More Global Warming Profiteering by Obama Energy Official

Ex-Gore associate and current Obama energy official Cathy Zoi is exploiting global warming for her own mega-gain.

FROM-Pajamas Media

Christopher Horner

Surprising documents made available to this author reveal that Assistant Secretary of Energy Cathy Zoi has a huge financial stake in companies likely to profit from the Obama administration’s “green” policies.

Zoi, who left her position as CEO of the Alliance for Climate Protection — founded by Al Gore — to serve as assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, now manages billions in “green jobs” funding. But the disclosure documents show that Zoi not only is in a position to affect the fortunes of her previous employer, ex-Vice President Al Gore, but that she herself has large holdings in two firms that could directly profit from policies proposed by the Department of Energy.

Among Zoi’s holdings are shares in Serious Materials, Inc., the previously sleepy, now bustling, friend of the Obama White House whose public policy operation is headed by her husband. Between them, Zoi and her husband hold 120,000 shares in Serious Materials, as well as stock options. Reporter John Stossel has already explored what he sees as the “crony capitalism” implied by Zoi being so able to influence the fortunes of a company to which she is so closely associated.

In addition, the disclosure forms reflect that Zoi holds between $250,000 and $500,000 in “founders shares” in Landis+Gyr, a Swiss “smart meter” firm. She also still owns between $15,000 and $50,000 in ordinary shares.

“Smart meters,” put simply, are electric meters that return information about customer power usage to the power company immediately and allow a power company to control the amount of power a customer can consume. These smart meters are a central component of the Obama administration’s plans to reduce electricity consumption as part of the “smart grid.”

In a rare moment of candor, Obama “Energy Czar” Carol Browner said to US News & World Report last year: “We need to make sure that …[e]ventually, we can get to a system where an electric company will be able [sic] to hold back some of the power so that maybe your air conditioner won’t operate at its peak, you’ll still be able to cool your house, but that’ll be a savings to the consumer.” (emphasis added)

Clearly, DoE funding to encourage the adoption of “smart meters” would very likely lead to much increased sales by Landis+Gyr — and a potential windfall for Zoi. But surely Zoi doesn’t participate in the relevant “energy efficiency” policy?

In fact, as a condition of her employment with the Obama administration, while Ms. Zoi maintained significant security holdings in Serious Materials and Landis+Gyr, she promised to “not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter that has a direct and predictable effect on the[ir] financial interest” without obtaining a waiver first.

But then, if she doesn’t participate in decisions that could have a “direct and predictable effect” on her Landis+Gyr holdings and she doesn’t participate in decisions that could have a “direct and predictable effect” on her holdings in Serious Materials, it seems worth asking in which decisions she can participate.

What, precisely, is she doing on our dime, and why is she permitted to carry such obvious conflicts of interest that appear to preclude her from working on nearly any matter of substance under her purview?

Doesn’t Zoi’s involvement in these issues raise serious ethical or legal issues? And what happened to the high ethics and complete transparency promised by the Obama administration?

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What a Piece of Work Is Man: Hubris and the Scientific Illiterates in the MSM

FROM- Big Journalism
by Rich Trzupek

As a scientist, I try to maintain a relatively respectful tone when discussing the lamentable state of journalism vis-à-vis environmental and scientific issues, though I may pepper in the occasional wisecrack designed to spice things up. But when Science correspondent Eli Kintisch’s Op-Ed piece that recently ran in the Los Angeles Times was brought to my attention, I threw up repeatedly. In this case, nothing but a rant will do.

Kintisch collected a few salient facts, but he just couldn’t seem to put them together. It was like playing Pictionary with your disturbingly dimwitted cousin. You draw a creature with big, floppy ears and a fluffy tail and you trace a series of arcs that indicate hopping, but after cousin Dave peers intently at the picture for half a minute, he turns to you and ventures: “Is it a horse?”

In much the same way, Eli Kintisch observes a world in which air pollution emissions have been drastically reduced over the past forty years, duly considers the state of the planet and then concludes: we need more air pollution!

You’re likely to hear a chorus of dire warnings as we approach Earth Day, but there’s a serious shortage few pundits are talking about: air pollution. That’s right, the world is running short on air pollution, and if we continue to cut back on smoke pouring forth from industrial smokestacks, the increase in global warming could be profound.

Cleaner air, one of the signature achievements of the U.S. environmental movement, is certainly worth celebrating. Scientists estimate that the U.S. Clean Air Act has cut a major air pollutant called sulfate aerosols, for example, by 30% to 50% since the 1980s, helping greatly reduce cases of asthma and other respiratory problems.

But even as industrialized and developing nations alike steadily reduce aerosol pollution — caused primarily by burning coal — climate scientists are beginning to understand just how much these tiny particles have helped keep the planet cool. A silent benefit of sulfates, in fact, is that they’ve been helpfully blocking sunlight from striking the Earth for many decades, by brightening clouds and expanding their coverage. Emerging science suggests that their underappreciated impact has been incredible.

And why do we need more air pollution, pray tell? To combat the myth of global warming, of course.

If we there were more fine particulate and aerosols in the atmosphere, more of the sun’s rays would be reflected and we would be able to counteract the evil effects of greenhouse gases. Simple!

