospects of earning millions trading carbon credits as part of the firm known on Wall Street as Blood and Gore:

But there are two big problems with this critique: First, there is no readily apparent alternative that would be any easier politically. It is difficult to imagine a globally harmonized carbon tax or a coordinated multilateral regulatory effort. The flexibility of a global market-based policy — supplemented by regulation and revenue-neutral tax policies — is the option that has by far the best chance of success. The fact that it is extremely difficult does not mean that we should simply give up.

In fact, every economist worth mentioning says that a carbon tax is preferable if curbing carbon output is your goal. So why is Al against it? Because there's no way traders can skim off a percentage, that's why.

And of course there's no reason the U.S. couldn't address its carbon output with a tax regardless of what the rest of the world did. No reason except that such a tax wouldn't enrich traders and empower bureaucrats, that is.

Next time, try to hide your conflict of interest a little better, Al.

ALSO: The Washington Post is doing a much better job of covering Climatetae. Note this article debunking the myth that the move to so-called "green jobs" would reduce unemployment


(pictures not in original article)
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"Notable Quotes"

"When you use bad data you get bad results. When you use it to enrich yourself, you are engaged in an activity worthy of a criminal investigation."

source

Alan Caruba
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University ‘tried to mislead MPs on climate change e-mails’

FROM-The Times

The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails has been accused of making a misleading statement to Parliament.

The University of East Anglia wrote this week to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee giving the impression that it had been exonerated by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). However, the university failed to disclose that the ICO had expressed serious concerns that one of its professors had proposed deleting information to avoid complying with the Freedom of Information Act.

Professor Phil Jones, director of the university’s Climatic Research Unit, has stepped down while an inquiry takes place into allegations that he manipulated data to avoid scrutiny of his claims that manmade emissions were causing global warming. Professor Edward Acton, the university’s vice-chancellor, published a statement he sent to the committee before giving evidence to MPs at a public hearing on Monday. He said a letter from the ICO “indicated that no breach of the law has been established [and] that the evidence the ICO had in mind about whether there was a breach was no more than prima facie”.

But the ICO’s letter said: “The prima facie evidence from the published e-mails indicate an attempt to defeat disclosure by deleting information. It is hard to imagine more cogent prima facie evidence.”

The letter also confirmed the ICO’s previous statement that the university had failed in its duties under the Freedom of Information Act by rejecting requests for data. The university had demanded that the ICO withdraw this statement.

The ICO letter, signed by Graham Smith, the deputy commissioner, said: “I can confirm that the ICO will not be retracting the statement ...The fact that the elements of a section 77 offence may have been found here, but cannot be acted on because of the elapsed time, is a very serious matter.

“The ICO is not resiling from its position on this.”

The ICO cannot prosecute the university because the complaint about its rejection of the information request was made too late. The ICO is seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach of the act.

Dr Evan Harris, Liberal Democrat member of the Science and Technology Committee, said: “It seems unwise, at best, for the University of East Anglia to attempt to portray a letter from the Information Commissioner’s Office in a good light, in evidence to the select committee, because it is inevitable that the Committee will find that letter, and notice any discrepancy.

“It would be a wiser course for the university not to provide any suspicion that they might be seeking to enable the wrong impression to be gained.”

An ICO spokesman said: “The commissioner has provided the select committee with a copy of the January 29 letter to which the university referred in a press statement.

“This is so that the committee can be aware of the full contents. The commissioner has not been invited to give evidence to the committee but stands ready to assist the inquiry.”

A spokeswoman for the university said: “The point Professor Acton was making is that there has been no investigation so no decision, as was widely reported. The ICO read e-mails and came to assumptions but has not investigated or demonstrated any evidence that what may have been said in emails was actually carried out.”

The university last night published its correspondence with the ICO on its website .


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A perfect storm is brewing for the IPCC

FROM-UK Telegraph

The emerging errors of the IPCC's 2007 report are not incidental but fundamental, says Christopher Booker

The news from sunny Bali that there is to be an international investigation into the conduct of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri would have made front-page headlines a few weeks back. But while Scotland and North America are still swept by blizzards, in their worst winter for decades, there has been something of a lull in the global warming storm – after three months when the IPCC and Dr Pachauri were themselves battered by almost daily blizzards of new scandals and revelations. And one reason for this lull is that the real message of all the scandals has been lost.

The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC's last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other "extreme weather events" were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The "science is settled", the "consensus" is intact.

But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.

All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC's 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.

Furthermore, it has also emerged in almost every case that the decision to include these scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate. As several IPCC scientists have pointed out about the scare over Himalayan glaciers, for instance, those responsible for including it were well aware that proper science said something quite different. But it was inserted nevertheless – because that was the story wanted by those in charge.

In addition, we can now read in shocking detail the truth of the outrageous efforts made to ensure that the same 2007 report was able to keep on board IPCC's most shameless stunt of all – the notorious "hockey stick" graph purporting to show that in the late 20th century, temperatures had been hurtling up to unprecedented levels. This was deemed necessary because, after the graph was made the centrepiece of the IPCC's 2001 report, it had been exposed as no more than a statistical illusion. (For a full account see Andrew Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion, and also my own book The Real Global Warming Disaster.)

In other words, in crucial respects the IPCC's 2007 report was no more than reckless propaganda, designed to panic the world's politicians into agreeing at Copenhagen in 2009 that we should all pay by far the largest single bill ever presented to the human race, amounting to tens of trillions of dollars. And as we know, faced with the prospect of this financial and economic abyss, December's Copenhagen conference ended in shambles, with virtually nothing agreed.

What is staggering is the speed and the scale of the unravelling – assisted of course, just before Copenhagen, by "Climategate", the emails and computer codes leaked from East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. Their significance was the light they shone on the activities of a small group of British and US scientists at the heart of the IPCC, as they discussed ways of manipulating data to show the world warming faster than the evidence justified; fighting off legitimate requests for data from outside experts to hide their manipulations; and conspiring to silence their critics by excluding their work from scientific journals and the IPCC's 2007 report itself. (Again, a devastating analysis of this story has just been published by Stephen Mosher and Tom Fuller in Climategate: The CRUtape Letters).

