Report from the NYT below so the slanted presentation is to be expected
The Obama administration and the new Congress appear headed for early confrontations over the reach of environmental regulation and federal subsidies for fossil fuel development.
The administration is moving determinedly forward on a series of actions to limit emissions of greenhouse gases and other air pollutants, to restrict some coal mining practices and to eliminate multibillion-dollar tax breaks for the oil and gas industry.
Those initiatives have already generated bipartisan objections in both houses of Congress, and the numbers in opposition grew with Tuesday’s voting. Many of the newly elected members have expressed skepticism about the existence of global warming and say they strongly oppose government action to combat it.
The presumptive new Republican speaker of the House, John A. Boehner of Ohio, has dismissed the idea that carbon dioxide is affecting the climate and has characterized cap and trade and other proposed solutions to global warming as job-killing energy taxes.
He and other Republican leaders in both houses, along with many Democrats and a number of state attorneys general, support measures to block the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, as it plans to do starting in January.
They will find fervent and well-financed support from business interests that fear the effect of such regulation on their cost of doing business. John Engler, the former Republican governor of Michigan and now president of the National Association of Manufacturers, said on Wednesday that the new Congress should assert stronger control over E.P.A., which, as he put it, “is getting way outside its authority in trying to regulate that which cannot pass in the legislative process.”
Mr. Obama has clearly narrowed his ambitions on environmental and energy policy, scrapping any hope of enacting comprehensive legislation to deal with climate change and the nation’s dependence on imported oil. He said he was not seeking confrontation with Congress over regulation of greenhouse gases.
“Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way” Mr. Obama said in his press conference Wednesday. “And I’m going to be looking for other means to address this problem. And I think the E.P.A. wants help from the legislature on this. I don’t think that, you know, the desire is to somehow be protective of their powers here. I think what they want to do is make sure that the issue’s being dealt with.”
Instead of seeking a broad approach to energy and climate change, Mr. Obama said, he would look for smaller policy bites that could attract Republican support. He said he hoped to generate wide support in the new Congress for further development of electric vehicles, for converting some of the nation’s heavy truck fleet to run on natural gas, for incentives for energy efficiency in buildings and appliances, and for more emphasis on renewable energy and nuclear power. He said such programs lead to innovation and can create thousands of jobs.
Tuesday’s voting offered a brutal verdict for many of those members of the House who had voted for the cap-and-trade approach that Mr. Obama has now abandoned. Some three dozen House Democrats who supported the 2009 climate bill were turned out of office.
Supporters of the measure, sponsored by Democratic Representatives Henry A. Waxman of California and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, noted that more than half of the 43 Democrats who voted against the measure also lost their seats, meaning that for most voters the election was not simply a referendum on the climate bill.
Even as voters in many states were issuing a rebuke to lawmakers who supported climate change legislation in Washington, the people of California, as is their custom, were moving in a different direction. They soundly defeated Proposition 23, an oil-industry-sponsored measure to gut the state’s landmark global warming law that will set strict limits on greenhouse gas emissions and create a trading system for pollution permits.
California voters also re-elected the Democrat Barbara Boxer to the Senate and returned a Democrat, Jerry Brown, to the governor’s office — both strong supporters of state and federal action on climate change.
SOURCE
Even National Geographic now acknowledges the Medieval Warm Period
Excerpt below:
As Greenland returns to the warm climate that allowed Vikings to colonize it in the Middle Ages, its isolated and dependent people dream of greener fields and pastures—and also of oil from ice-free waters.
A little north and west of Greenland's stormy southern tip, on a steep hillside above an iceberg-clotted fjord first explored by Erik the Red more than a thousand years ago, sprout some horticultural anomalies: a trim lawn of Kentucky bluegrass, some rhubarb, and a few spruce, poplar, fir, and willow trees. They're in the town of Qaqortoq, 60° 43' north latitude, in Kenneth Høegh's backyard, about 400 miles south of the Arctic Circle.