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Kintisch is correct in every particular – though I don’t for a minute, nor do thousands of my colleagues. Still, let’s assume that a weak greenhouse gas like carbon dioxide can drastically influence the climate of a planet subject to so many other, much more powerful, influences. Let’s assume that man is capable of understanding all of those complex forces so perfectly that we could introduce precisely the right amount of particulate and aerosols so as to create an ideal climate. Even if all of that were true, Kintisch’s “solution” would still be even more idiotic than it sounds.

We are one major volcanic eruption away from freezing our collective butts off. We live on a planet that, in recent geologic time, prefers Ice Ages far more than our current temperate climate, for reasons that nobody actually understands.

And, oh yeah, about that whole volcano thing: when Eyjafjallajokull erupts (the volcano in Iceland currently playing havoc with air travel in Europe) history tells us that Katla – a far larger and much more dangerous volcano – will blow soon afterwards. When Katla goes, and it’s overdue, it will spew so much ash into the atmosphere that we’ll be begging for a little global warming.

Following Eli Kintisch’s advice, that we should pour even more crap into the atmosphere, would only exacerbate and extend such a catastrophic (and natural) cooling event.

There’s only one word to describe people who actually believe that mankind can control nature: MSM journalists.

The editors of the Los Angeles Times are of course free to print any opinion they choose, but it says something about the state of mainstream journalism when those editors can read a piece like Kintisch’s and decide that it merits publication, rather than dumping it in the circular file alongside would-be contributors who are certain that the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group runs the world, or who report that the CIA has planted a mind-control chip in their cranium.

Opinions like Kintisch’s aren’t cutting-edge, they’re over the edge. But when it comes to science and the environment, the “journalists” struggling to right the sinking ship that is the old media can’t begin to tell the difference.

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Big Nature and Tiny Us

FROM-American Thinker


By Bruce Walker

Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano has forced tens of thousands of airline flights in Europe and the North Atlantic to shut down. The last time this volcano erupted, in 1821, it continued for two years. No one knows when the eruption will stop this time. This uncontrolled and unpredictable explosion of nature's power upon our lives steps across our puny civilizations with frightening ease.

Nineteen years ago, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines coughed up twenty million tons of sulfur dioxide. In Mexico, nine years earlier, the Chichón eruption perceptibly cooled the planet. Recent human history has other examples of globally cooling volcanoes. Mount St. Helens, erupting in 1980, threw gases and particles in the sky which were clearly visible for hundreds of miles.

The Icelandic Laki eruption in 1783 was believed by Ben Franklin to have cooled the planet, and thirty-two years later, the Tambora volcano in Indonesia produced the "year without a summer," in which distant New England experienced snowfalls in July. Krakatau, exactly one year after Laki, was twenty times more powerful than Mount St. Helens and cooled the planetary temperature perceptibly. These volcanoes are dramatic evidence of a mundane truth: We exercise very little power over our environment.

At a juncture of science and ideology in which acolytes of the global warming faith warn us that we appease the wrong gods, in spite of the fact that their theories show remarkably little predictive power, it should sober us all to realize that nature is much bigger than us. No one needs a hockey stick-generating software program to prove that a simple, natural volcano produces very real global cooling. What if the incidence of volcanic eruptions, as evidenced by Pinatubo, Chichón, and Eyjafjallajokull results in a significant cooling of Earth?

The Pinotubo volcano spewed twenty million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, which caused the global temperature to drop by one degree Fahrenheit. The Icelandic volcano is spewing 750 tons of sulfur dioxide into the air each second, according to the Icelandic Institute of Earth Sciences. That does not sound like a lot until one does the math: That is 2.7 million tons an hour, or 648 million tons a day. How much of that is entering the stratosphere? Atlantic Monthly reports that the ash cloud is extending seven miles into the stratosphere. So maybe this volcano will cool the Earth for a year or two.

The headline, though, is this: Big Nature and Tiny Us. Humans and their technologies are helpless against the whims of volcanoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, and the other burps and hiccups of our planet. We have known for many decades that someday in the near future, California and most of the Pacific Coast might be violently tossed by the shifting of the San Andreas Fault, and whole cities and states might quickly wind up on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. What would that do to "the environment"? In the narrow and petty minds of Warmers, the consequence would be that tens of millions of internal combustion engines and modern homes would stop ruining the environment, but of course, the true impact would be vastly more deadly to man and his tenuous hold upon life here on Earth...and upon the environment of our world. Why are these busybodies not working on ways to keep plate tectonics from producing this calamity? Because no one can really stop the drift of continents, or the volcanoes, earthquakes, and hurricanes which nature causes.

One fine day, a meteor or an asteroid may -- no, a meteor, asteroid, or similar interstellar object will -- smash into our planetary home. We will have little advance warning. There is not much we can do to stop it. We can scarcely predict when this will happen. The impact could easily cause the destruction of all human life, as well as the extermination of much animal and plant life on Earth. Despite the conflict about man-made global warming in the scientific community, there is no disagreement at all about what such a collision would do to our world. Yet the clergy of the Church of Global Warming proposes virtually nothing at all to meet this threat, which the dark ocean of outer space whispers is not an "If?" but a "When?"

