Little Children sacrificed on the alter of Climate Change

I should be used to it. but it never ceases to amaze me how the alarmist community will totally ignore truth and facts in order to promote their cause. The most recent example comes from the Tree Hugger site and an article titled Global Warming Uncovers Corpses Frozen in Time.

As usual this, like most alarmist sites, never misses an opportunity to frame a story around their agenda, facts be damned. In this case it really is a shame as the story is a fascinating one in and of itself and the author, Stephen Messenger, soils not only the story but the real scientific accomplishments behind the story. The first paragraph gives you a flavor of where the author is going:

Five hundred years ago, three Inca children were left to freeze high in the cold Argentinian Andes as a religious sacrifice. In time, their bodies mummified, having been swallowed in snow and entombed within the glacier, lost to time. But centuries later, in a warmer world, their perfectly-preserved corpses were discovered beneath the melting snow -- an increasingly common sight. Experts say that as glaciers continue to recede throughout the world, more of their long-guarded secrets will be revealed in the warm grip of a changing climate

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As you can tell the writer is not so much interested in the mummified children as he is "the warm grip of a changing climate". The truth is that the story of the mummified children or their discovery has nothing to do with global warming. Even if it did, it would only be further proof that the past climate was as warm as it is today.

The first important detail left out of the Tree Hugger story is when the children were discovered. Reading the story (be my guest) you would be left with the impression that these children were recently found, that the "warm grip" which caused the "melting snow" in which the children were "entombed" is a new event. In fact it happened over a decade ago, in 1999. Even more telling to the propaganda aspect to the article is that the only link to a story about the children so prominently featured in the headline and the pictures is to a blog which reposts a New York Times article about the opening of the museum that was built to house the amazing archeological find. The museum opened in 2007 as was the NYT article linked by Mr. Messenger about it. So to summarize, in January 2011 Mr. Messenger writes an article referencing a museum opening in 2007 to commemorate an event which occurred in 1999, yet fails to mention any of these pertinent facts in his article but rather leads the reader to believe that this is all a current event.

You will also notice the common tactic of appealing to authority "Experts say that as glaciers continue to recede throughout the world" Of course the article he references has nothing to do with any glaciers pertinent to the mummified children rather the link is to another Tree Hugger narrative article about  Himalayan glaciers and the impact on China and India.  I know what you are thinking, surely Mr Messenger would not reference an article based on repudiated research.....you would be wrong:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that Himalayan glaciers are receding rapidly and that many could melt entirely by 2035. If the giant Gangotri Glacier that supplies 70 percent of the Ganges flow during the dry season disappears, the Ganges could become a seasonal river, flowing during the rainy season but not during the summer dry season when irrigation water needs are greatest.

Yes the experts he references not only have nothing to do with the location of his main story, it is about the discredited IPCC report on the Himalayan glaciers.

Let's get back to the mummified children who were discovered in 1999. I have gone back and read many of the articles written at the time of the discovery. I have found none that reference global warming or even anything about glaciers. Most are typical of this Washington Post article which far from talking about "melting snow" describe the discovery like this:

The discovery team braved three days of driving snow and 70 mph winds at the world's highest archaeological site – the 22,000-foot peak of Argentina's Mount Llullaillaco – before they finally discovered the burial platform, which lay under five feet of rock and earth.

"At one point, we had to lower one of our workers into the pit by his ankles so he could pull the mummy out with his hands," Reinhard said.

We shall put aside the "driving snow" in the midst of "the warm grip of a changing climate" for the moment and focus on the location of the sacrificed children (in more ways than one). Far from being discovered beneath the melting snow of a receding glacier they  in fact  were "finally discovered the burial platform, which lay under five feet of rock and earth.

Had there once been a glacier which covered the burial platform? If so then it was not there when the children were placed there,... now was it?  But it is doubtful that the children were ever covered by a here again -gone again glacier. Consider this information from the April 1999 Washington Post article:

Drawn to icy mountain peaks in part because of their potential for preserving relics, Reinhard had visited the site in the 1980s and always planned to return, he said.

Far from stumbling upon some defrosting corps in the midst of a melting glacier, real scientist had spent years investigating sites then returned over a decade later to search for them.

Probably the most telling article on the initial discovery of the children which flies in the face of the narrative foisted on the readers of Tree Hugger comes from an article in US News and World Report from April 1999:

Gasping for breath in the oxygen-poor atmosphere 22,057 feet above sea level, nine archaeologists, workers, and guides spent nearly two weeks battling adverse conditions, including ferocious blizzards and 70-mph winds. For three days the team members were trapped in their tents under about 3 feet of snow, with the temperature at times 20 degrees below zero. "Even taking off my gloves to write notes was a major ordeal," expedition co-director Maria Constanza Ceruti recalled from Argentina. The altitude of the summit--only 6,971 feet lower than that of Mount Everest--can cause the brain to swell and the lungs to fill with fluid.

Johan Reinhard, primary organizer of the American-Argentine-Peruvian expedition sponsored by the National Geographic Society, had been scouting out this mountain peak since 1983 and had already brought 16 ice mummies down from other Andean summits. He knew the Incas were inclined to offer human sacrifices on the highest possible spots. "You feel like you're on the top of the world there," he said, after bringing the mummies down last week.

The weight of history. After using picks and shovels to dig through 5 feet of rock and frozen earth, the crew had to lower a graduate student into the pit by his ankles to lift the mummies out of their sanctuary.....

I know, I know, three feet of snow and 20 degrees below zero is just weather and has nothing to do with "the warm grip of a changing climate" unless of course you're in it. Regardless the fact that the children were found in a pit only confirms the fact that they were never frozen inside a glacier, at least not one that was there when they died. Further on in the article is the most telling comment on the discovery since it destroys the various narratives in the Tree Hugger story.

"Accidental" mummies have survived when nature served as an embalmer instead. The Ice Maiden Juanita--whom President Bill Clinton once jokingly said he might be tempted to ask out on a date--and the famous 5,300-year-old "Ice Man" discovered in the Italian Alps in 1991 were desiccated by exposure or repeated cycles of thawing and refreezing. The 1,000-year-old Bog People found at various sites in Northern Europe were turned to leather by the tannic acid of the peat into which they'd been cast. The newly discovered ice mummies, however, were saved from dehydration by the perpetual cold of their high-altitude burial site.(emphasis mine)

If the mummies were saved from dehydration by the "perpetual cold" the narrative of defrosting in the melting snow, is pretty much melted by the facts.

As with most alarmist narratives they are not only bad journalism, they are easily disproved by a quick search into the facts. But for the progressive mind facts are not the issue, driving the ideological narrative forward is the only goal. Giving cover for the talking points of a lie is a pretty simple task if you have "useful idiots" willing to parrot them and no conscious to restrain you, Mr. Messenger seems to have all the tools necessary in order to advance in his chosen field.


