In support of Gov. Perry

In New Hampshire, Rick Perry said:

"I do think global warming has been politicised … We are seeing almost weekly or even daily scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing our climate to change. Yes, our climate has changed. It has been changing ever since the Earth was formed. But I do not buy into a group of scientists who have, in some cases, been found to be manipulating data."

That has been slightly misquoted on the Left in various ways but is a perfectly level-headed statement. Leftists have however hit back by quoting their beloved "consensus". Evidence that there IS no consensus is therefore worth trotting out. Gov. Perry might have slightly over-egged the pudding by suggesting that scienists are going skeptical "daily" but not by much. The report excerpted below from last December does list a strong flow of scientists repudiating global warming

We do seem to have a good chance of a thoroughgoing skeptic in the White House from the beginning of 2013. What a blessing that will be to America!

More than 1,000 dissenting scientists (updates previous 700 scientist report) from around the globe have now challenged man-made global warming claims made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice President Al Gore.

This new 2010 321-page Climate Depot Special Report -- updated from the 2007 groundbreaking U.S. Senate Report of over 400 scientists who voiced skepticism about the so-called global warming “consensus” -- features the skeptical voices of over 1,000 international scientists, including many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN IPCC.

This updated 2010 report includes a dramatic increase of over 300 additional (and growing) scientists and climate researchers since the last update in March 2009. This report's release coincides with the 2010 UN global warming summit in being held in Cancun.

The more than 300 additional scientists added to this report since March 2009 (21 months ago), represents an average of nearly four skeptical scientists a week speaking out publicly. The well over 1,000 dissenting scientists are almost 20 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media-hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.

The chorus of skeptical scientific voices grew louder in 2010 as the Climategate scandal -- which involved the upper echelon of UN IPCC scientists -- detonated upon on the international climate movement. "I view Climategate as science fraud, pure and simple," said noted Princeton Physicist Dr. Robert Austin shortly after the scandal broke.

Climategate prompted UN IPCC scientists to turn on each other. UN IPCC scientist Eduardo Zorita publicly declared that his Climategate colleagues Michael Mann and Phil Jones "should be barred from the IPCC process...They are not credible anymore." Zorita also noted how insular the IPCC science had become. "By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication," Zorita wrote.

A UN lead author Richard Tol grew disillusioned with the IPCC and lamented that it had been "captured" and demanded that "the Chair of IPCC and the Chairs of the IPCC Working Groups should be removed." Tol also publicly called for the "suspension" of IPCC Process in 2010 after being invited by the UN to participate as lead author again in the next IPCC Report. [Note: Zorita and Tol are not included in the count of dissenting scientists in this report.]

Other UN scientists were more blunt. A South African UN scientist declared the UN IPCC a "worthless carcass" and noted IPCC chair Pachauri is in "disgrace". He also explained that the "fraudulent science continues to be exposed." Alexander, a former member of the UN Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters harshly critiqued the UN. "'I was subjected to vilification tactics at the time. I persisted. Now, at long last, my persistence has been rewarded...There is no believable evidence to support [the IPCC] claims. I rest my case!"

See: S. African UN Scientist Calls it! 'Climate change - RIP: Cause of Death: No scientifically believable evidence...Deliberate manipulation to suit political objectives' [Also see: New Report: UN Scientists Speak Out On Global Warming -- As Skeptics!]

Geologist Dr. Don Easterbrook, a professor of geology at Western Washington University, summed up the scandal on December 3, 2010: "The corruption within the IPCC revealed by the Climategate scandal, the doctoring of data and the refusal to admit mistakes have so severely tainted the IPCC that it is no longer a credible agency."

Much more HERE




Reply to the Washington Post on GOP skeptics

The Washington Post recently ran an article under the heading: "Climate-change science makes for hot politics" -- highlighting the strong dissent from global warming among GOP candidates and supporters. It is one of a number of such articles which end up belaboring skeptics with the "consensus". Denis Ables of Vienna, VA has written a comprehensive reply to it, which covers the science that they omit. I reproduce it below:

While it’s clear that the politics related to “climate change” are “hot”, so is the science. Eilperin and Achenbach, in their front-page article (August 20) have shed no new light on the science.

The term climate, unlike weather, is meant to cover much longer time spans. In just the past 1.3 million years our planet has experienced 13 ice ages, each followed by a brief warming period. We have the good fortune to be living during a brief warming period. Climate change has been ongoing since the origin of our planet some 4+ billion years ago. It's not always pleasant. When there are no longer any reports of shrinking glaciers or disappearing ice fields the next ice age will surely be underway.