Almost as revealing as the leaked documents themselves, however, was the recent interview given to the BBC by the CRU's suspended director, Dr Phil Jones, who has played a central role in the global warming scare for 20 years, not least as custodian of the most prestigious of the four global temperature records relied on by the IPCC. In his interview Jones seemed to be chucking overboard one key prop of warmest faith after another, as he admitted that the world might have been hotter during the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years ago than it is today, that before any rise in CO2 levels temperatures rose faster between 1860 and 1880 than they have done in the past 30 years, and that in the past decade their trend has been falling rather than rising.

The implications of all this for the warming scare, as it has been presented to us over the past two decades, can scarcely be overestimated. The reputation of the IPCC is in shreds. And this is to say nothing of the personal reputation of the man who was the mastermind of its 2007 report, its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri.

It was in this newspaper that we first revealed how Pachauri has earned millions of pounds for his Delhi-based research institute Teri, and further details are still emerging of how he has parlayed his position into a worldwide business empire, including 17 lucrative contracts from the EU alone. But we should not expect the truth to break in too suddenly on this mass of vested interests. Too many people have too much at stake to allow the faith in man-made global warming, which has sustained them so long and which is today making so many of them rich, to be abandoned. The so-called investigations into Climategate and Dr Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann seem like no more than empty establishment whitewashes. There is little reason to expect that the inquiry into the record of the IPCC and Dr Pachauri that is now being set up by the UN Environment Programme and the world's politicians will be very different.

Since 1988, when the greatest scare the world has seen got under way, hundreds of billions
of pounds have been poured into academic research projects designed not to test the CO2 warming thesis but to take it as a given fact, and to use computer models to make its impacts seem as scary as possible. The new global "carbon trading" market, already worth $126 billion a year, could soon be worth trillions. Governments, including our own, are calling for hundreds of billions more to be chucked into absurd "carbon-saving" energy schemes, with the cost to be met by all of us in soaring taxes and energy bills.

With all this mighty army of gullible politicians, dutiful officials, busy carbon traders, eager "renewables" developers and compliant, funding-hungry academics standing to benefit from the greatest perversion of the principles of true science the world has ever seen, who are we to protest that their emperor has no clothes? (How apt that that fairy tale should have been written in Copenhagen.) Let all that fluffy white "global warming" continue to fall from the skies, while people shiver in homes that, increasingly, they will find they can no longer afford to heat. We have called into being a true Frankenstein's monster. It will take a mighty long time to cut it down to size.

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Arguing global warming with Arnold

FROM-OC Register

By MARK LANDSBAUM

We recently offered tips on "What to say to a warmer" for when Al Gore or a fellow global warming alarmist comes to dinner. This week, we suggest: "What to say to a warmist named Schwarzenegger," in case the Terminator drops by.

California has the most destructive and costly global warming law in the nation, if not the world. In a perverse way, it's the governor's crowning achievement. That says a lot about a fellow who drove the state into virtual bankruptcy, accelerated unemployment to at least 12 percent, while dramatically increasing government spending, taxes and the government payroll. But those destructive acts pale next to what's in store if his preposterously titled Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 is enforced as planned.

California is the pivotal battle in the global warming war. If the tax-and-cap crowd succeeds here, it's only a matter of time before their poisonous solution spreads coast to coast. We are, as warmists say, reaching a tipping point.

To give the debate a shove in the right direction, here are some global warming tipping-point, talking points to raise over dinner:

Minority rules?– Only 28 percent of the public thinks dealing with global warming is a high priority, says Pew Research Center pollsters. That ranked global warming dead last among 21 public issues polled. If the rest of us don't think it's a big deal, why should the governor?

What it boils down to – Global warming alarmism never was about temperature. It's about control and money – their control and your money. California's touted Global Warming Solutions Act – also known as Assembly Bill 32 or AB32 – requires bureaucrats to write detailed rules to cap greenhouse gas emissions, mandate reporting by emitters, plan what emission reductions must be achieved and how, provide "alternative compliance mechanisms" and mandates, come up with government-determined "equity between regulated entities," ensure rules don't "disproportionately impact low-income communities," among other things. They've been writing the regulations since 2006 and still are.

Ka-ching – Government stands to profit. State Sen. Bob Dutton, R-Rancho Cucamonga, says Loma Linda University, in his district, "could be forced to pay nearly $4 million each year." Larger schools, more. Dutton says businesses will be forced to pay $20 to $60 per ton of greenhouse gas emitted. Government bureaucrats will decide which businesses pay.

Tiny carbon footprints – All greenhouse gases worldwide make up 2 percent of the atmosphere. Only 3.6 percent of that 2 percent is carbon dioxide. Only 3.4 percent of that 3.6 percent is man-made. If California shut down every man-made CO2-emitting source the result would be atmospherically unnoticeable. In fact, even using their favorite government and U.N. computer calculations, warmists admit that if every nation on Earth had rolled back CO2 emissions to the economy-killing extent called for in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, there would have been no noticeable change in global temperatures.

Irrelevant carbon footprints – Increasingly, scientists openly challenge the presumption CO2 has anything to do with temperature. A recent survey of American meteorologists found fewer than one in four say it's "very likely" most warming since 1950 is human-induced. At last count, 31,486 U.S. scientists had signed a petition saying "there is no convincing evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere." If they don't think so, why should we?

Warmists are wilting – Not long ago, denying man-made catastrophic global warming wasn't permitted in polite company. But even in Washington, D.C., where warmism rose to the level of presumed fact, the debate has changed from "What to do about it?" to what one environmental publication admitted is: "Whether it exists and is in any way driven by mankind?"

When warmists retort ... "The scientific consensus is that man causes catastrophic warming," remind them that, of 539 scientific papers published from January 2004 to February 2007 that contained the phrase "global climate change," not one provided any evidence that manmade influence on the climate would prove catastrophic in any way.

And, when warmists say... "Green jobs have grown faster than nongreen jobs," remind them it doesn't take much for tiny numbers to grow at impressive rates. Two is a 100-percent increase over one. It's true that the 36 percent increase in so-called "green jobs" in California from 1995-2008 is a larger percentage increase than the 13 percent growth in normal jobs. But those green jobs are much less than 1 percent of the state's 18 million jobs. Pass those small potatoes to your dinner guests.