If you wish to read more about the Inca mummies and a real scientist check this out High-altitude anthropologist 

Toons

FROM-The Corner

"Notable Quotes"

“We've got to go and drill for American energy wherever we have American energy. We've got to drill for it on the west coast, the east coast, the eastern part of the Gulf of Mexico, the Rocky Mountains and oh by the way, drill in [Alaska]. We've got to bring the nukes back. We haven't built a nuclear power plant since 1979.”

Michael Williams

Hard to make a buck on global warming under a foot of snow

FROM-Philadelphia Inquirer

George Parry
is a former federal and state prosecutor practicing law in Philadelphia

Al Gore and his supporters promised us that, if only we used enough fossil fuels, man-made global warming would bring about an environmental disaster that would simultaneously roast and flood Earth.

In the 1990s, one of the leading global-warming scientists predicted that European and American children would soon grow up without ever seeing snow. Another top climate scientist firmly declared that the traditional white Christmas was a thing of the past.

We were told that the science was settled: As environmentally irresponsible and all-around-dreadful humans drove Earth's temperature upward, the polar ice caps would melt, the polar bears would drown, and the rising ocean levels would inundate the world's coastal areas, creating millions of eco-refugees.

Well, that was good enough for me.

Giddy at the looming prospect of being able to boil lobsters in my toilet while New Jersey disappeared underwater, I set about planning my new life as the Nucky Johnson of Chestnut Hill's Boardwalk Empire. After all, once they tired of their FEMA trailers and tent cities, those displaced Jersey refugees were going to need someplace to rebuild. Why not on my newly valuable property at the area's highest point?

But then, as the hopeful 1990s gave way to the dismal present, it became apparent that things weren't panning out. Take, for example, these pesky recurring deep-freeze winters, to say nothing of the last two months of Snowmageddon. And, may I add, not only is New Jersey still disappointingly high and dry, but the damn ocean hasn't risen a single inch. Plus, it turns out, polar bears can swim. A total bust.

Yes, once again, the working man (that would be me) gets the short end. And Gore seemed like such a reliable guy! It's enough to shake one's faith in our usually trustworthy political class, to say nothing of all those climate-science geeks. It's almost as if they had some kind of hidden agenda. . . .

Grief counselors say that there are stages to recovering from the shock of a great loss, such as learning that you have a fatal disease. First comes denial, followed by anger, and then acceptance.

Now that my dream of reaping huge profits from the promised global-warming disaster lies shattered, I struggle to deal with my disappointment and loss. I'm past the denial part, but, before I reach the acceptance stage, I must somehow relieve my anger. So, I have a new plan. It involves a video camera, a baseball bat, and a colony of baby seals.

I hope to sell the television rights to Fox News.

Redford Hypocrisy

Carnegie Institution Study: Genocide Reduces Global Warming

FROM-American Thinker

By Andrew Walden

A study touting Genghis Khan's environmental record is being cheered by the team which produced Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth.  Genghis Khan's great accomplishment for the green cause?  Killing off 40 million humans so their un-tilled fields would be overtaken by forests. 

While some may find genocide morally repugnant, environmentalists had a different concern:  Would reforestation be enough to overcome the greenhouse gases released by all those decaying bodies?  Julia Pongratz, who headed the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology research project from the Institution's Standford University's campus offices, provides the answer in a January 20 news release:

We found that during the short events such as the Black Death and the Ming Dynasty collapse, the forest re-growth wasn't enough to overcome the emissions from decaying material in the soil.  But during the longer-lasting ones like the Mongol invasion ... there was enough time for the forests to re-grow and absorb significant amounts of carbon.

In other words, the problem with the bubonic plague was that is just didn't stick around long enough.  The CO₂ emissions from all those putrefying corpses were just too much for the regrowing forests to overcome.  But Genghis Khan and his successors cleared out their empire for centuries.  Once the initial wave of putrefaction ran its course, net CO₂ uptake began in earnest.

The Carnegie Institution's conclusion is seconded by the Gore team.  An article posted on "Take Part, Inspiration to Action" is titled "War, Huh-Yeah, What Is It Good For? The Climate, Apparently."  Its author cheers:

According to a new study, however, war is indeed good for something -- the environment. ...

The study appears to reaffirm cold-blooded Malthusian common sense: there will be more of something (trees) when there are less of the parasites (people) cutting that something down.

So, can we safely assume that to save the planet we just need to wipe each other out in a series of protracted wars? Even that, according to Pongratz's study, may not be enough to overcome the negative effects of deforestation-induced climate change.

Which "we" would be "safe" if the rest were "wiping each other out"?  Apparently the Gore team believes that the smug, "enlightened, conscious, and progressive" elite would be above it all.

"Take Part, Inspiration to Action" is part of the corporation which produced An Inconvenient Truth.  According to its website, "TakePart is a website, for one, and also a Social Action Network that includes individuals, NGOs, online communities and brands who share a common interest in making the world a better place.  We are a division of Participant Media, which has produced culture-shifting films such as An Inconvenient Truth, The Cove, and Waiting for Superman."  

Gore's team and the Carnegie Institution are not alone.  Leading environmentalists around the world are cheering -- and showing that they fully comprehend the study's misanthropic conclusions.  

MongaBay.com cheers "How Genghis Khan cooled the planet" and takes the time to point out that modern environmentalists must destroy agriculture, not just industry:  

"It's a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era," says Pongratz, lead author of the study in a press release. "Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago by changing the vegetation cover of the Earth‘s landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture."

The answer to how this happened can be told in one word: reforestation. When the Mongol hordes invaded Asia, the Middle East, and Europe they left behind a massive body count, depopulating many regions. With less people, large swathes of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Mother Nature Network asks, "Was Genghis Khan history's greenest conqueror?"

... the Mongol invasion cooled the planet, effectively scrubbing around 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere.

So how did Genghis Khan, one of history's cruelest conquerors, earn such a glowing environmental report card? The reality may be a bit difficult for today's environmentalists to stomach, but Khan did it the same way he built his empire - with a high body count.

Over the course of the century and a half run of the Mongol Empire, about 22 percent of the world's total land area had been conquered and an estimated 40 million people were slaughtered by the horse-driven, bow-wielding hordes. Depopulation over such a large swathe of land meant that countless numbers of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests.

In Science Daily, putrefaction headlines the story "War, Plague No Match for Deforestation in Driving CO2 Buildup."  The article explains: "Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes had an impact on the global carbon cycle as big as today's annual demand for gasoline. The Black Death, on the other hand, came and went too quickly for it to cause much of a blip in the global carbon budget."

