KYOTO, CALIFORNIA

If you live in any state but California, this might be a good time to prepare for the arrival of new businesses. The Golden State's politicians think they're going to lead the world again. All they think they need to do from Sacramento is command the planet's climate to cease that infernal warming we've heard so much about. What they'll end up doing is command people to live in much more primitive ways.

Unless these politicians actually want to expel entrepreneurs, most businesses are expected to stay home and perform obediently under a new regulatory regime. Some even expect that, under new legislation known as Assembly Bill 32, now destined for passage in the state Senate, a new generation of small, green businesses will multiply. Why, they might even bring Big Oil to its knees. The thinking, endorsed by the state's political class, its ever-trendy academics and its leading media, goes like this: Global warming is a crisis demanding emergency action. The Bush administration, having rejected the Kyoto agreement to reduce fuel emissions to Third World levels, simply won't do the enlightened thing. So it's time for California, being the font of popular culture and political wisdom, to seize the initiative and do to the world's sixth-largest economy exactly what its lagging competitors want it to do.

And if you're thinking all these overheated Democrats might be thwarted by a cooler Republican governor, think again. Arnold Schwarzenegger already has approved of the general objective. Offering modest modifications in a bill by Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, he's agreed that the state must enforce the emissions standards of 1990 by 2020. Basically, it means California will join with the other Kyoto signatories even if the U.S. will not.

The hardship to consumers and small businesses, to which the political class and the state's dominant media remain unfazed, could be dismal by Golden State conventions. The state chamber of commerce figures the legislation could reduce energy supplies by 17%. Even allowing for some business lobby alarmism, the obvious direction of energy costs under this plan will be dizzying. This is a state where often a citizen commutes more than 100 miles a day. The Nunez-Schwarzenegger plan - and we might as well affix the governor's name to it - will likely send businesses fleeing to other states. Or even other countries where pollution standards are lax. It's reasonable to expect measurably more global pollution as a result. We doubt the Golden State's green leadership is prepared for that.

Some small businesses around San Francisco do expect to benefit from the new emissions-saving technologies they envision developing as legislators wave their magic wands. It's their chance to set themselves apart from Big Oil and the chamber. But theirs is a fool's errand, a wager on illusory hopes. The more direct impact: higher energy costs, a grinding economy and a more Spartan lifestyle.

Source






SOME BAD NEWS FOR THE GLOBAL WARMING FANATICS

Neal Boortz comments:

What bad news? The hurricane season. Things aren't quite going the way the global warming crowd predicted. There have only been three tropical storms thus far. This is about average for the short term, but if you average it out over multiple years this would be below average. Hurricanes? Thanks for asking, but there hasn't been one as of yet. None. Nada. Zip. Nunca. Averaging between 19044 and 2005 we would have seen about 1.5 hurricanes thus far. Again ... we've seen none.

According to weatherstreet.com the National Weather Service predicted 12 to 15 named storms by December of this year. There were 27 last year. Now it looks like the 12 to 15 prediction may be a bit high. OK ... so the global warming nuts were wrong. They predicted a horrible hurricane season. It isn't happening. So ... what's different? What happened? Here's where you global warmistas need to sit down. Surface temperatures on the world's oceans are getting ...... cooler. According to a paper to be published next month in Geophysical Research Letters, between 2003 and 2005 globally averaged temperatures in the upper levels of the ocean have cooled. They've cooled not just a little ... but dramatically. Sea surface temperatures in the western Atlantic .. where hurricanes are fueled ... are now slightly below normal.

Oh well. Whatchagonna do! There's always the glaciers you can go to in order to prove your global warming scenario. More news. A soon-to-be released study by a Danish university says that Greenland's glaciers have been shrinking for most the past 100 years. The study of 247 of the 350 glaciers on Disko island shows that 70% of these glaciers have been retreating at a rate of about 8 meters a year since the end of the 1880s. There was apparently a real surge in glacier melting caused by a warming of the earth's atmosphere during the 1920s. Damned SUVs. The 1920 General Motors Yukon is being cited as a significant cause.