Why the intense focus on a dubious and minor problem, man-made global warming, and indifference to an unquestioned and lethal problem, some future collision with an object in outer space? And why are Warmers not trying to figure out how we can stop volcanoes? Liberated man is the enemy of Warmers, and human liberty is the hated object of these Warmers. Their goal, in the simplest terms, is raw political power, whatever harm this power causes to the rest of us. They must portray man as a creature which must be regulated, licensed, and taxed into regimented slavery in a vast empire of pseudo-science. The truth -- that nature is enormous and we are puny -- would lead us to conquer what we can to make our lives safer, richer, and happier.

So, like Druid or Aztec priests before them, what we innocently do can cause spring not to come, the sun not to rise, or fire to come from the sky. Only by making sacrifices which this priestly caste defines as acceptable can our offense against nature be placated. All mischief must have a cause in the conduct of man, because otherwise we could discard our chains and live as free men, knowing that nature is so vast that we cannot comprehend it and that taming nature to our use will bring abundance and joy, rather than the wrath of invented pantheons.

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Voters Take Global Warming A Bit Less Seriously

FROM-Rasmussen Report

Monday, April 19, 2010

Voters continue to show less worry about global warming.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 54% of voters still believe global warming is a serious problem, but that's down eight points from a year ago. The new numbers includes 29% who consider it very serious, a number, too, that has been inching down in recent months.

But 43% now say global warming is not serious, including 21% who say it is not at all serious. The number who say global warming is not serious at all is at its highest level measured in regular tracking in over a year. The overall number of voters who question the seriousness of global warming crossed into the 40s for the first time in January.

Forty-eight percent (48%) of voters say global warming is caused by long-term planetary trends, while only 33% blame human activity. These results are identical to those found last month.

Belief that human activity is the primary cause of global warming has declined significantly. In April 2008, the numbers were nearly the mirror image of the current findings. At that time, 47% blamed human activity, while only 34% named long-term planetary trends as the reason for climate change.

Many voters also continue to believe their president has different views on the topic than they do. Most (55%) say President Obama believes global warming is caused by human activity, while only 15% think the president blames long-term planetary trends.

The decline in voter concern comes despite the failed UN effort in December to produce an international treaty aimed at limiting the human activity that Obama and others consider the primary cause of global warming. At that time, most Americans (52%) said there continues to be significant disagreement within the scientific community over global warming.

Fifty-nine percent (59%) also said it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming.

That helps explain why Americans remain evenly divided over how urgent it is to deal with global warming: 43% say we must take immediate action to stop it, but another 43% say we should wait a few years to see if global warming is real before making major changes.

Seventy-one percent (71%) of Americans say stimulating the economy to create more jobs is a bigger priority for U.S. leaders than stopping global warming to protect the environment.

The plurality of voters (47%) says there is a conflict between economic growth and environmental protection, a number that has held fairly consistent over the past several months. Just 30% do not see this conflict, while 23% are not sure.

When it comes to U.S. efforts to help the environment, just 29% of voters now believe reducing the amount of energy Americans consume is more important than developing new energy sources. Most voters (63%) continue to see finding new energy sources as the more important goal.

The number of voters who think reducing energy consumption is the higher priority ties the lowest level measured in over one year. The number who put new energy sources first ties results found in January.

Women are more likely than men to place more importance on reducing energy consumption. While those over the age of 30 place much higher importance on finding new energy sources, voters under 30 are evenly divided on the question.

Fifty-eight percent (58%) continue to see renewable energy sources such as solar or wind power as a better long-term investment than fossil fuels. Thirty percent (30%) say investing in fossil fuels is the better plan.

Most Americans see a need for major lifestyle cutbacks to help the environment, but even more don’t think that's likely to happen.

Voters support offshore oil drilling more than ever, and most don’t agree with the president’s decision to limit where that drilling can be done.

Despite major announcements in recent days from both Ford and Nissan about stepped-up development of electric cars, just 17% of Americans say it is at least somewhat likely that the next car they buy will be all-electric.

Separate polling finds that 44% of Americans believe solar energy should become a standard method of heating homes in the United States.



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The Kool Aid Factory

Climategate: a scandal that won’t go away

From Macbeth to Watergate, it’s not the act that leads to nemesis, but the attempts to 'trammel up the consequence’ , writes Christopher Booker.


FROM-UK TELGRAPH

If you were faced with by far the biggest bill of your life, would you not want to be confident that there was a very good reason why you should pay it? That is why we need to know just how far we can trust the science behind the official view that the world is threatened with catastrophe by global warming – because the measures proposed by our politicians to avert this supposed disaster threaten to transform our way of life out of recognition and to land us with easily the biggest bill in history. (The Climate Change Act alone, says the Government, will cost us all £18 billion every year until 2050.)

Yet in recent months, as we know, the official science on which all this rests has taken quite a hammering. Confronted with all those scandals surrounding the “Climategate” emails and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the political and academic establishments have responded with a series of inquiries and statements designed to show that the methods used to construct the official scientific case are wholly sound. But as was illustrated last week by two very different reports, these efforts to hold the line are themselves so demonstrably flawed that they are in danger of backfiring, leaving the science more questionable than ever.


The first report centred directly on the IPCC itself. When several of the more alarmist claims in its most recent 2007 report were revealed to be wrong and without any scientific foundation, the official response, not least from the IPCC’s chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, was to claim that everything in its report was “peer-reviewed”, having been confirmed by independent experts.