"We had frost last night," Høegh says as we walk around his yard on a warm July morning, examining his plants while mosquitoes examine us. Qaqortoq's harbor glitters sapphire blue below us in the bright sun. A small iceberg—about the size of a city bus—has drifted within a few feet of the town's dock. Brightly painted clapboard homes, built with wood imported from Europe, freckle the nearly bare granite hills that rise like an amphitheater over the harbor.
More HERE
2010 Russian Heat Wave Was Only 20% Caused by “Climate Change”, Says Academy Of Sciences
Note there is no mention at all of “man-made” here
In the coming weeks Russian scientists plan to publish the results of their work on their investigation of the cause of the extremely hot 2010 Russian summer. This was reported yesterday in the German edition of Ria Novosti here.
The study was conducted by the Russian Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Control (Rosgidromet), headed by Alexander Frolow, and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Both organizations analyzed the summer weather anomaly.
Ria Novosti writes: "According to Frolow, the situation was influenced by a group of causes, among them a stubborn high pressure area and an unfavorable combination of ocean temperature anomalies. The situation in the European part of Russia was worsened by dry winds coming from other regions. According to estimates by the scientists, this weather anomaly was caused 20% by global climate change."
Note there is no mention in the Ria Novosti report of “man-made climate change” – only “climate change”. Since climate is always changing naturally, in sync with other cycles like ocean and solar cycles, evidence of a human greenhouse gas fingerprint as the cause would seem to be impossible to discern.
SOURCE
Troubling Global Volcanic Activity on the Rise
By Alan Caruba
The news is all about the Tuesday’s U.S. elections, but some of us are concerned about the news on Monday regarding a possible eruption of the Grimsvotn volcano in Iceland. Never heard of it? You will.
Grimsvotn is the most active volcano in Iceland. The one that made a lot of news earlier in 2010 was Eyjafjallajokull that, while relatively small, generated such a huge cloud of ash that it disrupted air travel across western and northern Europe for six days in April.
Here’s why volcano watchers around the world are on high alert.
This past week, in Indonesia, after a tsunami killed several hundred people, Mount Merapi rumbled to life forcing thousands to flee back to evacuation centers as 38 lava avalanches occurred with pyroclastic flows down the south and west slopes running outward for seven kilometers. They incinerate everything in their path.
In August, a volcano on Sumatra erupted for the first time in 400 years.
There is a “Ring of Fire” that stretches approximately 25,000 miles in a horseshoe from eastern Asia to the western shores of North and South America. It has 452 volcanoes of which 75% are the world’s most active or dormant.
On August 25, Italy’s Etna volcano and Columbia’s Galeros volcano both erupted.
In the U.S. the last major volcanic eruption was Mount St. Helens in 1980, but it is just one volcano in Washington State that includes Mount Baker, Glacier Peak, Mount Adams, and Mount Rainier, all part of a Cascade Range that reaches down into California. Mount Rainer is a massive stratovolcano located just 54 miles southeast of Seattle.
In June 1991, Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines sending millions of tons of ash and dust into the Earth’s atmosphere. It caused the global temperature to drop at least a degree or two for a few years.
Why talk about volcanoes in the aftermath of a historic election? Because there has been a significant increase in volcanic activity of late. That is never a good thing.
In his book, “Not by Fire but by Ice” the foremost authority on ice ages and magnetic reversals, Robert W. Felix, quoted Peter Vogt of the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office who warned that, “Almost all tectonic movement can be linked to magnetic reversals. Seafloor spreading, sea level changes, mountain growth, earthquakes, and volcanism all seem to speed up whenever the frequency of reversals speeds up.”
Magnetic reversals are part of the cycles scientists have determined existed over the 4.5 billion years of the Earth’s existence. They range from the most ancient, the Devonian, to the Holocene, from 10,000 years ago to the present. “At least twelve (magnetic) reversals can be linked to extinctions and climatic deterioration during the last three million years alone,” says Felix.
Significantly, the aftermath of magnetic reversals are linked to the emergence of new species in ways that Charles Darwin never knew or dreamed of. What we call “evolution” is far more likely the result of magnetic reversals. “Mass extinctions have been the rule, rather than the exception, for the 3.5 billion years that life has existed on this planet,” says Felix.