OK you global warmistas. Back to the drawing boards. Surely you'll find something new to use in your efforts to slow down the economy of the United States.

Source. The research Boortz refers to is reported below:





New data shows ocean cooling

The world's oceans cooled suddenly between 2003 and 2005, losing more than 20 percent of the global-warming heat they'd absorbed over the previous 50 years. That's a vast amount of heat, since the oceans hold 1,000 times as heat as the atmosphere. The ocean-cooling researchers say the heat was likely vented into space, since it hasn't been found stored anywhere on Earth.

John Lyman, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, says the startling news of ocean cooling comes courtesy of the new ARGO ocean temperature floats being distributed worldwide. ARGOs are filling in former blank spots on the world's ocean monitoring system - and vastly narrowing our past uncertainty about sparsely measured ocean temperatures.

Lyman says the discovery of the sudden ocean coolings undercuts faith in global-warming forecasts because coolings randomly interrupt the trends laid out by the global circulation models. As Lyman puts it, "The cooling reflects interannual variability that is not well represented by a linear trend."

The new ocean cooling also recalls several NASA studies in the past five years that found a huge natural heat vent over the Pacific ocean's so-called warm pool, a band of water thousands of miles wide, roughly astride the equator. Studies coordinated by Bruce Weilicki, of NASA's Langley Research Center, found that when sea surface temperatures rise above 28 degrees C, Pacific rainfall becomes more efficient. More of the cloud droplets form raindrops, so fewer are left to form high, icy, cirrus clouds that seal in heat. As a result, the area of cirrus clouds is reduced, and far more heat passes out into space. This cools the surface of the warm pool, the world's warmest ocean water.

Weilicki's research teams say that the huge natural heat vent emitted about as much heat during the 1980s and 90s as would be expected from a redoubling of the carbon dioxide content in the air. They used satellites to measure cloud cover and long-range aircraft to monitor sea temperatures.

Layman says the sudden ocean coolings particularly complicate the problem of separating natural temperature changes from man-made impacts on the Earth's temperature. The impact of human-emitted CO2 has been assumed to accumulate in a straight-line trend over many decades.

Meanwhile, since the 1980s, the Earth's ice cores, seabed sediments and cave stalagmites have been revealing a moderate, natural 1,500-year climate cycle linked to solar irradiance. Temperatures jump suddenly and erratically 1 to 2 degrees C above the mean at the latitude of Washington, D.C., and New York City for centuries at a time, and more than that at the Earth's poles.

Temperatures vary hardly at all at the equator during the 1,500-year cycle, and Bruce Weilicki's NASA heat-vent findings seem to indicate why. The warm pool of the Pacific acts like a cooking pot, with its "lid" popping open to emit steam when the water gets too hot. The more we look, the more we learn about the Earth's complex climate forces - though not much of the new knowledge comes from the huge, unverified global circulation models favored by the man-made warming activists.

Source. (Hat Tip to Cheat-Seeking Missiles)






RECYCLING NONSENSE IN BRITAIN

It was a protest that could have flared up in thousands of streets across the country. Fed up with rubbish not being collected because of baffling rules that dictate what they can and cannot recycle, the residents of Davy Avenue decided to confront their binmen. But as the bin lorry turned into the street, their demonstration mushroomed. "We wanted a silent protest, but more frustrated people from neighbouring streets arrived with black bin bags full of rubbish and threw them in the back of the truck," said father of three Mark O'Keefe, 27. "Then the lorry pulled away, leaving behind the waste from our street."

The incident in Scunthorpe last Friday reflects the growing frustration of millions of householders as council recycling schemes become ever more confusing and draconian, as highlighted last week on BBC Radio 4's Today programme. Examples of recycling madness include:

* North Lincolnshire council asking residents to cut the sticky strip from envelopes and remove the plastic 'windows'. It says that these 'contaminate the recycling process'.