But a new study put this claim to the test. A team of 40 researchers from 12 countries, led by a Canadian analyst Donna Laframboise, checked out every one of the 18,531 scientific sources cited in the mammoth 2007 report. Astonishingly, they found that nearly a third of them – 5,587 – were not peer-reviewed at all, but came from newspaper articles, student theses, even propaganda leaflets and press releases put out by green activists and lobby groups.

In its own way even more damaging, however, was the report from a team led by Lord Oxburgh on the scientific integrity of the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Two sets of evidence have been used more than anything else to drive the worldwide scare over global warming. One is a series of graphs showing how temperatures have suddenly shot up in recent decades to levels historically unprecedented. The other is the official record of global surface temperatures. For both of these, the CRU and the key group of top British and American scientists involved in those Climategate emails have been crucially responsible.

Lord Oxburgh himself is linked to various commercial interests which make money from climate change, from wind farms to carbon trading. None of the panel he worked with on his report were climate “sceptics”; and one, Dr Kerry Emanuel, is an outspoken advocate of man-made global warming. Even so, it was surprising to see just how superficial their inquiry turned out to be, based on two brief visits to the CRU and on reading 11 scientific papers produced by the research unit in the past 24 years, chosen in consultation with the Royal Society (which is itself fanatical in promotion of warming orthodoxy).

The crown jewels of the IPCC’s case that the world faces catastrophic warming have been all those graphs based on tree rings which purport to show that temperatures have lately been soaring to levels never known before in history – thus eradicating all the evidence that the world was hotter than today during the Medieval Warm Period, long before any rise in CO2 levels. Best known of these graphs, of course, was Michael Mann’s “hockey stick”, comprehensively discredited by the expert Canadian statistician Stephen McIntyre and Professor Ross McKitrick. But the IPCC was able to defend its case with the aid of another set of “hockey sticks”, based on different tree rings, produced by Mann’s close allies at the CRU.

The most widely quoted of the Climategate emails was that from the CRU’s director, Philip Jones, saying that he had used “Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline”. If there was anything in the CRU’s record which a proper inquiry should have addressed it was the story behind this email, because what it highlighted was the device used by the CRU to get round the fact that its tree-ring data hopelessly failed to show the result the warmist establishment wanted. When their Siberian tree rings showed temperatures in the late 20th century sharply dropping rather than rising, the “trick” used by Prof Jones and his colleague Dr Keith Briffa, copied from Mike Mann’s own “hockey stick”, was simply to delete the downward curve shown by the tree rings, replacing them with late 20th-century temperature data to show the dramatic warming

they wanted.

The significance of this sleight of hand can scarcely be exaggerated. Why, in using this misleading graph, did the IPCC not explain the trick that had been played by its leading scientists? If tree rings were so inadequate in reflecting 20th-century temperatures, why should they be relied on to reflect temperatures in earlier centuries? Why, when fresh Siberian tree ring data came to light, making a nonsense of the CRU’s earlier temperature reconstructions, did the CRU simply ignore the new data?

Anyone who has followed the meticulous analysis of this curious story by Steve McIntyre on his Climate Audit website might well conclude that we are looking here at a complete travesty of proper scientific procedure, matched only by the bizarre methods used by Mann himself to construct his original hockey stick. Yet these are the men, Mann, Jones and Briffa, who acted as the “lead authors” of the key chapters of the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 reports.

They quite shamelessly promoted the rewriting of history produced by themselves and a small group of colleagues – the so-called Hockey Team – which the IPCC in turn used as its main evidence to convince the politicians that the world faces unprecedented warming.

Yet scarcely a hint of this hugely important story is contained in the Oxburgh report, which simply glosses it over, hoping to appease critics by throwing in a few vaguely critical comments about how Jones and his team were a trifle “disorganised” in archiving their data. It ignores the utterly damning critiques of the CRU’s methodology produced by McIntyre and McKitrick. It does not even begin to question the way the CRU has compiled its global temperature record, relied on by the IPCC as the most authoritative of all the official data sources for surface temperatures.

Yet this in turn has given rise to all sorts of controversies, not least when Prof Jones last year admitted that much of his data had been “lost” (following his repeated refusals of applications to see it by McIntyre and others). More damaging still was the charge by senior Russian scientists that, in compiling its global record, CRU had cherry-picked the data supplied from Russia, suppressing that from most of the country while retaining the data from the vicinity of cities which, thanks to the “urban heat island” effect, showed a warming trend. So even the accuracy of CRU’s temperature record has been called seriously in doubt, although one would never have guessed it from Oxburgh.

As is reflected in so many political tragedies, from Macbeth to Watergate, it is often not the original dark act itself which leads to nemesis but the later attempts to “trammel up the consequence”. Nothing will do more to reinforce suspicion of the CRU’s conduct than the failure, first by those MPs, and now by the team led by Lord Oxburgh, to address properly the way in which it appears to have abused the principles of true science – a scandal which should be of concern not just to us here in Britain, who paid for it, but across the world.