The pain in Spain – Spain thought green jobs could replace regular jobs too. But the Spanish learned the hard way that every green job created meant more than two normal jobs were lost in the process. Spain is literally going bankrupt, in part because green jobs must be subsidized by taxpayers. Ask your guests if they'd like more taxes with their small potatoes.

What's the harm? – There are about 1.5 million California manufacturing jobs. The government estimates AB32 will increase electricity prices alone by 14 percent. (Has the government ever estimated costs on the low side?) Are manufacturing workers comfortable relying on an overnight flowering of windmills and solar panels to pick up the slack? Or, as most economists conclude, will higher prices simply mean fewer jobs?

Useless guesses– The Schwarzenegger administration promises AB32 will be cost-effective. Yeah, we remember his other promises, too. But what did Robert Stavins from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard say? "Even if one accepts the cost estimates that (Schwarzenegger's administration) produces, which I believe are significant understatements of the true costs, the estimates are still useless for identifying a cost-effective portfolio of policies to achieve the ambitious objectives."

Hurry up and stop – When warmists insist their Draconian regulations are needed immediately, remind them that even their own climate gurus concede there's been no statistically significant temperature rise in 15 years, which moved another of the alarmists' scientific high priests, Kevin Trenberth of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, to lament: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can't."

Friends – Who opposes AB32? A pair of pro-business, anti-tax types, Assemblyman Dan Logue, R-Linda, and U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Rocklin, back a ballot initiative to suspend the law until unemployment in the state drops to 5.5 percent. Candidates for governor Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner, another Republican pair who each once headed billion-dollar private enterprises, promise to suspend the law if elected.

Foes –Who supports the law? The likely Democratic candidate for governor, Attorney General Jerry Brown, whose flaky, left-wing, "think-small" approach nearly demolished California's economy when he was governor in the 1970s, loves it. He already has sued local governments for not complying.

Did we mention control? – AB32 imposes a cap-and-trade market to force emitters to buy government-issued permits if they exceed arbitrary limits for greenhouse gas emissions. The governor says this is a "market solution." In a real market, supply and demand determine prices. In this phony market, the government will pluck prices out of thin air.

Did we mention money? – The governor says AB32's diktats are altruistic. We suggest you follow the money. The tentative language for the ballot measure to suspend the law says passage would mean: "Potential foregone state revenues from the auctioning of emission allowances by state government by suspending the future implementation of cap-and-trade regulations." Yep, if AB32 is suspended, the government loses money. Guess whose money. Oh, by the way. Jerry Brown's office wrote that ballot language.

Dollars and common sense – If none of this is persuasive, with dessert serve your warmists dinner guests the conclusions of two Cal State University professors commissioned by the governor's office to calculate the law's economic implications. They concluded small businesses will pay on average $49,691 more per year, families will face $3,857 in increased costs, consumers will have to reduce discretionary spending 26 percent, and 1.1 million jobs will be lost.
Second helping– If that's not persuasive, remind them that even big corporate support that had signed on to warming alarmism to game the system and profit from new rules now is fleeing. Oil giants ConocoPhillips and BP and heavy-equipment maker Caterpillar recently quit the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, apparently no longer fearing or seeing profit in federal cap-and-trade, mired in Congress.

Retort – When Gov. Warmist says his chief CO2 bureaucrat, Mary Nichols at the Air Resources Board, insists suspending AB32 will "put all our efforts at energy efficiency and renewable energy in the deep freezer for a long time," you can say, "With efficiency and renewables like that, we certainly hope so."



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Let There Be No More Scientific Consensuses

There is No Frakking "Scientific Consensus" on Global Warming: Let There Be No More Scientific Consensuses


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"Notable Quotes"

"The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change."

source

Institute of Physics

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IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri to face independent inquiry

FROM-
UK Telegraph

Rajendra Pachauri, the controversial Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is to face an international inquiry into the performance of his organisation.


Environment and Climate ministers meeting in closed session in Bali last night insisted that an independent review should be carried out following the publicising of mistakes in its last report, and a row surrounding Dr Pachauri's robust response to his critics. If his management is found to be at fault his position could become untenable.

Participants in the unprecedented meeting – held at the annual assembly of the Governing Council of the United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) Governing Council in Bali – were sworn to secrecy over the decision and it is only expected to be announced after its detaled scope and composition have been worked out by UNEP and the World Meteorological Organisation, the two UN agencies that oversee the IPCC's work.

The ministers – led by Hillary Benn, the Environment Secretary,and his counterparts from Germany,. Norway, Algeria and Antigua and Barbuda – refused to allow Dr Pachauri to decide who would carry out the review, insisting it must be completely and demonstrably independent of the IPCC.

The two agencies are expected first to approach national academies of sciences and to ensure that it examines the management of the organisation as well as its scientific procedures.

The review is to report by August to allow time for its conclusions - and Dr Pachauri's position – to be assessed before the IPCC meets for its own annual assembly in Korea in October.

Achim Steiner, UNEP's Executive Director said that the IPCC faced a “crisis of confidence” with the public. , According to participants at the meeting, Dr Pachauri expressed regret for any mistakes that had been made, but stopped short of apologising for them. “He gave the impression of making an apology without actually doing so”, said one.

The participants add that he admitted only one mistake, a discredited prediction that the glaciers of the Himalayas would entirely melt away by 2035, for which the IPCC has already apologised. They say he described other alleged errors – such as a prediction that food production in parts of Africa might be cut in half by 2020 or the citing of studies by pressure groups rather than peer-reviewed research - as misunderstandings.

The ministers regard the mistakes as exaggerated, point out that they just concern a few sentences in a 3000 page report, and say they do not in any way undermine the basic science behind global warming. Their main concern has been over the aggressive way in which Dr Pachauri has responded to criticism, beginning with denouncing Indian research suggesting that the glaciers were not melting so rapidly as “voodoo science”.

Many wish he would resign,. But he was reelected unopposed less than 18 months ago,and has often rejected doing so. He refused to comment on the latest developments.


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Investigate Climate Crimes

FROM-IBD

Climate Fraud: A senator wants an investigation of the false climate testimony before Congress and wants Al Gore to reappear. The illegalities may involve more than just lying to Congress.