There is no disagreement that, since the beginning of our industrial revolution (the mid 1800s), industrial activity has likely been contributing to the steadily increasing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The issue is whether this increase in CO2 will, in time, lead to significant, possibly catastrophic climate change. There is a well established paleo correlation, covering hundreds of thousands of years, showing a strong correlation between the variation in the planet’s carbon dioxide level and its temperature variation. However, the temperature variations occur first, some 800+ years before the very similar Co2 variations. This is clearly part of natural variation - the ongoing carbon cycle. The oceans, being much denser than the atmosphere, are much slower in both warming and cooling. When the oceans are cooler, Co2 is absorbed, when warmer, Co2 is expelled. There is no evidence that Co2 is driving our planetary temperature. Claims that other types of climate change have been caused by increasing Co2 have all been debunked.

As for the “survey” proving that 98% of climatologists believe that man’s activities contribute to warming: As I recall there are some serious issues related to that survey regarding sampling technique and how the questions were phrased. For example, every climatologist would be aware of the urban heat island effect which is clearly brought about by man’s activities, so man does indeed have some effect on temperature. But, the UHI is a local effect. The rural areas surrounding the urban areas show no impact from UHI. Not only that, urban areas make up a miniscule part of the earth’s surface area, oceans taking up 70%, plus there are other vast areas that include very few inhabitants. In any event, even I would be reluctant to claim that man has had no impact on the temperature. If I had to choose between "yes" or "no", I'd have to be prudent and select "yes". But my preferable answer would have been that there seems to be no evidence at all that man is having a significant (or even measurable) impact on the planet's temperature.

Our current warming began during the late 1600s, as the little ice age stopped cooling. That’s two centuries of natural warming before the industrial revolution. The 200 years of warming could hardly be expected to stop just because the industrial revolution started. But, even as the carbon dioxide level has continued to increase since the mid 1800s the temperature has not been cooperating. From the 1940s to 1970s it cooled, and since 1998 it has basically been flat. In fact, most of our current warming has taken place during two periods, (1910 to 1940) and (1975-1999).

Proponents of AGW defend their computer model predictions by now claiming such things as volcano eruptions have interfered, but these are merely part of the ongoing natural climate change, which clearly demonstrates that their computer models are inadequate, and, in any event, the excuses are questionable, because there seems to have been no increase in the particulates in the atmosphere.

The reviews that supposedly exonerated the folks at the IPCC seem to have invariably been conducted by others with the same vested interest, (a rather common practice in climate investigations, otherwise known as “white washing”). These reviewers refused to even consider looking at the science, or at the IPCC’s lack of scientific method. Certainly any scientific conclusion based on data (or processes used) which has not been released, was lost or destroyed, is hardly a valid basis for making policy. That data handling scenario has been SOP for the IPCC.

It was also misleading for the Post reporters to compare temperature in this decade with just the previous two decades. The 1930s were also quite warm, the difference compared to recent temperatures so small as to be insignificant. (One must also keep in mind that those surface temperature readings from the 30s were all subsequently “adjusted” downwards! Documentation justifying that process will not soon be available.) Our current drought, pictured in the Post article, hardly compares to the disastrous drought in the earlier 1900s.

And then there’s the Medieval Warming Period. The MWP “had to be eliminated” according to the purloined IPCC emails, and – in the face of much existing and contradicting research – the IPCC obviously did its best to eliminate that entire era via their famed (and clearly debunked) “hockey stick” graph. There are numerous peer-reviewed studies on the MWP, over a relatively long period, and still ongoing (involving about 1000 scientists so far and covering 40+ countries, showing that the MWP was global (not just regional) and as warm, likely warmer, than now. (links to all MWP studies available via www.co2science.org) . There was no industrial activity at that time, so the MWP was clearly natural climate variation. Where is the evidence that the current warming (such as it is) is not just more natural variation?

Trenberth, an IPCC member and (of course) one of the warming proponents has actually claimed recently – to a large audience- that the null hypothesis , (climate variation is natural unless proven otherwise) should be changed to his hypothesis – (it’s all anthropogenic ) . This unbelievable claim with no evidence to offer! Keep in mind that an entity such as the International Panel on Climate Change is no different than any other bureaucracy. Its very existence depends on its findings. Its findings were clearly predictable. Neither has the UN made any secret of its ambitions in this regard. (See, for example Lord Monckton's findings.)