Similarly, environmentalists could conclude that the Nazi Holocaust just didn't last long enough.  After twelve years of Nazi rule, Germany was defeated, and humans began to grow in number again.  For seventy years, communist Gulags kept populations down on a more "sustainable" basis -- but alas, they too are gone.  Now it is up to environmentalists, who have for years dominated the culture and legal system of democratic countries, to prove that they can surpass these earlier efforts and -- as Khan did -- achieve much more long-lasting results.

Pongratz explains: "Based on the knowledge we have gained from the past, we are now in a position to make land-use decisions that will diminish our impact on climate and the carbon cycle. We cannot ignore the knowledge we have gained."

According to its website, "The Department of Global Ecology was established in 2002 to help build the scientific foundations for a sustainable future." 

After nine years, they have finally discovered the foundation of "sustainability." 

"Notable Quotes"

" The global warming/climate change/climate chaos "crisis" has reminded Americans that careerist university Ph.Ds can be just as likely to fudge evidence and distort research as political lobbyists. The old blanket respect for academia and academics is eroding. "

Victor Davis Hanson

It Never Ends!

FROM-Calorie Lab

Global Warming May Affect Fish We Eat

The declining of sea ice in the Arctic has many implications, but the most recent research published in the journal Nature Geoscience finds that this decrease may also affect Arctic sea life, including some of the fish we eat. The Arctic is particularly vulnerable to the impact of mercury emissions from industrial activities because oxidized mercury can deposit easily on snow and ice. When the ice melts, anaerobic organisms in the water convert this to methylmercury which then accumulates in the fatty tissues of cold water fish. Overconsumption of this compound can cause central nervous system damage, particularly in unborn babies and young infants. For this reason, pregnant women and children are discouraged from eating certain fish including swordfish, king mackerel, and shark.

Just another OOPS

Not too long ago

Spiegel 11-13-2009

A Warming Arctic

Greenland's Ice Sheet Melting Faster than Ever

By Christoph Seidler

Everyone knows that the ice sheet on Greenland is melting. But new research shows it is disappearing much faster than previously thought. The findings could mean that ocean levels are also rising more quickly....

Science Daily 11-13-09

Greenland Ice Cap Melting Faster Than Ever

ScienceDaily (Nov. 13, 2009) — Satellite observations and a state-of-the art regional atmospheric model have independently confirmed that the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass at an accelerating rate, reports a new study in Science....

The Times 11-13-2009

Greenland’s ice sheet is melting faster than ever, data shows

Hannah Devlin

Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating pace, according to the most detailed observations to date. Until now scientists had been unable to establish whether the loss of the ice sheet had speeded up significantly since the 1990s. Using two independent measurement techniques, the latest study reveals that the melting accelerated rapidly over the period 2000-2008....

UK Telegraph 11-13-2009

Greenland ice cap disappearing at rate of 300 Lake Windermeres a year

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent

The Greenland ice cap is melting at triple the rate of just a decade ago – shedding the equivalent of nearly 300 Lake Windermeres a year and threatening millions of homes with flooding, claim British scientists.

UK Guardian  1-26-2011

Greenland ice sheet is safer than scientists previously thought

New study overturns fears that increased melting could lubricate the ice sheet, causing it to sink ever faster into the sea...


.********

This is just a small sampling of the reporting on the original stories. What is really pathetic is some of the original reporting on the story back in 2009. Here is a typical example from the Telegraph story.

Such is the change in the vast ice sheet that the loss of weight is actually changing its affect on the earth's gravitational pull, the study in Science claims.

One gigaton could provide enough water for 17 million people in Britain and is the volume of Lake Windermere, the country's biggest water mass.

The melting rate has been accelerating over the last decade and has more than tripled since the early 1990s.

While scientists cannot say that all the melting is caused by climate change, they believe this is "very, very compelling evidence" that man-made global warming is affecting the world's ice sheets.

It could cause major coastal flooding could happen every five years – instead of every hundred.

About 1.2 billion people live in coastal areas around the world and they could be "devastated" by the rise in sea levels if the ice cap, which covers 1.71 million kilometres.

Professor Jonathan Bamber, the lead author at Bristol University, said: "When you put it into context how much ice is melting each year is very alarming.

"One gigaton is the same as a billion tonnes of water. Four of them could provide the domestic water supply for the whole of the UK.

"What is very worrying is that the speed of melting is increasing. Ice caps are like supertankers. Once they start moving in one direction is takes a lot to stop them."(emphasis mine)

I guess they will all be writing major retractions to their previous reporting....oops I forgot I was talking about the world media elites. 

HEADLINERS

Headlines that caught my eye

FROM-Live Science


Castration May Protect Reindeer in Warming Arctic

Price Of Junk Science

FROM-IBD


Global Warming: After the 1998 tobacco deal, many wondered where the next battleground for the shakedown lawyers would be. Few wonder now. The legal war over climate change is heating up — and it'll be costly.

The $246 billion tobacco settlement, reached by 46 state attorneys general and the tobacco industry, was not designed to improve public health. It was simply a way to line lawyers' pockets and create a slush fund for lawmakers.

Private plaintiffs' lawyers took in $8.2 billion in legal fees, and states have spent their share of the funds on items unconnected to tobacco-related illnesses and anti-smoking education.
It was, as we said a few years ago, "a naked cash grab."

Having exhausted that lucrative source, trial lawyers went trolling for another. Would it be the fast-food industry? Gun makers? What about companies that sell sugary drinks? Or those making pharmaceuticals?

While those industries will be beset by suing lawyers, they will be spared relative to the target that attracts the most attention. As we predicted on these pages, global warming will be the vehicle for the next litigation lottery. And the media are finally picking up on this.

"Climate-change litigation is fast emerging as a new frontier of law where some believe hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake," AFP reported Sunday.

Though not yet widespread, climate-related lawsuits have "ballooned" in the last three years, AFP said. Deutsche Bank says filings in the U.S. alone went from 48 in 2009 to 132 last year. "Entrepreneurial lawyers" are stalking prospective defendants, while businesses and insurers are trying to find ways to protect themselves.

While none of the lawsuits has been successful, the sheer volume of future suits is expected to generate what Rutgers law professor Howard Latin predicted in 2007 would be "one of the biggest legal practices in the next 20 years."

The typical defendants are energy-related companies and those that emit large amounts of carbon dioxide, or whose products generate CO2, which is supposedly causing the planet to heat.
We've found no reliable estimates as to how much global warming litigation will cost. But this we do know: It will be expensive, and painfully so.

AFP reports that "compensation for losses inflicted by man-made global warming would be jaw-dropping, a payout that would make tobacco and asbestos damages look like pocket money."