* Ipswich council workers leaving behind a bin full of recyclable waste because it contained a single supermarket bag.

* Confusing rules for recycling plain cardboard and printed cardboard in St Edmundsbury, Suffolk. The plain sort can either go in the brown bin for composting or the blue bin for dry recyclables. But printed cardboard can go only in the blue bin.

* Reading Borough Council refusing to take glass in case it gets broken in the back of the collection lorry.

* People in Lichfield, Staffordshire, who leave the 'wrong rubbish' in a recycling bin risk having the entire contents left behind or simply buried in a landfill site, ruining their recycling efforts.

North Lincolnshire Council responded to the Davy Avenue protest by calling the police. A spokesman claimed that refuse workers had been intimidated, and threatened to take legal action against residents for fly-tipping. But this is the same council that cut the collections of normal rubbish from weekly to fortnightly in June to meet the costs of its recycling scheme. Since then residents have complained about rubbish piling up in their gardens, attracting flies and rats.

Samuel Dent, 70, of Scunthorpe, said: "This is the first time in 36 years living here that I have had maggots in my bin. I have disinfected it many times and I recycle everything I can, but I still have this problem." Mother-of-seven Joanne Pollock, 45, said: "The rubbish is only collected every two weeks and within days the recycling bin is full, creating problems with flies and maggots. It is disgusting."

The situation has been made worse by the council's refusal to empty overflowing bins because the lids can't be closed. Scunthorpe resident Tracey Hunter, 34, said: "They said they wouldn't empty my bin because the lid was not down properly and that it was dangerous. I am registered disabled and can't empty it myself." Hayley Marsden, 33, said: "The bins are often full well before collection day. But if we put out extra bags on top of the bins, the binmen just leave them on the street." The proportion of rubbish recycled varies dramatically across Britain, from 51 per cent in St Edmundsbury to six per cent in Newham, London.

Councils are left footing the bill for the schemes. A survey by The Mail on Sunday found costs ranging from Reading Council's 412,000 pounds to Kensington and Chelsea's 2.3 million. Often the money made from selling the scrap paper, glass, metal or plastic is not passed back to the council but is kept by the recycling contractor. Two of the biggest firms are owned by French industrial giants Groupe Tiru and Suez Environment. Recyclable material is reused in the UK or sold on the global market and shipped as far afield as Pakistan, Argentina and China.

Despite the huge profits that recycling generates, in Reading, Berkshire, the council bans yoghurt pots from its plastic collection for being too light and rejects bins if they are contaminated with other rubbish and will visit the offending household. Local resident Elizabeth Day, 58, said the system needed to be simplified. "I agree that we should all do our part, but I do have to keep asking myself what can be recycled and what cannot. "We are not supposed to recycle microwave meal packaging, for example, but we can put out plastic bottles. It would be much easier if you could put out all plastic."

If people put their rubbish in the wrong containers, all of it may be left behind. Lichfield District Council will only remove rubbish left in bins and refuses to take extra bags placed at the side. Even more worryingly, people can face hefty fines for oversights or mistakes. Several councils, including Barnet, Harrow, Hackney and Bromley have introduced 'compulsory schemes', threatening to fine people up to 1,000 pounds for putting recyclable waste in their normal bin.

Donna Challice of Exeter, the only person to be prosecuted for putting the wrong rubbish in her recycling bin, was acquitted after a 6,000 pound court case because the council could not show she was responsible. The push for recycling comes from a 1999 EU ruling that set a limit on how much waste each country could bury in landfill. In turn the Government set councils the target of recycling one quarter of the 25 million tons of household waste they collect each year. Other European countries are far ahead of the UK. Germany recycles 57 per cent of its waste, the Netherlands 64 per cent and Denmark 41 per cent.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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