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EPA choking freedom

FROM- OC Register

Mark Landsbaum

"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined." –
James Madison

We've previously suggested what to say to a global warming zealot (http://www.ocregister.com/articles/%20-234092--.html), and even what to say to California's warmist-in-chief, Arnold Schwarzenegger (http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/%20-236562--.html).

Unfortunately, the ultimate discussion on global warming may require talking to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. If you thought zealots and celebrities-turned-politicians could be difficult to persuade, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Those who would remake the economy in their own image and conform your lifestyle to their vision of a globally cooler utopia are advancing their quasiholy mission with the heavy hand of the unaccountable, unelected bureaucracy at the EPA.

Call it government by, of and for the bureaucracy. Where's James Madison when we need him?

There's nothing as insulated, nothing as isolated, nothing as arrogant as a federal bureaucracy. Think this thought: "I'd like to have a reasonable discussion with someone who will consider my point of view." Now think: "IRS. FBI. Homeland Security." Ouch. The EPA epitomizes the aloof, authoritarian worst of all federal bureaucracies. Don't expect a warm reception.

Several key decisions begin this spring, not the least of which is the beginning of EPA enforcement. With this in mind, here are some EPA talking points, in case you're able to get a word in edge-wise:

Presumptions

We start with the understanding that this nation's founders never intended a massive government bureaucracy to dictate how Americans must live, what they can and cannot consume or manufacture, let alone how much of the stuff they exhale may legally be emitted. The EPA begins with the assumption that we've got all of this 100 percent wrong.

Change of venue

Congress, bless its misguided hearts, at least is a representative body held accountable by voters. That's why Congress, once hell-bent on shoving down our throats an economy-killing, freedom-squashing carbon cap-and-trade law, has backed off. Politicians still can be cowed by public outrage. That's also why global warming alarmists shifted the venue from the comparatively responsive Congress to the utterly insulated EPA. Faceless bureaucrats don't stand for election.

Changing rules

Once upon a time this overbearing regulatory agency restricted its intrusions to matters that pretty much everyone agreed needed attention. Air pollution was a serious problem not long ago. It's debatable whether the might of the federal government was the only, let alone the best, solution. But at least real pollution was a real problem. The EPA has changed that game, perhaps forever, by declaring CO2 to be a harmful pollutant that must be regulated.


Quasiscience

The excuse the EPA uses to exert its regulatory version of martial law over everyday activities is that the globe allegedly is dangerously warming, and manmade greenhouse gas emissions are to blame. Nevermind, that temperatures are, at most, flat over the past 15 years. The only place a cause-and-effect relationship exists between rising greenhouse gases and rising global temperatures is in manmade computer models. Looking beyond the problem of garbage in and garbage out, history tells us a quite different story. As for blaming mankind for rising temperatures, there were far fewer people and absolutely no smokestacks or Hummers centuries ago when temperatures were higher and CO2 levels much higher.

Building on sand

The EPA, incapable of distinguishing pollutants from harmless air, based its war on global warming on findings of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a governmental body, not a scientific body. The IPCC drew on scientific studies, except for those it excluded. IPCC hand-picked representatives, some of them scientists, summarized the findings, selectively including and excluding from the already-screened conclusions. The IPCC came up with an unsurprisingly political document drawn from sometimes one-sided, other times flatly flawed, research, while ignoring inconvenient contrary evidence. Since last year, there's been news aplenty about the IPCC report's frauds and mistakes. Good enough for government work, apparently.

Real science

The EPA's declaration of CO2 as a pollutant ignores its amply demonstrated benefits. Even if manmade emissions did cause higher temperatures, the consequences are likely beneficial not dire. The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change is a network of scientists not funded by governments that stand to gain control. It was established to examine the same climate data used by the U.N.'s panel. But the nongovernmental panel reached "the opposite conclusion – namely, that natural causes are very likely" responsible for whatever changes have occurred in global temperatures. Even so, its conclusion was: "[T]he net effect of continued warming and rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere will be beneficial to humans, plants and wildlife."

Arbitrariness on steroids

The 1970 Clean Air Act, which was improperly invoked to regulate CO2, is explicit in determining the level at which atmospheric pollutants trigger mandatory government regulation. As a result of extending Clean Air Act authority to CO2, 41,900 previously unregulated small entities will require preconstruction permits, and 6.1 million previously unregulated small entities will need operating permits. It's impossible for the feds to clamp down on every car, tractor, lawnmower, commercial kitchen or other mom-and-pop establishment. So here's what will happen: Bureaucrats arbitrarily will decide where to draw the line. A line drawn today doesn't mean it won't be redrawn tomorrow. Authority creep is inevitable, except, of course, in the cases of the well-connected, who game the system or grease the skids. Instead of quoting Madison, we should quote George Orwell: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

'It's too late' defense

It can be argued that the EPA is acting rashly based on wrong-headed legal interpretations, and justified this with rigged research with a blind eye to contrary evidence. It might be argued that the EPA should hold off regulating until underlying scientific claims can be verified. Don't hold your breath. "It is impossible to independently test or verify (England's Climate Research Unit's) calculations because raw temperature data sets have been lost or destroyed," noted Greg Abbott, the Texas attorney general, who has sued to block the EPA diktats.