The potential defendants in global warming litigation have a far bigger financial footprint than the handful of giant tobacco companies who were victimized by the settlement.

The costs won't be borne only by big corporations that deserve to be separated from their money, either. They'll be passed on to consumers, who will have to pay a tax in the form of higher prices for the next generation of goods that will be made as producers go to great lengths to avoid future litigation.

The fact is, the trial lawyers wouldn't have chosen climate change if they didn't think it would be lucrative. They're confident that they can show that contributions of CO2 emissions are causing the Earth to warm, which in turn is causing harm to the environment.

Of course, lawyers aren't shy about using junk science in the courtroom.

John Edwards, a former U.S. senator and one-time vice presidential candidate, made a fortune out of suing doctors in medical malpractice cases, claiming that physicians' errors were causing cerebral palsy in infants during childbirth.

The real science, though, pointed to genetics, not botched deliveries, a fact revealed during, not after, the roughly 10-year period that Edwards was trying cerebral palsy cases.

Our courthouses should be bastions of justice, not sources of cheap wealth or chambers that create laws out of thin air that no legislature would pass. Lawmakers create the policies that govern our judicial system, and they have both the authority, and the duty, to ensure that global warming litigation doesn't become legal plunder.

What should be on trial is the global warming guesswork that passes as science, not the producers in our economy.

Bathtubs and defending common sense

While reading the ridiculous story in the post below one piece of absurdity really caught my attention. It has to do with the alarm over higher water temperatures. The story points to this concern  in several places:

Scientists warn higher temperatures and lower rainfall in summer will lead to lower river flows and rising water temperatures....

And this absurd idea:

The Environment Agency is planning to plant more trees on river banks to increase shade and reduce water temperatures..

Much of the global warming lore is built around the idea that warmer water temperatures are going to reek havoc on the Earth and mankind. Everything from increasing the quantity and strength of hurricanes due to warmer oceans, to the absurd notion of transplanting fishes because of warmer lake and rivers.

Much of the warmer water nonsense, at least as regards to lakes and rivers has little to do with warmer atmospheric temperatures directly but as the result of of less rainfall and droughts, as the above linked article vaguely alludes to:

Scientists warn higher temperatures and lower rainfall in summer will lead to lower river flows and rising water temperatures.

The higher temperatures by themselves could have little affect on water temperatures as I'll explain in a moment. The idea that Great Britain or any other country can make plans based upon the assumption that global warming is going to cause them to suffer through excessive droughts is beyond both common sense or science.

How do we know this? Just look what is going on in Australia and how the previous drought conditions and the current flooding are both being blamed on global warming. We also learned recently that even believers know that there is no way to predict precipitation trends even if you believe the globe will continue to warm.

Scott Loarie, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution of Science on the Stanford University campus, says most of the research into this topic has been focused on temperature trends, "because we know the most about temperature. Pretty much all our evidence shows the Earth will get hotter, and there's very little dispute about that. We don't know very much about precipitation."


Loarie says the new study underlines just how important precipitation can be. Unfortunately, in many parts of the world, scientists simply can't say whether climate change in the long run will bring more moisture or more drought. Loarie says California is a case in point — the various climate forecasts disagree.


"So it's really a crapshoot in California whether we're facing a drier or a wetter future," he says.

So some scientist are beginning to admit, given overwhelming evidence, that they really do no know whether it is going to rain more or less because of their man made global warming. But that doesn't matter does it, the warmer temperatures will cause warmer oceans, lakes and rivers anyway right?

I wish I could remember where I read or heard this analogy so that I could give the person credit, but I can not. Regardless it is not my original thinking, it makes too much sense for me to have come up with it on my own and so I'm taking what I remember and modifying it in my far less sophisticated way.

The first thing you must remember is that the theory of global warming is that added CO2 in the atmosphere will warm the atmosphere which will cause positive feedbacks which will warm the atmosphere even more. Nothing in the theory says that additional CO2 will directly warm the water, just the atmosphere- pretty simple isn't it?

Now consider your bathtub full of water. It doesn't matter what the temperature is but let's say it is 80 degF. Now let's say you want the water in your tub to be a bit warmer. Let's say you wanted it to be 83 degF. Normally you would just run some hotter water into it to increase the heat of the water. But unlike modern plumbing, in order to raise the temperature in your tub using the new scientific methodology, we will have to turn up the temperature in your house. Now consider how long it would take to raise the temperature in your tub by turning up the thermostat in your house. Yes what we are saying is that we are going to raise the temperature of the water in your tub by turning up the heat in your house.

Now if your house was completely closed up and the water stayed stagnant in the tub and you then  turned up the heat in the house to a point where you could barely stand to live in it while you waited for your bath, eventually the tub water would increase in temperature. Of course if you had a dripping faucet which allowed a bit of colder water into the tub which caused the tub to loose a little water in the overflow, that would slow down the process a bit. Then of course if you had to go in and out of the house regularly while you were waiting for your bath, allowing cool air into the house on occasion, that might slow it down a bit more. Oh and you forgot that ceiling fan in the bedroom too, which circulates the air which slows down the process a bit as well. Oh and the poor kids sweltering half to death in your mad attempt to have a warmer bath, are going and opening the freezer on occasion for some ice cream, and, and ,and.....and that is for a fairly closed body of water, like a lake, how about a flowing river?

A river fed by mountain runoff of snow or glaciers, how will you warm your running facets in your sink? Perhaps you could plant a shade tree.

Consider all the moving, swirling elements that make up not only our climate system, but our entire ecosystem. Do you really believe that we could raise the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere enough to raise the temperature of the Thames, the Mississippi, Lake Superior, the Pacific Ocean? How warm would the Earth's atmosphere have to become to cause these massive bodies of dynamic waters to increase in temperatures able to kill off fish populations. This assertion is even more absurd than believing we are melting the poles where the average yearly temperatures are far below zero.

There is so much that man can do to protect our beloved Earth from real man made problems yet mad scientist are drowning reason in a tub of babbling foolishness paid for with your tax dollars.

It Never Ends!

FROM-The Independent

Fish threatened by global warming to be moved north

Scores of radical measures planned to help us and our wildlife cope with climate change

Fish from the Lake District will be moved to cooler waters in Scotland under radical plans – which will be unveiled this week – aimed at coping with climate change.

The first seven of more than 100 reports by government agencies and utility companies will set out how Britain needs to change to cope with hotter summers and wetter winters. They will highlight the risks – and potential costs – of more landslides, buckled railway lines, crumbling water pipes and rising sea levels threatening lighthouses around the coast. Officials say the studies are needed because levels of carbon emissions mean climate change over the next four decades is unavoidable.