At a hearing Tuesday by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on the Environmental Protection Agency's budget, ranking Republican James Inhofe told EPA head Lisa Jackson that man-induced climate change was a "hoax" concocted by ideologically motivated researchers who "cooked the science."

More than that, Inhofe, in releasing a GOP report questioning the science used to support cap-and-trade legislation, hinted that such activities may be part of a vast criminal enterprise designed to bilk governments, taxpayers and investors while enriching those making the false claims.

In asking the administration to investigate what he called "the greatest scientific scandal of our generation," Inhofe called for Gore to be summoned to explain and defend his earlier testimony in light of the Climate-gate e-mail scandal and admissions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) was essentially a work of fiction.

Since AR4 was released, Gore claims such as rising seas and endangered coastlines have been debunked. IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri has been revealed as a collector of anecdotes and student dissertations who had to retract the claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035.

Murari Lal, an editor of IPCC's AR4 report, has admitted to Britain's Daily Mail that he had known the 2035 date was false, but included it in the report "purely to put political pressure on world leaders."

Even Phil Jones, head of Britain's tainted Climate Research Unit, has conceded that, yes, the Earth was warmer in medieval times and there has been no statistically significant warming in the last 15 years.

As Charlie Martin of Pajamas Media reports, Inhofe is asking the Department of Justice to look into possible research misconduct or even outright criminal actions by scientists involved in questionable research and data manipulation. These include Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University and James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Inhofe's report suggests that the products of such scientific misconduct, used by the EPA and Congress to support draconian legislation and regulations, may violate the Shelby Amendment requiring open access to federally funded research, as well as the Office of Science and Technology Policy rules on scientific misconduct.

The report notes potential violations of the Federal False Statements and False Claims acts, which involve both civil and criminal penalties. Charges of obstructing Congress in its official proceedings are possible as well.

We should also follow the money. Researchers have lived off grants spawned by their claims of climate fraud. Oil and coal companies have suffered financially, as have their stockholders. Consumers have faced higher energy prices. Those who've made great sums are the very people who promote green energy and green companies in which they're invested based on the false claims they've made.

When you add up the costs of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill and EPA's finding that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, all in the name of fighting climate change, you have a scam that dwarfs Bernie Madoff's.

Vast sums are being made and will be made through the sale of carbon offsets and carbon credits. Perhaps the Securities and Exchange Commission should investigate the claims of such enterprises.

Gore himself has achieved a net worth estimated by some to be in excess of $100 million by persuading investors to get involved in his enterprises. He's been touted as possibly the world's first "carbon billionaire."

What if it's all been a fraud all along? Inhofe may not get his investigation, but certainly it is well warranted.



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"Notable Quotes"

"The solution is for you to stop trying to pass off garbage as science. The solution is for you establishment climate scientists to police your own back yard. When Climategate broke, there was widespread outrage … well, widespread everywhere except in the climate science establishment. Other than a few lone voices, the silence there was deafening. Now there is another whitewash investigation, and the silence only deepens.

And you wonder why we don’t trust you? Here’s a clue. Because a whole bunch of you are guilty of egregious and repeated scientific malfeasance, and the rest of you are complicit in the crime by your silence. Your response is to stick your fingers in your ears and cover your eyes."

source

Willis Eschenbach


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The global warming guerrillas

Published Feb 6 2010

FROM- UK Spectator

Matt Ridley salutes the bloggers who changed the climate debate. While most of Fleet Street kowtowed to the green lobby, online amateurs uncovered the spin and deception that finally cracked the consensus

Journalists are wont to moan that the slow death of newspapers will mean a disastrous loss of investigative reporting. The web is all very well, they say, but who will pay for the tenacious sniffing newshounds to flush out the real story? ‘Climategate’ proves the opposite to be true. It was amateur bloggers who scented the exaggerations, distortions and corruptions in the climate establishment; whereas newspaper reporters, even after the scandal broke, played poodle to their sources.

It was not Private Eye, or the BBC or the News of the World, but a retired electrical engineer in Northampton, David Holland, whose freedom-of-information requests caused the Climategate scientists to break the law, according to the Information Commissioner. By contrast, it has so far attracted little attention that the leaked emails of Climategate include messages from reporters obsequiously seeking ammunition against the sceptics. Other emails have shown reporters meekly changing headlines to suit green activists, or being threatened with ostracism for even reporting the existence of a sceptical angle: ‘Your reportage is very worrisome to most climate scientists,’ one normally alarmist reporter was told last year when he slipped briefly off message. ‘I sense that you are about to experience the “Big Cutoff” from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included.’

So used are greens to sycophancy in the television studios that when they occasionally encounter even slightly hard questions they are outraged. Peter Sissons of the BBC: ‘I pointed out to [Caroline Lucas of the Green party] that the climate didn’t seem to be playing ball at the moment. We were having a particularly cold winter, even though carbon emissions were increasing. Indeed, there had been no warming for ten years, contradicting all the alarming computer predictions... Miss Lucas told me angrily that it was disgraceful that the BBC — the BBC! — should be giving any kind of publicity to those sort of views.’


Of course, reporters have been going native for decades. The difference is that they cannot now get away with it. When acid rain was all the rage in the 1980s, I was a science editor and I relayed all sorts of cataclysmic predictions from scientists and greens about its effect on forests. (Stern magazine said in 1984 that a third of Germany’s forests were already dead or dying and that experts believed all — all! — its conifers would be gone by 1990.) Today, we know that these predictions were wildly wrong and that far from dying out, forests in Germany, Sweden and North America actually thrived during that decade. I should have been more sceptical.

Yet, this time round, despite 20 years of being told they were not just factually but morally wrong, of being compared to Holocaust deniers, of being told they deserved to be tried for crimes against humanity, of being avoided at parties, climate sceptics seem to be growing in number and confidence by the day. What is the difference?

In a word, the internet. The Climate Consensus may hold the establishment — the universities, the media, big business, government — but it is losing the jungles of the web. After all, getting research grants, doing pieces to cameras and advising boards takes time. The very ostracism the sceptics suffered has left them free to do their digging untroubled by grant applications and invitations to Stockholm. The main blog used by the Consensus, realclimate.org, exemplifies this problem, because it was set up by a PR company and is run by an employee of Nasa, who ties himself in knots trying to show that he does the blog in his spare time. It is also characterised by a tone of weary condescension and censoring of dissent that you do not find on most sceptic sites.


