Climate change is happening 'here, now': US government report

Of course there is climate change. There always has been. The only interesting question is whether mankind can do anything about it. Periods of warming and cooling oscillate and the last period of warming ended 10 years ago

THE harmful effects of global warming are being felt "here and now and in your backyard", a groundbreaking US government report on climate change warned today. “Climate change is happening now, it is not something that will happen decades or centuries in the future,” Jerry Melillo of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, one of the lead authors of the report, told AFP.

Climate change, which the report blames largely on human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases, “is under way in the United States and projected to grow,” said the report by the US Global Change Research Program, a grouping of a dozen government agencies and the White House.

The report is the first on climate change since President Barack Obama took office and outlines in plain, non-scientific terms [non-scientific indeed] how global warming has resulted in an increase of extreme weather such as the powerful heatwave that swept Europe in 2003, claiming tens of thousands of lives. [If global warming caused that, why have we seen no similar episodes since?]

Hurricanes have become fiercer as they gather greater strength over oceans warmed by climate change. [Widely disputed by experts]

Global warming impacts everything from water supplies to energy, farming to health. And those impacts are expected to increase [No harm in expecting. But many expectations are disappointed], according to the report titled Global Change Impacts in the United States.

Areas of the country that already had high levels of rain or snowfall have seen increases in precipitation because of climate change [Since there has been no significant change for 10 years, that's an unlikely "because"], says the report, which focuses on the US but also tackles global climate change issues.

“We focused on regions of the US because another big message we wanted to get across is that not only is climate change happening now, but it's happening in your backyard,” said Melillo. “You care a great deal more about a tornado in your own backyard than one half a world away,” said David Doniger, senior policy director at the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

Arid areas, such as the largely desert US Southwest, are experiencing more droughts. [So some places get more rain and some get less. How is that an indication of overall change? If there really was warming, total rain should increase]

On the US Gulf Coast, sea level rise is particularly pressing [Only on the Gulf coast? That doesn't sound very global!]; in the Northwest, how long snowpack sits on the mountains might be [and might not be] an issue, and farmers in the Midwest are concerned because winters have become milder, allowing more pests to survive the season. [Have you ever met a happy farmer?]

But climate change also operates in a global nexus and the US cannot be viewed in isolation, the 196-page report says. Climate change-related food production problems in one part of the world can affect food prices and production decisions in the US, he added. [Political decisions are the major influence, though] “There is a whole host of connections when you discuss climate change; the US cannot be viewed as an island,” Melillo said.

The chief aim of the report is to help US policymakers and the general public make decisions on how to act to halt climate change, Melillo said. The report's release comes just six months before countries from around the world meet in the Danish capital Copenhagen for a UN conference that aims to produce an ambitious, new climate pact aimed at rolling back global warming.

Experts have been thrashing out a draft of a negotiating text for the new pact meant to take effect from the end of 2012, spelling out curbs on emissions by 2020 that will be deepened by 2050.

Reports issued by the previous administration of president George W. Bush - who famously rejected the Kyoto Protocol [It was actually the U.S. Senate that rejected it], the previous UN framework on climate change - were highly technical and did not cover as many issues as the sweeping first report issued by the Obama White House, said Melillo.

The report stresses the need for immediate action against global warming, saying: “Future climate change and its impacts depend on choices made today.” “We have the power to determine how bad this could be and to avoid the worst impacts of global warming,” said Doniger. [Only given some rather mad and counterfactual assumptions -- about clouds, for instance]

“It's like Charles Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol,' where the ghosts come and show Scrooge the way the future could unfold into either a happy future or a disastrous future. “This shows us that the future is in our hands, just as it was in Scrooge's hands,” said Doniger. [Hubris]

SOURCE. The original report can be found here





Some comments on the above report from Roger Pielke Jr

Imagine if an industry-funded government contractor had a hand in writing a major federal report on climate change. And imagine if that person used his position to misrepresent the science, to cite his own non-peer reviewed work, and to ignore relevant work in the peer-reviewed literature. There would be an outrage, surely . . .

The Obama Administration has re-released a report (PDF) first issued in draft form by the Bush Administration last July (still online PDF). The substance of the report is essentially the same as last year's version, with a bit more professionalism in the delivery. For instance, the photo-shopped picture of a flood appears to be removed and the embarrassing executive summary has been replaced by something more appropriate.