The dangers to wildlife have triggered the most extreme solutions: the Environment Agency is poised to catch and transfer thousands of vendace and schelly, both freshwater white fish, from the lakes of Cumbria to Scottish lochs.

Scientists warn higher temperatures and lower rainfall in summer will lead to lower river flows and rising water temperatures. As a result, oxygen levels will fall. "It may be necessary to rescue fish or oxygenate the water to help them survive," the Environment Agency's report will warn. "We may also need to reintroduce species to re-colonise stretches where fish have died."

Where climate change could lead to the permanent loss of a habitat, some species will need to be relocated. Coldwater and migratory fish, including salmon and trout, are particularly vulnerable because changes in water temperature lead to higher mortality rates and changes to the timing of their migrations. A decline in eel populations over the last 30 years could also be attributed in part to climate change.

The Environment Agency is planning to plant more trees on river banks to increase shade and reduce water temperatures and to adapt flood defence, hydro-power and water pumping schemes to allow fish to pass through....

Read and weep


yes they have lost their minds and are living in a make believe world

Ain't no mountain high enough

As is usual in the ever expanding field of climate change flimflammery we have conflicting analysis of doomsdayism ( I know I just made it up).

I assume it it is still an acceptable scientific principle that animal habitats are primarily determined by their need for sustenance. In other words animals tend to hang out where the vittles are. Which if true, its true isn't it?, brings forth a confliction of flimflammery.

We now have a shocking development in the flimflam community, where it has been determined that in spite of previous model induced hypothesis, real world evidence points to the conclusion that plant life rather than fleeing to the mountain heights to escape MAN MADE GLOBAL WARMING it is instead moving down hill.

For years researchers have watched plants and animals migrate to cooler quarters in response to global warming. But a new study suggests some plants are moving downhill, drawn by increased precipitation.

Not wanting to throw another hypothesis into the mix, but I will anyway, perhaps the plants are coming down out of the mountains to suck up some of that SUV exhaust (CO2) they thrive on. I actually have no proof of that other than millions of years of plant life on Earth fiendish respiratory craving of that devilish element mined from depths of hell by humankind's insatiable desire to feed it's energy lust. But I digress.

So plants are moving down the mountains, why? Other than my CO2 hypothesis, the scientist in this study of northern California mountains say it has to do with increased precipitation. From another narrative article on the study:

Individual plants don't move, of course, but the optimal range of many different species in the area studied has been creeping downhill. That means more new seeds sprouted downhill, and more new plants took root. This was true not just for annual plants but also for bushes and even trees.

Why would that be, Dobrowski wondered, considering that the area has warmed up. He and his colleagues say the answer lies not in the temperature, but in the amount of life-giving rain and snow. It turns out this region has been getting wetter.

"These plants are tracking water availability more so than temperature," he says.

Well that makes sense right? Although plants hate .5 degC of global averaged temperature increase over the past century as determined by scientist with overwhelming financial interest and ideological prejudices, they still must have water. I wonder if anyone told the plants in the tropical rain forest they need to head to higher ground? Again I digress.

Again I find a confliction in the flimflam. This clearly says  "It turns out this region has been getting wetter."  However it seems to me that California was supposed to burn away in drought turning it into a dust bowl of Biblical proportions:

California's farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said Tuesday.

In his first interview since taking office last month, the Nobel-prize-winning physicist offered some of the starkest comments yet on how seriously President Obama's cabinet views the threat of climate change, along with a detailed assessment of the administration's plans to combat it.

YES, YES, YES !!! So saith the amazing Dr. Chu, he a high priest of the flimflam community and Laurette of the NOBEL most high:

Chu warned of water shortages plaguing the West and Upper Midwest and particularly dire consequences for California, his home state, the nation's leading agricultural producer.

In a worst case, Chu said, up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture.

"I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen," he said. "We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California." And, he added, "I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going" either.

Doomsdayism at its apocalyptic best! But he does not speak only on his own NOBEL authority , oh no, the amazing Dr. Chu relies on studies published in the oracle journal Science

A pair of recent studies raise similar warnings. One, published in January in the journal Science, raised the specter of worldwide crop shortages as temperatures rise. Another, penned by UC Berkeley researchers last year, estimated California has about $2.5 trillion in real estate assets -- including agriculture -- endangered by warming.

Interesting, wasn't this most recent study about the migrating plant life published in the same oracle journal?

But a new study in Science has found that plants in northern California are bucking this uphill trend in preference for wetter, lower areas.

Why yes it was. Wetter lower areas? The amazing Dr. Chu and the oracle Science proclaimed that California was doomed, DOOMED I TELL YOU DOOMED! But now we have scientist sacrilegiously making statements to the oracle NPR:

Loarie says the new study underlines just how important precipitation can be. Unfortunately, in many parts of the world, scientists simply can't say whether climate change in the long run will bring more moisture or more drought. Loarie says California is a case in point — the various climate forecasts disagree.

"So it's really a crapshoot in California whether we're facing a drier or a wetter future," he says

A crapshoot!? Has this man not heard of the amazing Dr Chu? But we have confirmed something very important here, MAN MADE GLOBAL WARMING will either cause drier or wetter weather, now we can prepare.

I know you think I have gotten off on a Chu tangent and forgotten about the animals, I assure you I have not. Because while a new narrative has emerged to explain plants moving downhill the old one persist about animals moving uphill. "Moutain species at risk in climate change" putting aside that the once venerable UPI does not even spell check its headlines and thus we end up with moutains rather than mountains, this is a story about animals fleeing to the mountains to escape the heat. Yes that same .5 degC which both the animal and plant kingdom of Earth are totally incapable of adapting too. I know, I know its going to get worse, but they say it already affecting them.

Some scientists predict a 20 percent to 30 percent species loss if temperatures rise by 3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, and if some of the more extreme warming prediction come to pass the loss rate could approach 50 percent, a United Nations climate change panel says.

Tens of thousands of species that live on or near mountains are vulnerable, scientists say. These species, living in habitats from the high plateaus of Africa to the jungles of Australia to the Sierra Nevada in the United States, are already experiencing climate pressures, they say.

In response to warming, animals classically move to cooler ground, but mountain species face drastic limitations.

Oh those "some scientist" they seem to be everywhere now don't they?

May I suggest that perhaps the animals fleeing the intense heat of lower altitudes as they come upon the trees and bushes moving downhill to suck up CO2  find moisture, stop and enjoy the shade, not to mention the berries. Perhaps this brief respite from the sweltering world we have inflicted upon them will allow these poor creatures time to adapt to this new climate. Perhaps they may shed a little fur as they relax under the boughs of the weeping willows and listen to the sweet melody of the Meadow Larks in the branches overhead.