Fix is in

The EPA's power grab officially began at the end of March with press releases declaring the agency's "final decision" that issuing "construction and operating permit requirements for the largest emitting facilities will begin." Today, the "largest." Tomorrow "the not-so-large?" The next day, who knows? At this rate you might want to hold your breath. Exhaling soon may be an emission law violation.

Nearly last ditch

Congress will have a chance this spring to reassert authority over the bureaucracy when it considers reining in the EPA. A pending resolution by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, would veto the EPA's "endangerment finding" that declared CO2 to be a harmful pollutant. Stay tuned.

Last ditch.

The EPA's unprecedented claim to sovereignty over things that move and many that remain stationary is being challenged in court by no fewer than 15 states' attorneys general, and private plaintiffs, including 500 scientists, who dispute the IPCC's science. The nut of the challenges is that the government exceeded its authority in declaring CO2 a harmful pollutant, and that underlying science is fatally flawed.

Forecast

We're usually optimistic, but the short-term outlook is bleak, and the long-term is bleaker yet – unless someone derails the high-speed, runaway EPA. Otherwise, James Madison's homeland and yours is in for a stormy climate of arbitrary bureaucrats picking and choosing winners and losers, allowing you less and less to say about it as the government expands its control over American life even further.

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Green Emperors Must Stand in Line

FROM- AI

Waster Russel Mead

Sometimes, you don’t have to be an emperor to have no clothes. Just being the Prince of Wales can be enough. After all, in May of 2008 Prince Charles warned the world that we had only eighteen months left to save the planet from spiraling climate disasters. Twenty-three months later we are struggling to cope with the resulting chaos and devastation; fortunately the Prince has given us an extension. On March 7 of 2009 he announced that we have 100 months to save the world. There are 87 months still left — at least by the current count. And who but an evil or foolish climate denier can disagree? After all, the Prince speaks with the Authority of Science — and his tailors are the best and his garments are always very grand.

As the dust settles from the climate upheavals of the last few months — the email scandal, the collapse of the Copenhagen summit, the revelations about the flaws in the IPCC methods and reports — the overall pattern looks more and more clear.

First, there’s significant evidence that something unusual is happening to the world’s climate, and a very strong case exists that it is related to human activity.

Second, some important questions remain. Climate science is a young discipline, and the earth’s climate system is extremely complex. Gathering data, interpreting data, developing and testing models, and making predictions all present non-trivial problems. It is likely that as time goes by and our knowledge and methods improve, many of today’s views on climate will be modified, some significantly. It is impossible to predict from our current knowledge base whether the likely revisions will point to increased risks, decreased risks, or a complex mix of increased and decreased risks. It is possible but by no means certain that the changes in our understanding of climate dynamics will lead to improved ideas about how to reduce the impact of human activity on the world’s climate.

This far, much to the annoyance of some readers, my views are more or less compatible with those of mainstream climate scientists and on these underlying facts of the case I’m pretty close (perhaps a bit more cautious) than the article published in a recent issue of the Economist.

Third, the climate change movement is losing ground; in the English speaking world, in China and India, even in Germany, the political climate is turning more hostile.More...
As someone who has always been less skeptical about the science of climate change than about the politics of the issue, I’m not surprised. I’m not even unhappy; the headline policy proposals that the ‘climate change community’ has generated are by and large unrealistic and ill-advised. Concern about the impact of human activity on the environment makes sense; the political program of the climate lobby does not. It is too global and too grandiose ever to be implemented, and the kind of treaties that the movement has sought cannot be delivered by the international system that now exists.

At the national level, the climate lobby is reeling from a series of setbacks. French President Sarkozy has dropped his support for what would have been Europe’s first carbon tax after concluding that the program was contributing to his steep decline in the polls. Australia’s government was handed an embarrassing defeat over a climate change bill; an opposition leader who sided with the government lost his job when his party revolted. In the United States, even the most optimistic proponents of climate change action have drastically scaled back their dreams; the current Senate bill on cap and trade looks more like a subsidy program for energy companies than like a serious effort to reduce America’s carbon use. Polls in the United States are even less encouraging.

As China and India sense that the global balance of power is changing in their favor and also that the climate lobby has lost political momentum in the West, they are looking less likely to take serious action. And generally, the ongoing financial and economic problems in the world have driven climate change far down the list of global priorities — and made it harder for the climate lobby to raise money from private foundations and guilty rich people.

A poll by the German magazine Der Spiegel found that the percentage of Germans “worried” about the effects of climate change has fallen from 58 percent to 42 percent; German government officials are described as “horrified” by the lack of professionalism at the IPCC and German scientists are demanding the resignation of Rajendra Pachauri.

Characteristically the climate lobby is blaming its troubles on the moral imperfections of other people: short-sighted ordinary people too stupid to comprehend the danger, evil climate “deniers” confusing the peasants with misleading charts, energy producers ready to wreck Planet Earth if that will increase the value of their stock options, and cowardly politicians who won’t walk the plank for the most important issue in the history of mankind. Another, less arrogant and obnoxious way to say the same thing is to say that the climate lobby has been unable to develop a strategy that could work in the world we happen to inhabit.

The current New Yorker offers a classic example of clueless hand wringing: “Why, with global warming, is it always one step forward, two, maybe three steps back?” asks Elizabeth Kolbert, citing a number of the cascading political disasters that have overtaken the movement.
Until the climate change movement understands the flaws in its own strategy, it will continue to experience political setbacks even as it repairs its scientific foundations.