This post is about how the report summarizes the issue of disasters and climate change, including several references to my work, which is misrepresented. This post is long and detailed, which is necessary to support my claims. But stick with it, or skip to the end if you've seen the details before (and long-time readers will have seen them often), there is a surprise at the end.

[....]

So a person responsible for misrepresenting science in a government report has ties and presumably financial interests with companies that have an interest in climate policy outcomes? No, couldn't be. Could it?

For those wanting a more rounded picture of extremes in the United States, here is what an earlier CCSP report concluded about extreme events in the United States, but which was uncited by this new CCSP report in this paragraph:

1. Over the long-term U.S. hurricane landfalls have been declining.

2. Nationwide there have been no long-term increases in drought.

3. Despite increases in some measures of precipitation (pp. 46-50, pp. 130-131), there have not been corresponding increases in peak streamflows (high flows above 90th percentile).

4. There have been no observed changes in the occurrence of tornadoes or thunderstorms

5. There have been no long-term increases in strong East Coast winter storms (ECWS), called Nor’easters.

6. There are no long-term trends in either heat waves or cold spells, though there are trends within shorter time periods in the overall record.

More HERE





The con is on: how carbon credits neuter Cap & Trade

An economist ridicules the current U.S. climate bill

In my discussion of the Cap & Trade scheme for carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2E) emissions (greenhouse gases) proposed by U.S. Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Edward Markey, D-Mass. (the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act of 2009), I argue that the two key issues are (1) the size of the overall quota and (2) the enforcement of the rule that without a permit, you cannot emit.

Prima facie, the scheme looks tough. The Discussion Draft Summary of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 reads: “The draft establishes a market-based program for reducing global warming pollution from electric utilities, oil companies, large industrial sources, and other covered entities that collectively are responsible for 85% of U.S. global warming emissions. Under this program, covered entities must have tradable federal permits, called “allowances,” for each ton of pollution emitted into the atmosphere. Entities that emit less than 25,000 tons per year of CO2 equivalent are not covered by this program. The program reduces the number of available allowances issued each year to ensure that aggregate emissions from the covered entities are reduced by 3% below 2005 levels in 2012, 20% below 2005 levels in 2020, 42% below 2005 levels in 2030, and 83% below 2005 levels in 2050.”

In fact, the scheme is a total con. It permits the US to increase CO2E emissions until 2020. The escape mechanism used - carbon offsets or carbon credits - suggests that for the period 2020 - 2050 also, the supposed intent of the Act - to reduce CO2E emissions in the US - will be neutered.

Provided the secondary markets for permits are efficient, Cap & Trade is equivalent to a tax on CO2E emissions. They both have the same informational requirements for the policy authorities/regulators: the authorities must be able to monitor and measure the actual volume of CO2E emissions. That is not a minor challenge, because there are many sources of CO2E emissions, and many of them are either hard to monitor or too small-scale to warrant the fixed cost of monitoring. That’s why ACES exempts entities that emit less than 25,000 tons per year of CO2 equivalent. So my father-in-law’s barbecue activities will probably be exempt. That is just as well, as his grilled swordfish is to die for. Monitoring and measuring the actual volume of emissions is difficult, but in principle it can be done in a way that can be independently verified.

Carbon offsets: a con for our time

The ACES bill allows polluters to purchase up to 2bn tonnes a year in carbon “offsets”, over and above the total allowance provided by the permits of the Cap & Trade scheme. This 2bn-tonne annual offset allowance exceeds all the CO2E emission reductions envisaged between now and 2040! As further icing on the environmental cake, many of these offsets could be purchased overseas (and be based on overseas ‘carbon offset operations’), and would therefore not reduce US domestic emissions, even if they reduced overseas emissions (which they probably won’t anyway, as I argue below).

What is a carbon offset or carbon credit? A carbon offset or credit is the right to an additional allowance to emit greenhouse gases, which is created by some activity or investment that has reduced carbon emissions, or rather, that is alleged to have reduced carbon emissions, based on some counterfactual, hypothetical scenario. This credit can be sold by the originator to interested parties such as a US utility that wishes to emit more CO2E than the sum of its free allowance and any additional purchases it has made of additional permits in the secondary market for permits.