Or they could listen to the advice of some scientist who have determined their future:

"It's a really simple story that at some point you can't go further north or higher up, so there's no doubt that species will go extinct," Walter Jetz, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale, said.

And so it goes in the flimflam community of Doomsdayism. But in the real world

SING IT LOUD!

STOP THE PRESSES !

Sanity in the Main Stream Media


FROM-OC Register

Editorial: Put up or shut up on global warming

t is time for an independent investigation of whether or to what degree human activities are creating catastrophic global warming. It should be conducted by scientists untainted by advocacy and uncompromised through receiving taxes or private funding to advance or debunk the theory.

Many in the new Congress were elected on promises to re-evaluate global warming claims used to justify Draconian regulations. A "team of nongovernment and non-U.N. experts must be established with access to all the raw data, records, adjustments, fudges ... and computer codes currently being black-boxed by government scientists," says Robert Ferguson, president of the nonprofit Science and Public Policy Institute for "sound public policy based on sound science." We agree.

NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have resisted Freedom of Information Act requests for release of unadjusted raw data and documentation of their adjustments to them. Good science requires theories be tested.

Even proponents of catastrophic manmade global warming theory say the average global temperature increased 0.7 degrees Celsius over the past century. We must be certain such tiny changes and the cataclysmic predictions based on them are valid before imposing huge economic sacrifices, infringing personal freedoms or levying new taxes.

A good place to start is temperature data. NASA and NOAA, which together receive nearly half a billion dollars a year in tax funding for climate research, "have been systematically fiddling the worldwide temperature record for years, making 'global warming' look worse than it is," according to a new paper by meteorologist Joe D'Aleo, an American Meteorology Society fellow.
"[W]hen data conflicts with models, a small coterie of scientists can be counted upon to modify the data" to agree with models' projections, says MIT meteorologist Dr. Richard Lindzen.

Research by meteorologist Anthony Watts found that 89 percent of U.S. ground temperature stations do not meet NASA's standards for distance between stations and adjacent heat sources, seriously compromising readings. That's before NASA "adjusts" the raw data, adding more significant additional false warming, Mr. Watts says.

"The raw temperature data produced by the ... stations are not sufficiently accurate to use in scientific studies or as a basis for public policy decisions," he concludes.
Thousands of e-mails leaked in 2009 from Britain's Climate Research Unit showed researchers lamented the "hapless state" of their temperature records, including "hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy and duplicate stations," and "no uniform data integrity."

CRU Director Phil Jones later conceded "temperature data are in such disarray they probably cannot be verified or replicated," bringing into question the U.S. records because, "almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same."

An independent analysis also should be made of climate computer models and the purported cause-and-effect relationships assumed between greenhouse gases and higher temperature, rising sea levels and melting glaciers.

Headlines that caught my eye

FROM- LA TIMES

Parking space management: Remove a spot, reduce global warming?

Cosmic rays contribute 40 p.c. to global warming: study

FROM-The Hindu

PRISCILLA JEBARAJ

A key belief of climate science theology — that a reduction in carbon emissions will take care of the bulk of global warming — has been questioned in a scientific paper released by the Environment Ministry on Monday.

Physicist and the former ISRO chairman, U.R. Rao, has calculated that cosmic rays — which, unlike carbon emissions, cannot be controlled by human activity — have a much larger impact on climate change than The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims.

In fact, the contribution of decreasing cosmic ray activity to climate change is almost 40 per cent, argues Dr. Rao in a paper which has been accepted for publication in Current Science, the preeminent Indian science journal. The IPCC model, on the other hand, says that the contribution of carbon emissions is over 90 per cent.

‘Cosmic ray impact ignored'

Releasing Dr. Rao's findings as a discussion paper on Thursday, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh noted that “the impact of cosmic ray intensity on climate change has thus far been largely ignored by the mainstream scientific consensus.” He added that the “unidimensional focus” on carbon emissions by most Western countries put additional pressure on countries like India in international climate negotiations.

The continuing increase in solar activity has caused a 9 per cent decrease in cosmic ray intensity over the last 150 years, which results in less cloud cover, which in turn results in less albedo radiation being reflected back to the space, causing an increase in the Earth's surface temperature.

While the impact of cosmic rays on climate change has been studied before, Dr. Rao's paper quantifies their contribution to global warming and concludes that “the future prediction of global warming presented by IPCC's fourth report requires a relook to take into the effect due to long term changes in the galactic cosmic ray intensity.”

Policy implications

This could have serious policy implications. If human activity cannot influence such a significant cause of climate change as cosmic rays, it could change the kind of pressure put on countries to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Mr. Ramesh emphasised that Dr. Rao's findings would not reduce domestic action on climate change issues, but he admitted that it could influence the atmosphere of international negotiations.

“International climate negotiations are about climate politics. But increasingly, science is becoming the handmaiden of politics,” he said.

In November 2009, Mr. Ramesh had released a report by glaciologist V.K. Raina claiming that Himalayan glaciers are not all retreating at an alarming pace. It had been disputed by many Western scientists, while IPCC chairman R.K. Pachauri dismissed it as “voodoo science.” However, Dr. Raina was later vindicated by the IPCC's own retraction of its claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.

“Since then, Western Ministers have reduced talk about the glaciers to me, they have stopped using it as frequently as a pressure point for India to come on board,” said Mr. Ramesh.

When Mr. Ramesh sent Dr. Rao's paper to Dr. Pachauri, he replied that the next IPCC report was paying special attention to the impact of cloud cover on global warming. The Minister expressed hope that Dr. Rao's findings would be seriously studied by climate researchers.

“There is a groupthink in climate science today. Anyone who raises alternative climate theories is immediately branded as a climate atheist in an atmosphere of climate evangelists,” he said. “Climate science is incredibly more complex than [developed countries] negotiators make it out to be… Climate science should not be driven by the West. We should not always be dependent on outside reports.”

Disputing IPCC claims

According to the latest report by the IPCC, all human activity, including carbon dioxide emissions, contribute 1.6 watts/sq.m to global warming, while other factors such as solar irradiance contribute just 0.12 watts/sq.m.

However, Dr. Rao's paper calculates that the effect of cosmic rays contributes 1.1 watts/sq.m, taking the total contribution of non-human activity factors to 1.22 watts/sq.m.

This means that increased carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere are not as significant as the IPCC claims. Of the total observed global warming of 0.75 degrees Celsius, only 0.42 degrees would be caused by increased carbon dioxide. The rest would be caused by the long term decrease in primary cosmic ray intensity and its effect on low level cloud cover.

This means that predicting future global warming and sea level rise is not as simple as the IPCC makes it to be, since it depends not only on human activity, but also significantly on the unpredictability of cosmic ray intensity.