One of those species is Homo sapiens, human beings, and we have existed for a mere 200,000 years. Civilization as we know it is about 5,000 years old; a blink of the eye in terms of the age of the Earth.
Thus, all this volcanic activity occurring around the world may be signaling the advent of a new magnetic reversal and, as bad as volcanoes are, a magnetic reversal is the very definition of a cataclysm on such an order that it defies the imagination. Think of the sudden end of dinosaurs.
I tell you this because of all the blather of biodiversity, predicted species extinctions, and similar nonsense that is now following in the wake of the corpse formerly known as “global warming.” It is the new deception.
The real action is that of the Earth and the Sun. Though a predictable solar cycle, the Sun has gone “quiet” of late with few sunspots, the popular name for gigantic magnetic storms seen on the surface of the Sun. They almost always precede cooling cycles of shorter or longer duration and the worst of these are ice ages.
We are at the end of the latest interglacial period of 11,500 years and the next ice age will come on with blinding speed.
When you tie volcanic activity, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural events together, it behooves the human race to be far more humble about our so-called affect on the Earth’s environment. Our home is a small planet in a very large universe.
SOURCE
Prominent Australian Greenie false prophet
Tim Flannery does it again
I’m astonished that people still take this shameless alarmist seriously despite all his dud predictions. The latest example. Tim Flannery in The Sydney Morning Herald, February 12, 2009:
THE day after the great fire burnt through central Victoria, I drove from Sydney to Melbourne. Smoke obscured the horizon, entering my air-conditioned car and carrying with it that distinctive scent so strongly signifying death or, to Aboriginal people, cleansing. It was as if a great cremation had taken place.
I didn’t know then how many people had died in their cars and homes, or while fleeing, but by the time I reached the scorched ground just north of Melbourne, the dreadful news was trickling in. And the trauma will be with us forever.
I was born in Victoria, and over five decades I’ve watched as the state has changed. The long, wet and cold winters that seemed insufferable to me as a boy vanished decades ago, and for the past 12 years a new, drier climate has established itself.
Bureau of Meteorology Monthly Weather Review, Victoria, August this year:
OVER half the state recorded rainfall in the highest 10 per cent of previous totals, with some locations in the western district, specifically Weeaproinah, Cape Otway Lighthouse and Apollo Bay, all highest on record. In fact, Weeaproinah experienced not only their wettest August on record, but also their wettest month on record, with a 628mm soaking.
BOM, Melbourne Metropolitan Area, last month: WETTEST since 1975.
SOURCE
How Australia's main public broadcaster shields the Greens
They are a Green/Left outfit that wouldn't know what a free and fair debate even looked like
The Australian Conservative describes how ABC host Jon Faine shut down an attempt to question a Greens supporter:
Melbourne ABC radio presenter Jon Faine threatened to switch off his guest panellists’ microphones this morning when one of them—IPA executive director John Roskam—tried to press questions on the policies of the Australian Greens.
Faine’s threat came after Roskam tried to question “Rob of Monbulk”, a Greens’ supporter, during the program’s talkback segment.
The caller phoned in to criticise Roskam over the IPA boss’s opposition to trialling drug injection rooms. But when Roskam attempted to ask the caller about the Greens’ policies on euthanasia and carbon taxes, Faine would not let him do so, declaring that he wanted to “move on”.
Roskam said this was an example of why the Greens are enjoying growing electoral support – “no one has ever held them to account"…
When Roskam attempted to question the caller about electricity prices, his co-panellist, former editor of The Monthly, Sally Warhaft, urged the Greens’ supporter not to answer.
Jon Faine said, “And we’re moving on, we’re moving on, we’re moving on, we’re moving on, and we’re moving on. I can turn your microphones off, but it would be a drastic step to do so.”
This report doesn’t even describe just how desperately loaded this “conversation” was. Listen at the link. The Greens-leaning Warhaft was allowed to speak long and uninterrupted by Faine, himself Greens-sympathetic. The Greens caller was allowed to speak at length, even when he falsely accused Roskam of being a liar. But whenever the outnumbered Roskam attempted to speak as the lone voice of the non-Greens majority…
SOURCE (See the original for links)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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