An example is tree planting. Joe Bloggs plants a bunch of trees, say in a re-forestation project in the Amazon jungle. A number is put on the amount of C02 that will be absorbed by these additional trees. This becomes a carbon offset or carbon credit that can be sold by Joe to some avid polluter in America. What’s wrong with this? Nothing, except that the claim about the additional CO2 that will be absorbed by the tree planting project is non-verifiable. Even if we can determine exactly how much CO2 will be absorbed by the re-forested patch of jungle between now and Kingdom Come, we still don’t know what we need to know. What we need to know is how many of these additional trees would have been planted in the absence of the carbon offset or carbon credit scheme. If Joe would have planted the same number of trees in any case, even without the incentive of the revenue from the carbon offsets/credits, the project is not ‘additional’.

It gets better. Carbon credits/offsets have been awarded not just for planting trees, but also for not cutting them down. The logic is impeccable - if without the carbon offsets I would have cut down the trees, CO2 absorption would have been lower, so the scheme is additional - but non-verifiable. “Hello, Honey! Busy day again. Been hard at it, not cutting down those trees again. Money’s on the way.” It’s rather like a counterfactual version of the set-asides of US and EU agricultural policy.

For carbon offsets or carbon credit schemes to work you don’t just have to monitor and measure actual carbon emissions. You have to be able to monitor and measure carbon emissions in a hypothetical, counterfactual ‘parallel’ universe in which the carbon offset scheme does not exist. We can build mental, mathematical models of that hypothetical, counterfactual universe, but we cannot measure it objectively, the way we can, in principle, measure actual emissions. Controlled experiments are not possible. Natural experiments are likely to be few, far between and of dodgy quality.

So how does one establish the degree of additionality of schemes and projects that are proposed as candidates for carbon credits or carbon offsets generating activities or investments? Well, you hire an expert. I know there are honest and incorruptible experts. I also know that there are sufficient numbers of dishonest, corruptible experts who will certify anything for the right price. I fear that any claim to additionality for even the wonkiest carbon-offsets generating project will be certified by some unscrupulous, dishonest expert, agency or business. The shameful recent experience of the rating agencies in the rating of complex structured financial products shows how low experts and professionals will stoop if the price is right.

This generalised “trahison des clercs” has produced a vast and growing industry of verifiers and certifiers of candidate carbon offset producing projects, investments and activities. No doubt there are competent, well-intentioned and honest practitioners of the CO2E additionality arts. The problem is, we will never know. We have to take the word of experts and professionals who are exposed to the most naked conflict of interest. There have already been reports of claims for carbon credits/offsets that were so blatantly ridiculous (including the repeated not cutting down on the same patch of hardwood forest). The world will be taken for a massive ride if we don’t kill the whole carbon offsets/carbon credits business outright.

The political economy of the birth of this demented carbon credit/offset scheme was the perception in the rich industrial countries that the developing countries had to ‘get something’ out of the war on global warming. Perhaps they should. Carbon credits/offsets, however, are not the way to do it. An elaborate con, employing mainly consultants and specialised businesses from the advanced industrial countries, is not a solid foundation for economic development.

Aha!

Given the reality that ACES allows CO2E emissions to be increased, effectively indefinitely, some of the more bizarre features of the law make more sense. There is no economic problem (‘just’ a breach of faith) with the fact that Candidate Obama’s election promise that 100 per cent of carbon trading permits would be auctioned off in the carbon market has been scrapped. About 85 per cent of the allowances will be given away to various interested and hard-lobbying parties in the energy sector; local electricity distribution companies are scheduled to receive 35 per cent of the permits.

The initial allocation of the permits is a distributional issue, not an efficiency issue. It determines how the scarcity rents created by the permits are allocated. It need not interfere with the efficient abatement of CO2E emissions, as long as the allocation does not depend on current and future planned or expected emission volumes. Even if all permits are given free of charge to the biggest historical polluters, they will have a scarcity value (opportunity cost) to these historical polluters. They can keep them and continue to pollute, or they can sell them in the secondary market for permits. If this secondary market for permits is reasonably efficient (admittedly an untested conjecture), the right signals will be given to ensure that the mandated overall reduction in emission volumes is achieved in the most cost-efficient manner.