Contrast it with wattsupwiththat.com, a site founded in November 2006 by a former Californian television weather forecaster named Anthony Watts. Dedicated at first to getting people to photograph weather stations to discover how poorly sited many of them are, the site has metamorphosed from a gathering place for lonely nutters to a three-million-hits-per-month online newspaper on climate full of fascinating articles by physicists, geologists, economists and statisticians.

Or take a book published last month called The Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montford, a rattling good detective story and a detailed and brilliant piece of science writing. Montford has never worked in the media. He is an accountant and science publisher who works from his home in Milnathort in Kinrossshire. He runs a blog called ‘Bishop Hill’.

Montford came to the subject in 2005 when he read a blog post by another amateur non-journalist named Tim Worstall, a scandium dealer who lives in Portugal (I am not making this up), who was in turn passing on news of another blogger’s work: Stephen McIntyre, a retired mining consultant and keen squash player in Toronto. Because he keeps catching errors in their work, McIntyre is the sceptic the climate scientists most love to hate, even though he is scrupulously polite and insists that the followers on his website, climateaudit.org, are too. ‘A certain person’, the Climategate scientists called him in their emails, or ‘Mr Mc “I’m not entirely there in the head”’, or ‘the self-appointed Joe McCarthy of climate science’.

Notice that all of these sceptic bloggers are self-employed businessmen. Their strengths are networks and feedback: mistakes get quickly corrected; new leads are opened up; expertise is shared; links are made. Prejudice and ignorance abound too, but the good blogs get rewarded with scoops and guest essays so they tap into rich seams of knowledge. When Montford first ran his now classic post called ‘Caspar and the Jesus paper’, about the shenanigans the IPCC had to resort to in order to get a flawed paper rebutting McIntyre into the peer-reviewed literature in time to use it in their report, word of mouth caused interest in his website to explode.


Mcintyre’s forensic dissection of the Consensus papers puts cosy scientific peer review to shame. Digging deep into data and computer programs, he has found myriad mistakes in both the statistical technique and the data used to make the famous hockey stick graph, which purported to show that recent temperatures were unprecedented in level and rate of change. But he has also uncovered a mistake in data that conveniently prevented 1934 being warmer than 1998 in America; the splicing together of the records of two Antarctic weather stations as if they were one; the smoothing of sea-level rise in a way that conveniently concealed its recent deceleration; the use of a Swedish lake sediment series upside down so it showed recent warming instead of cooling; and most recently the reliance of an attempt to resuscitate the hockey stick on a ludicrously small sub-sample of just 12 Siberian larch trees. That last one came about when Montford spotted that a scientist who had been refusing McIntyre access to data for ten years had published in a journal with a strict policy of archiving data. Montford tipped off McIntyre, who asked the journal to force the scientist to release the data, which he eventually did.

‘It seems inconceivable to the commentariat,’ says Andrew Orlowski of the online newspaper of the IT industry, the Register, ‘that scientists have prejudices too, and that the publication process (peer review) is not some Kitemark of quality but is vulnerable to being hijacked.’ Chip Knappenberger, who blogs at masterresource.org, believes the rise of blogs as repositories of scientific knowledge will continue if the scientific literature becomes guarded and exclusive. ‘I can only anticipate this as throwing the state of science and the quest for scientific understanding into disarray.’

When Climategate broke, the mainstream media, like knights facing archers at Crécy, mostly ran dismissive pieces reflecting the official position of the Consensus. For example, they dutifully repeated the line that the University of East Anglia’s global temperature record was vindicated by two other ‘entirely independent’ records (from Nasa and NOAA), which was bunk: all three records draw from the same network of weather stations. Editors then found — by reading and counting the responses on their blog pages — that there was huge and educated interest in Climategate among their readers. One by one they took notice and unleashed their sniffing newshounds at last: the Daily Express went first, then the Mail and the Sunday Times, last week the Times and this week even the Guardian.

For those few mainstream journalists who had always been sceptical — like Christopher Booker — it must be a strange experience, like being relieved after living behind enemy lines. Who knows, one day even BBC News may ask tough questions. But it was the bloggers who did the hard work.

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STOP THE PRESSES !

Sanity in the Main Stream Media




EDITORIAL: EPA's global-warming power grab

Senate should overturn greenhouse gas regulations

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Scientific scandals and record snowfalls have begun to melt away the congressional appetite for more global-warming regulations. On Sunday, to take the latest example, a major scientific journal admitted that "oversights" compelled the retraction of its conclusion that sea levels were rising as a result of increased worldwide temperatures. Reports of this sort make it increasingly difficult for members of Congress to enter iced-over districts to ask their constituents to make economic sacrifices in an attempt to appease Mother Earth into favoring us with colder weather.

This does not mean, however, that the left has given up on global warming as a means of exerting more government control over the economy.

To avoid a potentially messy vote, President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency has turned to the administrative rule-making process to impose climate-control regulations. In December, the agency made an "endangerment finding" that declared that six gases - including the carbon dioxide you are exhaling as you read this - are putting the planet's well-being in peril. The first major rule based on this finding will be finalized next month.

President George W. Bush's EPA administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, warned that such a finding would result in a major government power grab. "[T]he potential regulation of greenhouse gases under any portion of the Clean Air Act could result in an unprecedented expansion of EPA authority that would have a profound effect on virtually every sector of the economy and touch every household in the land," he explained.

Fortunately, Mr. Obama's team might not get away with it. So far, 40 senators have signed on to an effort by Sen. Lisa A. Murkowski, Alaska Republican, to nullify the EPA endangerment finding. Three Democrats have been willing to co-sponsor the legislation, but Senate sources suggest a number of others may be willing to vote for the bill when it comes to the floor.

Mrs. Murkowski, who takes a moderate stand on the issue, is key to lining up the bipartisan support required for passage. In the past, the Alaska senator has embraced government efforts to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, including a limited form of cap-and-trade. Her resolution is evidence that both sides of the global-warming issue can agree that such a fundamental public-policy question should not be decided by unelected bureaucrats. Both sides also should be troubled by the EPA's twisting of the Clean Air Act, which originally was designed to cut down on actual pollutants, into regulating so-called greenhouse gases.