“We conclude that the contribution to climate change due to the change in galactic cosmic ray intensity is quite significant and needs to be factored into the prediction of global warming and its effect on sea level raise and weather prediction,” says the paper.

Keywords: global warming, climate science theology, climate change

GREENPEACE FOUNDER QUESTIONS MAN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING

FROM-The Blaze

HEADLINERS

Headlines that caught my eye

FROM- The Register

Shale ignorance! Lords blast gov for ignoring cool new fuels

Labor Department awards millions of dollars in college grants for scarce ‘green jobs’

FROM-The Daily Caller

By Matthew Boyle

The Department of Labor has issued several million dollars in grants to community colleges and specialized universities around the country to train students for “green jobs” in renewable energy fields. While the grants are supposed to fund the future “rank and file” workers of the renewable energy industry, there’s a glaring problem the DOL seemingly overlooked — those jobs are either non-existent or scarce.

A former college official who has applied for these grants and has in-depth experience working with the Department of Labor and the Department of Education told The Daily Caller that colleges will often fudge expected job placement numbers just to get extra government cash.

“On ground level – it’s a real struggle – my grant writers came to me and honestly said, ‘I don’t have any job projections, what do I tell them?’ You do your best to make up job numbers,” said the former college official, who wished to remain anonymous to prevent jeopardizing future job opportunities. “But it’s not like lying – it’s just guessing what we might be able to do in a best case scenario, but you don’t say it’s not likely for many jobs.”

The former college official told TheDC that, though his college received five different “green jobs” grants from the Department of Labor to train students, no program has been set up yet.

“I can tell you, one, at least at my college, we’ve been very slow to get these grants underway,” he said. “In terms of those programs going, what’s the rate of success on these programs? I don’t think the DOL could produce very strong job numbers on these programs.”

Bill Wilson of not-for-profit group Americans for Limited Government told TheDC these programs and grants are nothing more than a collection of buzzwords, as they don’t serve any practical purpose.

“Congress needs to cut these vanity ‘green job’ promotion projects out of the budget, it is a waste of money and an insult to the American taxpayer to fund these thinly veiled environmental political rallies,” Wilson said in an e-mail.

It’s not like these grants are being given to research and development programs at big name schools focusing on developing new renewable energy technology, either. They’re being given to universities and community colleges to train students in technical or associate degree programs to work in yet-to-be-developed fields. Many of the grants are promised to colleges that pledged to push “green jobs” or “new energy technology,” but don’t go into much more detail about how they plan to go about doing that.

For instance, Calhoun Community College in Decatur, Ala., received more than $3.4 million to help train 175 people, both those who are unemployed and high school students, in “energy-efficiency technology.” That translates into more than $20,000 per person, and many of the trainees likely won’t be able to secure jobs simply because there aren’t very many companies in the U.S. hiring for what they are being trained to do.

Then, there’s Kern Community College District in Bakersfield, Calif., which was granted about $2.7 million for similar training programs for 650 people. There’s also the Shenandoah Valley Workforce Investment Board, Inc., in Harrisonburg, Va., which got about $5 million to help 1,010 “unemployed and dislocated workers” learn “current and future employer needs” in green technology manufacturing, solar and wind energy support and efficiency assessment and retrofitting for existing energy consumers.

The former college official told TheDC that, though solar and wind are emerging energy sources and though some people around the country are interested in making their homes or businesses “greener,” he thinks there isn’t enough business to support the people being trained to go into these industries. Colleges, he said, are simply incapable of turning down free government money.

Obama's Solar Nightmare

FROM-American Thinker

By Ed Lasky

The Democrats have been busy the last two years, and not just reengineering the healthcare industry, restructuring the auto sector, assaulting Wall Street and the financial sector, harming our public finances.  They have also been trying to transform America's energy industry at our expense. This is Barack Obama at his worst -- picking losers and winners by personal whim, donations for dollars deals, and ideological zeal.

Who have been the losers and who have been the winners?  And have the winners just been taking the taxpayers for a ride while their guy has been driving the bus -- with taxpayers sitting in the back?

The Obama administration has tried to kill off the oil industry. Offshore moratoriums have been unilaterally imposed by executive orders and justified using scientific panel studies that were misrepresented-if not distorted- by the administration. The drilling permitting process has been afflicted with sclerosis. Federal lands are becoming less and less available for development.

Obama does not like carbon; he boasted during the campaign that he would bankrupt coal power plants and that his policies would necessarily boost the price of power. Those words were ignored by much of the media, in thrall to the man they so wanted to win. When the rapture swept journalists into ecstasy who cared about little details here and there about Obama's agenda?

He tried and failed to get a cap and trade bill through Congress. He warned that if that effort failed he would do another end run around Congress and rely on his Environmental  Protection Agency to do his dirty work.

Who knows? Maybe Obama has personalized his gripes and made them the basis of public policy. We know how he feels about George Bush and Dick Cheney -- both with strong ties to the oil industry. Maybe he just doesn't care for the South where much of our carbon wealth is found -- a Republican redoubt that he may have just written off as a political wasteland for him.

Hence, gas prices approaching $4 dollars a gallon -- and this is not yet the summer driving season that typically boosts gas prices as demand increases.

This price hike may make New York Times columnist Tom Friedman gleeful. He considers high priced gas (and Chinese authoritarianism) the answer to all ills. He writes column after column on these topics from the baronial splendor of his homes (here is a photo of one of them; he earned his fortune, by the way, by marrying it). Undoubtedly, he salves his conscience regarding the carbon footprints of his homes with checks to buy carbon credits -- and writes more columns castigating us for our addiction to carbon.

But I digress.

How else have the Democrats been trying to change our power industry? By the old-fashioned way: changing the rules of the game (as noted above) and then using our tax dollars to enrich green schemers. The grand champion of spending boosts by Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress has been a 1014% boost in spending for the "Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Program."  Then there is something called the Green Jobs Labor Fund-which did not even exist prior to 2009 and has received hundreds of millions of dollars.

But wait...there is more.

HEADLINERS

Headlines that caught my eye

From- eWire Informer

Evergreen Solar Cutting Jobs And Moving To China

There's "Weather" and There's "Climate,"

FROM-American Digest

"Notable Quotes"

" The terrible truth may be that civilization arose in and only because of an unusual warming period. If that is the truth, God help us, we are probably doomed in pretty short order (historically speaking). Meanwhile, warming has always been good for us and there is no reason to think that that will be different in the future. Individual persons and societies in general suffer much more from cold than from heat. If or when the global climate cycles back and the glaciers return, let us hope that human activity really can heat up the world "

Ken Blanchard

How Much of Your Money Wasted on ‘Climate Change’? Try $10.6 Million a Day

FROM-Pajamas Media

 By Art Horn 

Seems everyone is talking about the massive United States federal deficit and how it has now reached an unfathomable $14 trillion. Is there any way to comprehend such a bloated number? Try this: the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. At that speed a photon of light starts at the surface of the Sun and reaches the Earth in 8 minutes. On Star Trek, the speed of light is warp one — at that speed the Enterprise would travel about 6 trillion miles in one year. If each dollar of the deficit is represented by one mile, it would take the Enterprise more than two years traveling the speed of light to go 14 trillion miles.