But what does not make even an ounce of sense in the draft ACES law, is that regulators will be required to ensure that distributors and other recipients of free permit allocations, pass on the full value of these allowances to the consumer. Consumers, whose energy demand is the ultimate cause of the CO2E emissions, will therefore have no financial or price incentive to reduce their energy consumption. The allocations of permits to the energy producers will have no value to these energy producers, because they have to pass the scarcity rents on to the consumers.

The result is that the entire permit scheme does not alter the price or quantity constraints faced by any participant in the CO2E scheme. Therefore, emissions will not be reduced. But that is inconsistent with the supposed desire to reduce emissions to 83 percent of their 2005 level by 2020 and to 17 percent of the 2005 level by 2050. Except that is it not inconsistent if there is no intention to reduce emissions at all, but instead every intention to permit them to be raised above their 2005 levels. And that is of course what is going on.

A similar sleight of hand can be found in another part of the ACES Act - ‘the renewable electricity requirement’. This begins at 6% in 2012 and gradually rises to 25% in 2025. But the governor of any state may choose to meet one fifth of this requirement with energy efficiency measures. This means that the renewable energy objective is emasculated by allowing power companies to count efficiency savings as part of their renewable energy target. Think about it. Energy savings already get rewarded, because you need fewer CO2E emissions permits. Counting them in addition as a contribution to renewable energy is double counting.

Conclusion

The American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act of 2009 is worse than nothing: it is a con and a fraud. It pretends to be a vehicle for reductions in CO2E emissions. In fact it is designed to permit increases in CO2E emissions.

Reducing CO2E emissions is painful. America doesn’t do pain any longer. Be it the environmental or the fiscal arena, only painless solutions are politically acceptable and feasible. When there are no painless solutions, problems are allowed to fester and grow until they finally blow up. It is time for America to grow up and to accept that there are problems for which there are no painless solutions.

SOURCE






Ice shelves stable over at least the last six years

Yes. Bits of ice do break off and always have but there is no increase in it happening

ANTARCTIC ice shelves are showing no sign of climate change, six years of unique research have shown. Scientists from Western Australia's Curtin University of Technology are using acoustic sensors developed to support the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to listen for the sound of icebergs breaking away from the giant ice sheets of the south pole. "More than six years of observation has not revealed any significant climatic trends," CUT associate professor Alexander Gavrilov said yesterday.

Professor Gavrilov and PhD student Binghui Li are investigating whether it is possible to detect and monitor significant changes in the disintegration rate of the Antarctic ice shelf by monitoring the noise of ice breaking. The pair are using two acoustic stations, one 150km off Cape Leeuwin, the southwest tip of WA, and another off the gigantic US military base on Diego Garcia in the Chagos Archipelago, in the Indian Ocean. "They are part of a network of underwater acoustic receivers, or hydrophones," Dr Gavrilov told The Australian yesterday.

The stations have been used to locate nuclear explosions detonated by India.

More than 100 signals from Antarctica are detected weekly by the Cape Leeuwin station. They are then transmitted to Geoscience Australia in Canberra. "Six years of results is not long in the scheme of things, so we will keep watching," Dr Gavrilov said. The pair will present their research at a conference in Europe later this month.

SOURCE







Monckton on the genocidal Green/Left and their push for world dictatorship

An interview

Murphy: In the Senate and the House and on Capitol Hill, there's a debate on the Cap and Trade Bill, known as the Waxman-Markey bill, which has devastating effects on rationing energy. What other effects will the bill have?

Monckton: The first effect is that this is the largest tax increase ever to be inflicted on a population in the history of the world. And it is also the most pointless and unnecessary tax increase. Winston Churchill used to say that the only legitimate purpose of taxation is to raise revenue. But what has happened on the left in politics is that the left are now using taxation not only as an instrument of raising revenue, but as an instrument of policy, to try to make people behave in a way which the left thinks is desirable.

So they have decided that "global warming" as they used to call it, "climate change" as they began to call it, and "energy security" as the bill now calls it-and "absolute rubbish," as I call it-is a problem that needs to be addressed by inflicting taxation on the entire population.

However, it occurred to them, after I testified in front of them and told them so, that if they were to put up the cost of energy, then that cost would fall disproportionately on the very poorest taxpayers. Or even if they weren't taxpayers, it would fall disproportionately on them, because energy costs form a far larger proportion of the household budget of poor people than of wealthier people.