Instead of preventing smokestacks from belching noxious fumes and toxic chemicals harmful to the health of human beings, the agency has made its new enemy No. 1 a cow chewing grass in a field. Citing U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, the EPA declared "enteric fermentation" - a fancy phrase to refer to a cow's natural emissions in the field - to be the primary source of methane, which is 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in planetary warming.

The EPA placed what it called a "primary reliance" on reports like those of the IPCC instead of conducting independent research to make its finding. Given the retractions and revelations of faulty science surrounding the global-warming religion, especially at the IPCC, it's time to take the issue out of the EPA's hands so Congress can address it in the open. The Senate should pass Mrs. Murkowski's disapproval resolution when it comes for an expected vote next month.


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Global Warming Update

FROM-A MINORITY VIEW

BY WALTER WILLIAMS


John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, in an hour-long television documentary titled "Global Warming: The Other Side," presents evidence that our National Climatic Data Center has been manipulating weather data just as the now disgraced and under investigation British University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit. The NCDC is a division of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Its manipulated climate data is used by the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, which is a division of the National Aeronautical and Space Administration. John Coleman's blockbuster five-part series can be seen at www.kusi.com/weather/colemanscorner/81583352.html.

The Coleman documentary presents research by computer expert E. Michael Smith and Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D'Aleo. During the 1960s and into the 1980s, the number of stations used for calculating global surface temperatures was about 6,000. By 1990, the number of stations dropped rapidly to about 1,500. Most of the stations lost were in the colder regions of the Earth. Not adjusting for their lost made temperatures appear to be higher than was in fact the case. According to Science & Environmental Policy Project, Russia reported that CRU was ignoring data from colder regions of Russia, even though these stations were still reporting data. That means data loss was not simply the result of station closings but deliberate decisions by CRU to ignore them in order to hype their global warming claims. D'Aleo and Smith report that our NCDC engaged in similar deceptive activity where they have dropped stations, particularly in colder climates, higher elevations or closer to the polar regions. Temperatures are now simply projected for these colder stations from other stations, usually in warmer climates.

Mounting evidence of scientific fraud might make little difference in terms of the response to manmade global warming hysteria. Why? Vested economic and political interests have emerged where trillions of dollars and social control are at stake. Therefore, many people who recognize the scientific fraud underlying global warming claims are likely to defend it anyway. Automobile companies have invested billions in research and investment in producing "green cars." General Electric and Phillips have spent millions lobbying Congress to outlaw incandescent bulbs so that they can force us to buy costly compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL). Farmers and ethanol manufacturers have gotten Congress to enact laws mandating greater use of their product, not to mention massive subsidies. Thousands of major corporations around the world have taken steps to reduce carbon emissions including giants like IBM, Nike, Coca-Cola and BP, the oil giant. Companies like Google, Yahoo and Dell have vowed to become "carbon neutral."

Then there's Chicago Climate Futures Exchange that plans to trade in billions of dollars of greenhouse gas emission allowances. Corporate America and labor unions, as well as their international counterparts have a huge multi-trillion dollar financial stake in the perpetuation of the global warming fraud. Federal, state and local agencies have spent billions of dollars and created millions of jobs to deal with one aspect or another of global warming.

It's deeper than just money. Schoolteachers have created polar-bear-dying lectures to frighten and indoctrinate our children when in fact there are more polar bears now than in 1950. They've taught children about melting glaciers. Just recently, the International Panel on Climate Change was forced to admit that their Himalayan glacier-melting fraud was done to "impact policy makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action."

What would all the beneficiaries of the global warming hype do if it becomes widely known and accepted that mankind's activities have very little to do with the Earth's temperature? I don't know but a lot of people would feel and look like idiots. But I bet that even if the permafrost returned as far south as New Jersey, as it once did, the warmers and their congressional stooges would still call for measures to fight global warming.

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More than a rock collector

FROM-Pajamas Media

Climategate: What We Should Be Doing About Natural Climate Change


Just because AGW is a fraud doesn't mean that we should ignore the natural and cyclical changes in the Earth's temperature.

by Harrison Schmitt

Earth’s climate changes are extraordinarily complex phenomena. They represent decadal, to millennial, to epochal changes in weather patterns as nature continuously attempts to compensate for solar heating imbalances in and between the atmosphere and oceans.

Nature’s attempts to restore heat balance take place under the complicating influences of the Earth’s inclined daily rotation, movement and release of heat stored in the oceans, aerosol production by many natural processes, water and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, and periodically changing orbital position and orientation relative to the sun. In spite of all these variables and more, the Earth currently controls its temperature in a very narrow range as shown by satellite measurements of the temperature of the lower atmosphere (troposphere) since 1979.

Global surface and near surface temperatures have risen about half a degree Centigrade (about 0.9 degree Fahrenheit) each 100 years since the minimum temperatures of the Little Ice Age in 1660. Multi-decade intervals of more rapid warming and cooling have occurred during this current, centuries-long general warming trend as they have for over 10,000 years since the last major ice age.

Indeed, by the end of the 17th century, glaciers had advanced over valley farmlands cultivated as those same glaciers receded during the preceding Medieval Warm Period (about 800-1300). Since the last major ice age, decades long periods of warming and cooling have been superposed on longer cycles, the longest repeating about every 1500 years.

All of this has occurred without any significant human activity. Cooling between 1935 and 1975 and since 2000, and warming between 1975 and 1995 have been the most recent such variations and correlate strongly with variations in solar activity.

In contrast to these facts, climate change assumptions and computer modeling, rather than real-world observations, underpin the government’s efforts to restrict American liberties and confiscate trillions of dollars of American income in the name of “doing something” about climate change. The scientific rationale behind this proposed massive intrusion into American life requires more than a “consensus” of like-minded climate analysts and bureaucrats. It needs to be right.

Recent disclosures and admissions of scientific misconduct by the United Nations and advocates of the human-caused global warming hypothesis shows the fraudulent foundation of this much-ballyhooed but non-existent scientific consensus about climate.

Still, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other government agencies persist in over-stepping their regulatory authority to jam climate related regulations into our lives and economy at the expense of liberty, jobs, and incomes. Federal control of energy production and use, advocated by special “climate” interests, will have a vanishingly small effect on slowing three and a half centuries of very slow, erratic, but natural global warming.