So what can we cut out of the federal budget to make any kind of dent in this enormous pile of borrowed money? We could start with the vast sums of cash being wasted on climate change research.


This year, your government will spend in the neighborhood of $4 billion on global warming research, despite the fact that there has been no global warming since 1998, and despite all of the billions that have been spent so far yielding no conclusive evidence that using fossil fuels to make energy has any significant effect on Earth’s temperature.


The human component of carbon dioxide that is injected into the air each year is very small, on the order of 3%. Half the carbon dioxide emitted into the air by human activity each year is immediately absorbed into nature. Carbon dioxide is 8% of the greenhouse effect; water in the air is 90% of the greenhouse effect. By volume, carbon dioxide is currently at about 390 parts per million in the atmosphere, increasing at about 2 parts per million annually. In other words, carbon dioxide is increasing at a rate of .5% per year. Since human activity adds 3% of the carbon dioxide that gets into the air each year, the human component of the increase in carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year is 3 % of .5%, or just .015%.


Here is what the federal government thinks is happening with the Earth’s climate due to the burning of fossil fuels — the following quote is from chapter 15 ^[1] of the Advancement of Science’s 2011 budget request:

Past scientific research demonstrates that the Earth’s climate is changing, that humans are very likely responsible for most of the well-documented increase in global average surface temperatures over the last half century, and that further greenhouse gas emissions, particularly of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, will almost certainly contribute to additional widespread climate disruption. This climate disruption poses considerable risk to society because it can be expected to cause major negative consequences for most nations and to a wide range of species.

The first sentence is obvious: of course the Earth’s climate is changing; it always has and always will no matter what we do.


The next statement — “humans are very likely responsible for most of the well-documented increase in global average surface temperatures over the last half century” — is speculation. The statement completely ignores any natural variability in the climate. Apparently all of nature’s power to regulate the Earth’s temperature, which has been going on for millions of years, stopped 50 years ago, and now carbon dioxide is the principal driver of the climate. This is political and social advocacy, not science.


Then, this statement: “further greenhouse gas emissions, particularly of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, will almost certainly contribute to additional widespread climate disruption.” The implication is that there has already been widespread climate disruption — there has not. There is no more extreme weather ^[2] going on now than anytime in the last 2,000 years. Per the complex Orwellian world of government-speak, we have now moved on from “global warming” to “climate change” to “climate disruption.” Climate change wasn’t frightening enough! What’s next? My money’s on “climate disintegration” — that should keep the money flowing so we can figure out who and what will be disintegrated.


The statement then reads: “This climate disruption poses considerable risk to society because it can be expected to cause major negative consequences for most nations and to a wide range of species.” And that is the key to all of this: the fear factor. Pitching rising sea levels and other catastrophic consequences to keep the research money coming.


If you want to know where to save money in the budget, cut the vast sums of redundant funding headed to redundant federal agencies doing redundant climate change research. Four billion dollars to study climate change — and that’s just for this year!


Check the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s 2011 budget request ^[3], and go to chapter 15 ^[1]: Climate Change in the FY 2011 Budget. The numbers are staggering. In 2011, your government will spend $10.6 million a day to study, combat, and educate about climate change.


The big winner in the climate change money train is the National Science Foundation — they are requesting $1.616 billion. They want $766 million for the Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability ^[4] program, a 15.9% increase from their last budget. They also need another $370 million for the U.S. Global Change Research Program ^[5] (USGCRP), an increase of 16%. They say they also need another $480 million for Atmospheric Sciences ^[6], an increase of 8.1%, and Earth Sciences ^[7], up 8.7%.


Oh, and $955 million for the Geosciences Directorate ^[8], an increase of 7.4%.
The second largest request for money in 2011 comes from the Department of Energy. They say they need $627 million for things like funding for renewable energy. The request represents a whopping 37% increase from last year! They want a 12% increase for energy efficiency programs. They want to eliminate $2.7 billion of subsidies for industries that emit large amounts of carbon dioxide.


Let’s get NASA in on the parade! For 2011, NASA wants $438 million to study climate change, an increase of 14%. NASA’s total Earth Sciences budget request is actually $1.8 billion. Some $809 million of that is for satellites, some of which are specifically put in orbit to study climate change. It is difficult to separate out which ones are for climate monitoring and which ones are not, so I won’t include this number in the overall climate change money train. But make no mistake: a significant percentage of the $809 million is exclusively for climate change satellites.


The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is looking for $437 million for climate research. This is an increase of 21.4% from the previous budget. This includes funds for regional and national assessments of climate change, including ocean acidification. Once again, another meaty bag of money to tap into for researchers, who have nice cars and big houses and need to keep up the payments.


The Department of the Interior (DOI) is also interested in robbing the climate change vault — they say they need $244 million in 2011. Of this total, $171 million is for the Climate Change Adaptation initiative ^[9]. This program identifies areas and species that are most vulnerable to climate change, and implements coping strategies. Another $73 million is needed for the New Energy Frontier initiative ^[10]. The goal of this program is to increase solar, wind, and geothermal energy capacity.
Solar and wind power don’t survive without this government funding.


Is that $14 trillion making sense yet?


Of course, there’s more. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wants $169 million to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, an increase of 1%. Do you believe that next year greenhouse gases will be reduced by the EPA spending $169 million? I would bet the ranch that greenhouse gases will continue to increase next year, and the year after that, and the year after that despite EPA spending your money.


Is there any government agency that does not get some climate change funding? The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) wants $338 million for climate change programs. They want $159 million for climate change research, up a whopping 42%. They also want another $179 million for renewable energy, an increase of 41%! The USDA’s climate change efforts are supposed to help farm and land owners adapt to the impacts of climate change. Yes, really.


Redundancy on top of redundancy, piles of money on top of piles of money. All to study climate change, which, according to the theory, should be warming us rapidly, but, according to the data, has stopped. How much of the requested money these government agencies actually get is not yet known. The way they spend money in Washington, you can rest assured they’ll get most of it.


If you’re looking to cut the budget, climate change is a good place to start. If we don’t get a handle on Washington’s spending soon, and I mean very soon, climate change will be the least of our problems.