And the first response I got when I said this to the committee was, "Why are you calling them `poor people'? We call them `low income families.' " And I said, "That means that they are poor, and if they are poor, we should say that they are poor, and we should do something about it, rather than making them poorer still. And I'm not here," I said, "to bandy words about what is the politically correct phrase about somebody who is poor. Somebody who is poor is disadvantaged by not having enough money to live on." "And so, let's call a spade a spade. This bill will in particular needlessly, pointlessly, extravagantly, hurt the poor."

Now, of course, the Democrats eventually realized this. So they decided that they would use some of the revenue from taxing the richer purchasers to subsidize the poorer purchasers so that they can go on using energy. But of course, the moment that you do that, you undermine the purpose of the bill, which is to stop people from using lots of energy.

Murphy: In the past you've described the global warming scare, fraud, hoax-you've used numerous words to describe this-as a "genocidal" policy, similar to the policy of how AIDS was handled, or to the ban on DDT. Is that still your view?

Monckton: What we have here, is a faction in politics, and it's a worldwide faction, that really came out of the Marxist extreme left when the Berlin Wall collapsed, and found its new home in the environmental movement. And it got into the environmental movement and took it over. A friend of mine is one of the founders of Greenpeace, and he said, "All of us who are genuine environmentalists left after a year, because the Marxists moved in and took it over."

So, what we have, is what I call the traffic light faction: the greens too yellow to admit that they're really red. And it's they who are trying to say to us that this climate scare is real, so that they can impose upon us measures that would drastically reduce the human population by direct intervention, if necessary.

But why does this fail, even if they are eventually granted the authoritarian powers that would be necessary to enforce the sterilization of the male population, or to enforce a one-child policy? These were policies that were tried, respectively, in India and China, and both have abjectly failed. The only way to prevent the population in the poorer countries (or the "lower-income countries") from rising rapidly beyond the resources of that country being able to cope with them is to raise the standard of living of the general population of these countries. Nothing else works.

This is perhaps the fundamental fact of demographics: that if you want to stabilize populations in poorer countries, you must raise their standard of living. Nothing else works whatsoever. So, we come along and we say, even to China and India, and this is what the Democrats have been saying, "Either you agree that you will not ever burn CO2 into the atmosphere at the rate we did, that you will keep yourselves poor, or we will impose protectionist trade sanctions upon you."

I heard the Democrats arguing this when I was testifying in front of them, and I told them what an extremely bad idea that was. And why it's a bad idea, is because even if protectionism worked- and, of course, it always, in fact, backfires on the person who tries to impose it-all it would do is to keep China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, and other large countries, poor. If it keeps them poor, their populations will continue to increase rapidly. If their populations continue to increase rapidly, their carbon footprints will increase rapidly in the long run, if not in the short, and probably even in the short. So you will have achieved the precise opposite of what you say you're intending to do, and you will have a growing population, when the left's real aim is to reduce population.

So what they are advocating at the economic and political level, simply doesn't work. And it works no better than their attempts to ban DDT, which led to the deaths of 40 million children in the poorer countries. A totally unnecessary ban. DDT is not dangerous! You can eat it by the tablespoonful- do you no harm at all. But they invented a scare that it causes cancer, which it does not. They invented a scare that it might thin the eggshells, which it does not-unless you happen to deprive the birds of calcium in their diet, before you do the measurement, which is how they got the bogus result they based it on.

So, we've seen these lies and manufacturing of data before. Same with HIV, where, as with any other fatal, incurable infection, it should have been treated as what's called a notifiable disease, carriers isolated immediately to protect the rest of the population. This was not done. The result? Twenty-five million dead, 40 million infected and going to die, and heaven knows how far the epidemic will continue to spread. In Washington, D.C., here, where we're speaking from, 3% of the population is now infected with HIV, and that means that there's a good chance that Congressmen and Senators rubbing shoulders with cleaners and other basic labor inside Congress, some of them are going to get infected before very long, because the correct public health measure wasn't taken, because yet again, the left had a policy on this and the policy did not accord with scientific reality at any point.

So we've seen it with DDT-they acted against the science: 40 million killed. We've seen it with AIDS- they acted against the science: 25 million killed, 40 million infected and going to die. And already people are now dying, all over the world, of starvation, as a result of the biofuels scam which came out of the global warming scare and has taken, for instance, one third of all the agricultural land of the United States out of producing food, for people who need it. Now it's producing fuel for automobiles that don't.