A long-term federal and commercial agenda to gather power and profit in the name of “environment” at the expense of liberty has no constitutional foundation. The Tenth Amendment leaves to the states all governance responsibility for environment as no direct or indirect mention of it exists in the Constitution. Prudent protection of local environments by the states and the people does have justification in the Ninth Amendment’s protection of natural rights, including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as formalized in the Declaration of Independence. The Feds need to butt out!

So, what should the people do now about climate, if anything? We must prepare to adapt to inevitable change, however unpredictable it may seem. We can recognize that production and use of our own domestic oil, gas, coal, and nuclear resources buys us time to meet these challenges and, at the same time, preserve our liberty.

We can develop far better surface and space observational techniques and use them consistently over decades to better understand the science of our Earth. On political time scales, we can quit taking actions with unknown and unintended consequences. We can choose sustained research and development of energy alternatives, those with clear paths to commercialization, rather than continue tax dollar subsidies and loan guarantees for premature or flawed introduction of politically motivated concepts. We can provide investment and business environments that will advance new sources of energy, particularly through reduction of personal and business income tax rates.

Basically, instead of being ideologically greedy and ignoring good science and economics, we can start being wise and truly concerned about our children, and their children, and the society in which they will live.

Harrison Schmitt is a a former senator from New Mexico and a geologist. He walked on the Moon as part of the crew of Apollo 17.

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Al Gore Is Lying Low -- for Good Reason

FROM-American Thinker

By Rex McBride

Maybe Al Gore's been advised by legal counsel to lie low. He may be the leader of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) movement, but he's not defending it in public, not even when it's falling apart and his new fortune is based upon it.

Mr. Gore and his financial backers earned millions of dollars in start-up "green" companies and carbon trading schemes. If the scam worked, he could've become the first "carbon billionaire."
"What goes up can fall down" applies to ill-gotten gains in the stock market or "carbon trading" schemes. In such schemes, it's foreseeable that trusting investors will (a) not only get hurt when the scam collapses, but they'll also (b) pursue legal remedies and sue him for fraud.

Mr. Gore's financial gains were based on the contradictory and error-plagued assertion that man's release of the trace gas CO2 will fry the planet.

Once it becomes clear to everyone that the AGW theory is based on cleverly manipulated data twisted by rigged computer models controlled by several dozen IPCC politicians/scientists, we can expect that investors who lose millions by investing in these companies will eventually haul Mr. Gore and the insider IPCC scientists into court.

Over the years, American tax dollars were poured down the fantasyland AGW "rat hole." Sooner or later, Al Gore needs to answer some hard questions. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait for lawsuits from private investors. Today, legal counsel will advise him to remain silent.

It's impossible to predict how many lawsuits, or what kind, might arise once everyone realizes that the AGW scam dwarfs Bernie Madoff's $50-billion Ponzi operation. New studies appear almost daily that further undercut AGW theory. The biggest daily newspaper in the Netherlands vindicated that country's leading AGW critic in the article "Henk Tennekes -- He was right after all."

Dr. Tennekes was fired in the 1990s from a prominent research position and blacklisted for debunking AGW theory. He upset the same IPCC scientists who control the leading "peer review" climate research journals and who blocked the publication of all contrary research in those journals for decades.

As investors learn the extent of the scam, Mr. Gore's start-up "green" companies will lose considerable value, like flaky dot-com companies lacking a real product. Investors in these "green" companies -- who reasonably relied upon Gore's alarming claims -- may pursue several possible remedies:

- derivative shareholder lawsuits, disgorging from Mr. Gore and other senior officers in these companies any illicit gains from any insider trading that could be proven; and/or

- lawsuits against brokers who did not perform the SEC's necessary "due diligence" research before peddling those shares; and/or

- civil RICO lawsuits against Mr. Gore and any IPCC scientists who participated in blocking the publication of contrary research, cooking the data, all of whose annual income skyrocketed from the public hysteria.

On the state level, it's impossible to predict if one or more state attorney generals will look back on the tobacco industry cases and decide, representing the taxpayers of his or her state, to file criminal and/or civil RICO actions against Gore and the enriched IPCC scientists.

(On the federal level, while President Obama is in office, the Justice Department will not file RICO or SEC actions against their buddy Al Gore. Remember, the president originally hoped that Boxer-Kerry cap-and-trade would generate over $600 billion in new corporate taxes -- "emergency" measures justified by fantasy AGW theory.

Remember the joke about the government taxing air? In the Twilight Zone of Boxer-Kerry, say hello to cap-and-trade.)

If Mr. Gore's "green" companies do crash and significantly injure private investors, attorneys in a civil lawsuit could compel Gore to answer questions like:

(1) When you claimed that "the science is settled," did you mean that it's "settled" that you and the IPCC scientists could make quick millions by manipulating the data and fomenting public hysteria?

(2) What does "peer review" mean if none of the IPCC scientists who controlled the academic journals protested that there was no original data to support your frightening claim of accelerated temperature increases after 1995?

(3) If the very scientists that the public trusted to act as the "check and balance" against careless research -- or worse yet, to protect against research fraud -- did not catch a "tiny" problem like not having original supporting data after 1995, does "peer review" mean that IPCC's scientists would secretly work in concert to cover each other's asses and keep the grants coming?

Such questions need answers.

In "The Dog Ate Global Warming", an article at the Cato Institute, Patrick J. Michaels noted that "[i]f there are no data, there's no science. U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the answer."

Obviously, Al Gore cannot be compelled to answer questions in a criminal court under the 5th Amendment. However, his admissible bank and stock portfolio records would prove his skyrocketing wealth, making him a "deep pocket."

Since 1970, the scope of RICO cases has grown far beyond prosecuting mafia operations. The law firm Nixon Peabody explained:

RICO was written in broad terms. To state a claim, a plaintiff must allege four elements: (1) conduct (2) of an enterprise (3) through a pattern (4) of racketeering activity... Each element of a RICO claim requires additional analysis: an "enterprise" is marked by association and control; a "pattern" requires a showing of "continuity" -- continuous and related behavior that amounts to, or poses a threat of, continued criminal violations; and "racketeering activity" involves the violation of designated federal laws ...