The entire basis for the proponents of anthropogenic global warming is their hypothesis - that there is a positive feedback related to increasing Co2 which will, at some point, begin driving up temperature more quickly. However, even current temperatures indicate that their computer model projections based on this hypothesis are failing. Computer models do not qualify as evidence (other than to perhaps indicate incompetence). Even the IPCC folks acknowledge that their computer models generate “projections” and not “predictions”. The major news media has failed to distinguish this difference. Projections offer no guarantees at all. Not only that, the “hot spot” which, according to the computer models, must show up in some specific area in the troposphere are nowhere to be found. That alone should bring on serious questions about the validity of the IPCC hypothesis.

Finally, there is the isolated concern related to just the one issue - increasing carbon dioxide. The Co2 level has not only been much higher in the distant past but also during several ice ages, and even going into one ice age. This trace gas is now at 400 ppmv (parts per million by volume). The annual increase is 2 ppmv per year. At the current annual level it will be 600 to 700 ppmv by the year 2100. In the distant past life on this planet has apparently thrived at much higher levels of CO2. In fact, right now our vegetation is thriving on the additional CO2, and requiring even less water. Submarine crews live in 3000 to 5000 ppmv for extended durations with no apparent problems.

While we should obviously continue to look for ways to reduce our “carbon footprint”, this trace gas does not appear to be anywhere near a level, even within the next few hundred years, where it might then become prudent to permit politicians to treat the situation as a crisis (assuming we haven't already resolved the issue). Politicians’ “treatment” of any crisis tends to follow the “cure worse than the illness” model. We have time to deal with Co2 without having to, in the interim, move into caves.

Received via email




Enough Already with the 'Green' Jobs

I would just hate to have to be the one to break this to the President (er, scratch that. I would probably relish it.), but when the President returns from Martha's Vineyard to present his highly anticipated economy-and-jobs plan, I hope for both his and the American people's sake that it doesn't contain more dreamy outlines for the creation of 'green' jobs. Because when you've lost the zeal of the Gray Lady, you know something's up:

In the Bay Area as in much of the country, the green economy is not proving to be the job-creation engine that many politicians envisioned. President Obama once pledged to create five million green jobs over 10 years. Gov. Jerry Brown promised 500,000 clean-technology jobs statewide by the end of the decade. But the results so far suggest such numbers are a pipe dream....

A study released in July by the non-partisan Brookings Institution found clean-technology jobs accounted for just 2 percent of employment nationwide and only slightly more — 2.2 percent — in Silicon Valley. Rather than adding jobs, the study found, the sector actually lost 492 positions from 2003 to 2010 in the South Bay, where the unemployment rate in June was 10.5 percent.

Federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed, government records show. Two years after it was awarded $186 million in federal stimulus money to weatherize drafty homes, California has spent only a little over half that sum and has so far created the equivalent of just 538 full-time jobs in the last quarter, according to the State Department of Community Services and Development.

I have to admit, I never thought I'd see the day when the NYT would publish the phrases "green jobs" and "pipe dream" in the same piece. And it feels so good.

SOURCE




“There are a hell of a lot more bears”

Shock news. Scientists who don’t know what they are talking about. The EPA doesn’t know what they are talking about.

The latest government survey of polar bears roaming the vast Arctic expanses of northern Quebec, Labrador and southern Baffin Island show the population of polar bears has jumped to 2,100 animals from around 800 in the mid-1980s.

As recently as three years ago, a less official count placed the number at 1,400.

The Inuit have always insisted the bears’ demise was greatly exaggerated by scientists doing projections based on fly-over counts, but their input was usually dismissed as the ramblings of self-interested hunters.

As Nunavut government biologist Mitch Taylor observed in a front-page story in the Nunatsiaq News last month, “the Inuit were right. There aren’t just a few more bears. There are a hell of a lot more bears.”

SOURCE






Global warming runs out of gas

Comment from Canada

For those who have a wish to hear the grating sound of a man distempered and frustrated that the cause for which he has given at least a decade of his time, the “greatest moral challenge of our time,” is lost, I recommend listening to Al Gore as he was captured during an address at an Aspen global warming conference two weeks ago. It is a revelation. Mr. Gore is not a happy Jeremiah. You hear him on the tape near rage, repeatedly shouting “bulls–t” over the arguments of his critics.