In any view, whichever aspect of this scare you look at, the policies of the left are not just heroically stupid, but deeply damaging for the future of humankind, and particularly damaging for the very poorest.

Murphy: That is very true. What is coming out- you've identified the biofuels scam as hurting the poor with food starvation, which is listed as one of WHO's top causes of death. Now, [UN Secretary-General] Kofi Annan has just issued a bizarre, bogus report stating that 300,000 people have died already as a result of global warming or climate change per year, and more deaths are possible. But the policies that he's advocating to solve this will kill billions of people, and will eclipse that, even if it were true.

Monckton: Let's look at this report. It's produced by the usual crowd of rent-seekers wanting to enhance the role of the UN as a world government. That's what is really behind this: It's world government that the left are after. And world government, of course, does not mean democratic government. It means autocratic government, rather like the EU writ large. And this report they produced is plainly nonsense, and you can just look at one simple fact, and that is that for the last 15 years, as [MIT climatologist] Dick Lindzen is about to tell us, there has been no statistically significant global warming. For the last eight and a half years, there has actually been a trend of global cooling, and quite a rapid one.

So, why is Kofi Annan coming along now, 15 years after the warming stopped-and, of course, the warming was pretty unremarkable even while it was happening; it was entirely within natural variability-but the warming stopped 15 years ago, and only now do they tell us that this warming was killing people. It certainly can't have been killing people recently, because we've been having global cooling. And that one fact is enough to establish what complete nonsense this UN report is.

All it is, is another way of keeping this flagging, failing scare in the headlines between now and the Copenhagen Climate Summit organized by the UN for December 2009. And at that summit, they are hoping the first steps to turn the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change into a world government will be taken. They are not frankly particularly worried about whether they get a deal on who should cut global emissions by how much. It is not, and never was, about that. It is not and never was about the climate.

As Vaclav Klaus, the president of the European Union at the moment, has rightly said, "It's not about climatology; it's about freedom." They want to take our freedom away. They want to set up a world government which will tell the rest of us how to behave, and which will certainly not be subject to any democratic recall or accountability or constraint. And they will do this by saying that, of course, the peoples of the world if left to their own devices, would screw up the planet, because of the emissions of carbon dioxide. Therefore, to save you from yourselves, we are going to ask your government to hand over their sovereignty and their powers-of course in our democratic countries, their powers are peoples' powers-to unelected bureaucrats, technocrats, and dictators, so that they will govern us in the future. That is what this is all about, and they have to be stopped, which is why I am here.

Murphy: There was an interesting report that didn't get much play, that came from the Center for International Cooperation at New York University. This had different scenarios-in the one they were promoting, there would be no deal at Copenhagen; everything falls apart. And in another scenario, there is a deal at Copenhagen, but it falls apart. And then there's one where you agree over time to make emission cuts. But the key to the one they are pushing is that they want two things: One, to set up an IAEA-type of agency to govern all nations, willing or unwilling, on the carbon emissions, so your world government question is there. And, two, they want to use carbon credits as-and this is really wild and outlandish, but based on the credit crisis we're having right now, the economic downturn, the breakdown crisis-they want to use carbon credits as the new currency, with the IMF as the clearing house, central bank for the world. This is just ridiculous.

Monckton: Well, no, it isn't ridiculous, you see. It's dangerous. That's what it really is. This is exactly the type of mechanism which those who are in the small cabal that is plotting all this are working on in order to bring about world government before anyone notices. That is why they're so very angry with us. Because what we're saying is that as far as the science is concerned, there is no basis for doing anything whatsoever about the climate, which has looked after itself for four and a half billion years and will continue to do so. Our perturbations of it are so small as to be entirely insignificant, so insignificant that they cannot hope to be distinguished from natural climate variability, as even NASA itself said the other day. There is no basis scientifically for doing anything.

The correct policy to address a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. However, they are not concerned with whether there is a problem or not. They merely wish to pretend that there is a problem, and try to do so with a straight face, for long enough to persuade, not the population, because we have no say in this, but the governing class in the various member-states of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: That they should hand over their powers as government to the United Nations or to a new agency, or possibly just to the existing climate panel, merely restructured a bit. So that we would no longer be free to decide what our currency would be, or how much of it there should be, or what we could burn, or what we could do.