There is nothing surprising about the green crack-up. The changes the climate change movement sought were so dramatic, so complex and so expensive, and required so much coordination in so many different countries, that the climate lobby could only hope to prevail by creating an aura of mass panic about global warming. In my first post about ‘climategate’, I wrote that climate scientists, like Dean Acheson at the start of the Cold War, felt they needed to be ‘clearer than truth’ to sell the public on the dangers they saw. It was this that led the movement and its most visible leaders to stress high profile predictions (like the infamous glacier story) that very publicly blew up in their faces.

This was devastating to the movement; its narrative had been that “We are the scientists, the voices of reason; our critics are ignorant cranks.” Thus the ineffable Rajendra Pachauri, utterly incompetent to manage a high profile global scientific institution in its hour of crisis but serenely convinced of his superior wisdom and virtue, tore himself away from his erotic novel writing to dismiss people who dared question his beloved glacier prediction as “voodoo scientists”.

The critics’ narrative was simpler: “The emperor has no clothes.” Climategate and the IPCC meltdown powerfully reinforced the critical narrative. The pompous, wiser-than-thou establishment had been caught with its pants down. The fact that the mainstream media were slow to appreciate the significance of these developments and were slow to grasp how much things had changed only served to strengthen the impression that the critics were right. The mainstream media looked like the courtiers admiring the emperor’s fine new garments while everyone else could plainly see the skinny imperial knees and the saggy royal rear end. It was a big political win for Matt Drudge, Fox News and all the other kids in the crowd shouting “But he’s not wearing anything at all!”

The underlying problem is strategic, not merely one of PR. It turns out that the actual science, as strong as it is, won’t scare enough of the people enough of the time to enact the sweeping changes the climate lobby wants. That may change over time as evidence accumulates, but the climate movement’s plan for a Big Global Fix probably can’t be adopted no matter what the science says. In the meantime the effort to stampede the herd into the corral by hyping the evidence has not only collapsed; it has given skeptics a strategic boost. Future pronouncements by future green poo-bahs will be met with more skepticism and more cynicism than ever before. To the extent that the green lobby is fighting an entrenched conspiracy of rich oil companies, it has just handed its enemies a powerful set of weapons.


But there’s another little point to consider. I hate to bring this up, but when it comes to the possibly disastrous problems that humanity has so far failed to solve, climate change is neither the most immediate or the most deadly. We live with many unsolved problems. Some are even scarier than global warming — like nuclear proliferation, the development of biological weapons of mass destruction, and the rising volatility of the international financial system. It has been crystal clear for more than a century that modern technology makes war so overwhelmingly destructive that it should no longer be allowed; yet the world is no closer to the elimination of war than it was in 1910. Any or all of these may well do us in before Antarctic ice melt drives tsunamis up the Hudson or climate change creates super-cyclones that empty Florida of everything except walking catfish and Burmese pythons.

Given the many dangers humanity faces, and the limited economic and political resources available to counter them, it’s not as clear as Prince Charles thinks that climate change needs to be the number one issue we address in the next 18 or 87 or however many months he thinks we have left. The United States, for example, has only a limited amount of political capital with China and India. Should we put all of our diplomatic chips on the table to stop global warming, or should we prioritize getting their help in strengthening the nuclear non-proliferation regime, arms control, or local issues — like getting India to be more forthcoming in its negotiations with Pakistan, lessening the dangers of both proliferation and nuclear war? Can an American administration survive if the country believes that it has chosen to ignore China’s trade surplus with the United States in order to prioritize global warming? If President Obama is succeeded by a Republican, it’s unlikely that the US commitment to fighting climate change would grow. How much of his political capital should the President spend on global warming now — as opposing to conserving his popularity and his political majority for worries like re-election and support for his disarmament policies?

“Science” provides no answer to questions like these; the climate change movement has not really thought them through.

I suspect that over time the list of issues that are at least as grave as climate change and quite possibly more urgent will grow. The global economy appears headed into a turbulent era; how much of our political capital should be spent on working with China to avoid devastating world depressions that could get us into big trouble (like war) long before climate change can really hit us? The weaponization of biology as our ability to create organisms and make new diseases explodes is likely to generate a host of arms control issues — and the proliferation of biological WMDs is far easier to arrange and harder to stop than the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Terrorists in particular are likely to find ‘loose germs’ much easier to get hold of or even create than ‘loose nukes’.

In some ways, the greens are like a doctor telling a 95 year old man with heart trouble that he has a slow growing form of prostate cancer that is likely to kill him in 15 years. He doesn’t have to be a ‘cancer denier’ to think that this isn’t the issue he needs to focus on right now.

Prince Charles, Rajendra Pachauri and all the other naked green emperors need to get in line. The human condition in the twenty-first century is far graver and more complex than they seem to understand. They are not the only people with an urgent agenda; climate change is neither the only nor the most imminent threat to civilized life. Humanity needs leaders who can face its problems whole, think about how to address them in context, and above all who can act calmly and deliberately — neither being swept away by every passing panic (remember swine flu) nor taking refuge in denial.