RICO lawsuits are now won in a wide variety of civil disputes -- e.g., insurance companies working in concert to delay/shortchange payments owed to dentists.

Other RICO cases resulted in court judgments against the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club, Catholic sex crimes, and Major League Baseball.

It violates federal law to fake taxpayer-funded research and then manipulate or destroy data to enrich oneself. If an insider group secretly conspires to do so, it looks and smells like RICO.
If more AGW-destroying news rolls in, and if Gore's "green" companies lose significant value, then shareholder derivative lawsuits and/or state RICO lawsuits will follow -- more so as the losses grow.

Mr. Gore is in hiding today -- no longer the "courageous" leader of the AGW movement. Apparently, Planet Earth is "no longer in grave danger" or "needing to be saved," but Gore could lose all of his ill-gotten assets.

If the victim list grows and criminal intent is proven, Mr. Gore could do serious time. After a much smaller scam, Bernie Madoff got 150 years.

What if you want answers about the potential misuse of tax dollars that enriched AGW insiders but didn't invest in one of Al Gore's fantasies?

Call Congress and demand that the GAO audit all climate change grants. GAO has the professional audit expertise to follow the money, gather objective facts, and report on any significant fraud or abuse.
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Sunshine State climate change

One of the pleasures of living on the Treasure Coast of Florida is the landscaping possibilities. Being in a subtropical climate you can grow many varieties of plants and enjoy them year round.

When we built our new house two years ago we looked forward to landscaping our property with tropical foliage, hibiscus,oleanders,bougainvilleas, and of course palm trees. Thanks to the "enhanced greenhouse effect" this winter our lush tropical foliage can be best described as-DEAD.

This would not greatly upset me as it gives us the opportunity to replace our wimpy tropical plants with hardier stock, more in keeping with our changing climate. The only truly heartbreaking development in this winter of our discontent is the palm trees we planted when we moved in. One in the back yard, the other the center piece of our landscaping in the front of our house. It had grown so full an beautifully proportioned that at Christmas I decked it out with lights. Now all the fronds are dead, frozen into brown sagging heartbreak every time I drive up to my house.

I am not alone, the entire neighborhood, town, county indeed much of the state is filled with once lush vegetation turned brown, not by global warming induced drought but by days of unusual freezing temperatures in the "Sunshine State."

It is not just the vegetation that has taken a hit, animal life unaccustomed to the cold has suffered as well. I'm sure many have heard of the falling iguanas

Record lows across South Florida are literally freezing the invasive iguana in its tracks.

Kamikaze iguanas, plummeting from their treetop perches, have long been a Floridian urban legend. On Wednesday morning, Local 10 caught the free-falling lizard on tape.

This Miami Herald story from last month shows just how destructive "Climate Change" can be to our ecosystem'

Cold snap kills fish at alarming rate

Thousands of fish have died in freshwater and saltwater because the extended cold spell has lowered water temperature.

Waters all around Florida are about to get very stinky over the next few days as hundreds of thousands of fish killed by the extended cold weather begin to decompose and float to the surface.

From the Panhandle to the Keys, from the Gold Coast north to the First Coast, anglers and fisheries scientists venturing out into chilly bays, estuaries, rivers, canals, and even the open ocean, are finding dead and stunned fish in a wide range of sizes and species -- freshwater and saltwater. And this is just the beginning, experts say.

``It's gross. It turns your stomach,'' said Luiz Barbieri, chief of marine fisheries research at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute (FWRI) in St. Petersburg. ``The magnitude of this is unbelievable. It's really dismal and sad to see.''

Fish kills are not uncommon during winter cold snaps, but the record-setting duration of below-normal temperatures throughout the state since Jan. 1 is reminiscent of the deep freezes of 1989 and 1977.

During those episodes, the main casualties were snook, a cold-sensitive species that tends to become listless and die when water temperatures drop below 50 degrees.

But this week's big chill may have decimated populations of other species previously believed capable of escaping plummeting water temperatures.

Jerry Ault, professor of marine biology and fisheries at University of Miami's Rosenstiel School, is surprised at the number of tarpon and bonefish killed this past week. On Wednesday afternoon, Ault's research assistant Mike Larkin picked up the carcasses of more than 160 bonefish from Florida Bay in the Upper Keys. Later in the day, Stuart fishing guide Bruce Ungar brought the scientist a ``truckload'' of dead tarpon from three to 4 ½ feet long found floating near the St. Lucie Nuclear Power Plant.

``Amazingly scary,'' Ault said. ``It's hard to get a grip on the number of mortalities, but the effects will be felt for years to come.''

Scientists and anglers say that during cold snaps fish typically protect themselves by heading for deeper water -- where temperatures are more moderate than in the shallows -- to wait it out. But this extended period of frigid weather combined with brisk northerly winds pushed cold water off the flats and into the deeper channels and canals leaving fish no escape. A NOAA weather website pegged water temperatures at various sites in Florida Bay in the 40s since the weekend.....

Today I was listening to the radio and learned that one of the poster children of the "global warming" campaign had not escaped "climate change. It seems the Florida Aquarium sent people to the Keys to investigate the damage done to our coral reefs.

Florida is the home to the most extensive shallow coral reef formations in North America. From the Florida Keys to the Dry Tortugas, these coral reefs have been under increasingly destructive influences over the years to dredging, ship groundings and illegal collecting. As if that wasn’t enough of an uphill battle, the recent cold snap in January may have killed everything in waters less than 10 feet deep....

....If initial reports are true and the majority of shallow coral formation in the Keys have been wiped out, the need to propagate corals on a massive scale aren’t just important, they are essential....

I do understand the "enhanced greenhouse effect" hypothesis, how warmer temperatures will cause more moisture in the atmosphere which in turn can cause increased snow falls when it gets cold. I thought however this was to occur in the northern latitudes like well ..... Washington DC, or Philadelphia ? I had no idea however that this hypothesis had advanced so far south as to give places such as Dallas record snowfalls . I certainly had no idea climate change would drastically effect me here in sunny Florida with dead palm fronds and snook, not to mention iguana falls and dead coral reefs. It must be all that evaporation.

There can only be a couple of answers to these strange occurrences. Either "climate change" is far worse than they have told us or ALGORE has been vacationing in our state this winter.

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