These things would be dictated to us by the dictators at the center. And this is an extremely dangerous moment, because it repudiates freedom, it repudiates democracy, it denies us both of those. It repudiates any form of justice. It is a kick in the teeth for the poor. It has no merit whatsoever except to enhance the wealth and the power of the governing elite, and that really what we're seeing here is a conspiracy of the governing class against the governed. And if the governed continues to be as passive, and acquiescent, and as unquestioning as too many of them are being in Europe (it's a little better in the States), then this faction is going to get its way, and when it gets its way, we shall realize that it's far too late for us to do anything to throw it into reverse.

SOURCE





Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Reviewing Climate Change and Cap and Trade Programs to Insure Investor Protection

Based upon information supplied to it by the Space and Science Research Center (SSRC), the Securities and Exchange Commission has begun a review of the Obama administration’s carbon trading, ‘emission allowance,’ and climate change permitting programs to insure investors are adequately protected.

According to SSRC Director, John Casey, “The reason for our request to the SEC is straightforward. Since global warming has ended, there simply is no need to implement a massive government tax or investment/trading programs in a vain attempt to control it. The natural repeating cycles of the Sun which caused the past global warming have now reversed to a normal though potentially dangerous cold phase. The unbelievable $646 billion tax on the people paid for through cap and trade programs and spelled out in the proposed 2010 federal budget is the largest environmental tax in the history of the United States. It is also completely unnecessary. Here we are creating a huge tax and investment system to counteract something that does not exist and yet not spending the first dollar to get our country prepared for the rapidly advancing coldest weather in over 200 years!

As a result, the SSRC in conjunction with its parent company, have asked the SEC to insure that publicly traded companies and their investors are protected from the real prospect of what I believe could be highly risky if not illegal (“worthless securities”) trading in climate change control instruments. In a March 19, 2009, letter to SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro, I have asked that she take several definitive steps to protect investors. The least of these steps is that the SEC needs to insure investors are provided full and accurate disclosure of climate change investment risks. Investors should be told that there is no global warming and that the coming cold weather may make any such investment vehicles worthless in a few years as the world comes to recognize man made climate change for the failed concept that many experts believe it is. I can see investors, Wall Street firms, and public companies losing tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars because of these climate change control efforts by the Obama administration.”

On whether a political appointee such as Chairman Schapiro will do anything to interrupt the climate change and global warming programs of the Obama administration, Casey voiced optimism saying, “Chairman Schapiro has been given a free hand and wide ranging mandate to revamp the SEC and toughen its investor protections in light of a wave of scandals and other financial crises that have rocked Wall Street over the past two years. I am hopeful that she will stand up to partisan politics by making all such climate change controlling investment programs contain full disclosure of the risks involved. I would like her to go beyond that as specified in my letter by for example, halting all carbon trading. I have not announced the SEC’s review previously to allow them sufficient time to look into the matter. Now that the SEC has had the ball in their court for the past three months, I hope we will see a ruling soon, especially with climate legislation now being considered by Congress.”

In looking at the climate change question objectively Casey injected, “The SSRC is the leading independent science research organization in the United States on the science of and planning for the next cold climate era. I was the recipient of heavy and often irrational criticism from all sectors when I first announced my research and the forecast of the next climate change to the media, US government, and the scientific community. Now that my predictions have come to pass, scientists and prominent leaders from around the world have now joined the fray in the effort to spread the word about the dramatic changes taking place in the Sun and what really causes climate change on Earth.

Accordingly, the SSRC is now the most quoted source on the world wide web on the subject of the climate change to this new cold era. I will continue my efforts to alert the media, our government, and the American people on how this next climate period will unfold and what effects it will have on everyone.

This request to the SEC for investor protection and disclosure of the inherent risks of carbon trading is another logical step in support of that mission. The on going process of the SSRC to speak the truth about climate change will also accelerate as the cold weather gets closer. This Wednesday for example, the SSRC will issue a new climate forecast, the most important of its kind in over two years. It will provide a more detailed schedule for how soon the deepest cold will arrive and start to create food shortages in the United States because of expected crop damage. In the meantime, let’s hope the SEC does the right thing by protecting investors from the folly that is called ‘man made climate change.’ ”

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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