Striking that balance will be hard, but as I’ve written before on this blog, the twenty first century is likely to prove the most challenging era humanity has ever known. To play its not inconsiderable part in the the complicated business of getting humanity through this century in reasonably good shape, the environmental movement needs stronger leadership than, so far, has come to the fore. Not even Prince Charles, Rajendra Pachauri and Al Gore seem to be up to the job.

But you’ve got to admire the threads.

Senators Question Flawed NASA Climate Data

FROM-New American

Written by Alex Newman

After admitting that the United States' own climate data was worse than the Climategate-tainted University of East Anglia’s, two U.S. Senators are demanding answers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

“In light of recent revelations and scientific reports, we are contacting you regarding our continued concerns with the apparent declining credibility of United States climate data," wrote Senators John Barraso of Wyoming and Louisiana’s David Vitter in a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden. "With almost ten percent unemployment, America cannot afford to base its energy policy on flawed data."

After a series of scandals and blatant errors largely discredited the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that warned of disastrous global warming, the letter explains that policymakers turned to American data as a sort of back up. "Unfortunately, it appears that U.S. data is equally flawed and corrupted by questionable scientific practices," the Senators stated.

The letter refers to information obtained from NASA by the Competitive Enterprise Institute under a Freedom of Information Act request. In the documents, a senior scientist from the space agency advised a reporter that NASA’s climate data is inferior to the Climategate-spoiled records from the UEA’s disgraced Climatic Research Unit — and that NASA’s information is partially derived from the CRU’s flawed data.

Also casting doubt on U.S. climate data is an investigation by meteorologists Alan Watts and Joseph D’Aleo. “The study highlighted that among many other data integrity issues, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and NOAA have not only reduced the total number of weather stations that they gather climate data from, but have 'cherry picked' the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places," explained the Senators’ letter.

The results of the investigation — which also concluded that some 90 percent of weather stations do not even meet the government’s own standards on the appropriate distance of stations from biasing influences like roads or airports — are available at surfacestations.org.

A former NASA physicist’s study is also cited in the letter, fueling even more questions about the agency’s “science.” Dr. Edward Long, who released the results of an investigation in late February, concluded that "GISS, over a 10-year period has modified their data by progressively lowering temperature values for far-back dates and raising those in the more recent past." And after reviewing the study, the Senators concluded in their letter that the result of NASA's methodology had been to "dramatically change the true temperature record of the United States."

The lawmakers noted that they had “serious concerns” about the recent reports. They also invited NASA chief Bolden to testify before the Senate on the credibility of the agency’s data. “The American people deserve to know the facts about the science behind our policies,” they explained.

Another prominent U.S. Senator, Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe, called for investigations of some climate scientists after a report prepared for his Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee concluded that there were potentially criminal activities involved. Even the former head of the UN’s climate-change panel has called for an inquiry into an apparent “warming bias” by government climate researchers.More...

In an interview with Fox News about the letter and NASA’s climate data, Senator Barraso also criticized the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate carbon dioxide — a gas exhaled by humans and essential to plant life. "When the administration is trying to make an endangerment finding on carbon dioxide, I think it's reckless to make such huge decisions affecting American jobs and the American economy based on data that may not be reliable, and seems to be contaminated," he said. "I don't think the facts bear out, at this point. You wonder if it's more about politics than it is about science."

But amidst all of the scandals, NASA’s climate research programs are set to increase their funding by a whooping $2.4 billion, or 62 percent through 2015, according to the Washington Post. “The budget increase reflects both a campaign promise by President Obama to focus far more on the threat of climate change and what NASA officials called a ‘philosophical shift’ on the issue,” the paper reported.

Without an even greater outcry from citizens, the governments of the world will continue pouring the people’s resources into this scam. There is too much at stake for them to go down quietly. But as illustrated by the seemingly never-ending stream of scandals, errors, and lies, the climate crusade is imploding, and fast.

The IPCC report has already been all but debunked after a long series of scandals and obvious errors were uncovered. Many American politicians and officials distanced themselves from the flawed report after the revelations, claiming they were relying instead on U.S. government data. But now, it has become obvious that NASA and other American agencies in charge of U.S. “climate science” have been providing less-than-accurate information as well.

As reported recently by The New American magazine, global-warming alarmism is dying a slow death. The recent NASA scandals are just a new chapter in the rapid unraveling of the campaign to convince people around the world to pay carbon taxes to global authorities. And as documented in an earlier article for The New American magazine from the UN Copenhagen global-warming summit, the anti-science climate alarmist agenda is clear: more taxes, more regulation, more government, and less freedom.

With a poll from October of last year showing that barely a third of Americans believed in human-caused global warming, the alarmists were clearly already losing the battle for public opinion. And that was before the recent exposure of all the mistakes and scandals, which also made it clear that alarmists are losing in the scientific arena as well. But governments have vast sums of money at their disposal, and Obama made it abundantly clear when he rammed through healthcare “reform” despite massive opposition that public opinion will not alter his agenda.

Stopping governments from saddling the people of the world with economy-destroying taxes and regulations is a crucial fight. But it will be long and hard. To win, a groundswell of Americans even larger than the opposition to health “reform” must demand an end to unconstitutional EPA carbon regulations and put a stop to the billions in funding for bogus climate “science.” If legislators refuse to listen, they must be removed from office as soon as the next elections permit.