Can a person win the Nobel Peace prize twice? I surely hope so, for this is the E=mc² moment of our green time.

It is not a pretty display. The question the sorry little rant calls up is whether, in its way, this temper fit was a signal that the great global warming crusade, that has had such a sweet run for the last decade or more, is finally over. Has it run, so to speak, out of gas?

The signs are everywhere that it has. Here in Canada, for example, how far are we from those days when Stéphane Dion was the freshly-minted leader of the Liberal party, having ascended to that dubious altitude largely on the pledge that he was going to build a “green” Canada. It was telling that within the Liberal party at that time featly to a drastic and nebulous green agenda was enough to grab the leadership prize away from the perceived stronger candidates, Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff. As so often happens, however, much as they are embraced by celebrities and touted by inside “experts,” when so-called green politics are placed before the people those politics and the people who espouse them are forcefully rejected.

Some five or so years later, not a little of Stephen Harper’s success in gaining a majority government came from refusing to engage, in any serious and convincing manner, with the politics of the planet-savers. Political correctness dictates some tepid genuflection towards the obsession with a warming planet, but Harper — and people know this — can be counted on not to jump on the carbon-counting express. He can be counted on to not bend in the face of the manufactured fury presented by professional activists and environmentalists, either to slow or stop the oil sands or introduce some ludicrous and wasteful “tax” on carbon dioxide. And while it may be a footnote to the national trend, Rob Ford’s election as mayor of Toronto can also be read, in part, as a rebuke to the previous mayor’s incessant tinkering with “environmental” measures — from plastic bag surcharges to bike lanes — at the expense of more basic municipal functions.

These are merely the local Canadian signals. But one can skip the globe and find almost everywhere that governments, staring at the reality of recession and financial anxiety, have given up on their vague projections of green economics. Where is President Obama, who promised that on his accession “the rise of the oceans will start to slow and the planet begin to heal?” — surely the most fatuous declaration in the history of politics. Well, he appears to be giving speeches every second day, but none of them feature the retreating oceans or our healed planet.

In fact he’s been tooling around in a $2-million bus oblivious of the carbon costs, and there simply hasn’t been any signal that his White House is giving the great Gore crusade anything but the barest of rhetorical support. If there were any political value to ardent greensmanship, surely a President who is floundering on the economy and sinking in the polls would have grabbed that raft with a passion.

But there isn’t anymore. Perhaps the recession has tamed the imaginations of most people and their governments. In tight economic times people are naturally unwilling to engage in the comic-book fantasies of the wilder environmentalists. Perhaps Climategate gave a too-souring glimpse into the mixture of science and advocacy that has, to some extent, corrupted both. Perhaps, finally, the unctuousness, sanctimony and sputtering righteousness of the high-profile environmentalists signal to most observers that they aren’t really as certain of all this “science” as they pretend to be. Either way this long green game has lost its fundamental energies. The celebrities will find another wristband; the politicians will find a new vague distraction.

For that, Mr. Gore himself has a lot of blame to carry. His own “sputtering righteousness” and his adolescent barks of “bulls–t” to his critics may be a reverse of the Obama declaration. Gore’s meltdown might just be the moment when the people of the planet saw the carney show for what it was.

SOURCE




How Obama Spent His Summer Vacation- Day One: Kill Power Plants, Kill Jobs

Prepare for your electric rates to go up, Chevy Jolt drivers

Under new interpretations of old rules, the EPA will shortly be forcing the shutdown of about 20 percent of coal-generated electric capacity in the United States. Since coal generates about half the electricity demanded in the US, the country will have to find other, more expensive ways of making up about ten percent of electric capacity at a time that the administration wants electric to be the clean fuel of choice.

Maybe Obama doesn’t understand that he can’t import electricity from Brazil.

In addition to the loss of generating capacity, the Commerce Department estimates that the new rules could kill up to 60,000 jobs, says Heritage, while an industry trade group says that the rules will cost $129 billion, according to the Washington Post.

During the 2008 presidential campaign then-Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden both claimed that if elected they would institute policies that make it cost prohibitive for coal-fired plants to operate in the United States.

Looks like this is one promise they’ll keep.

“So, if somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can,” Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle in a clip the paper likely tried to suppress, “it’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

While the Obama campaign scrambled at the time to say that their comments were taken out of context, Mike Carey, president of the Ohio Coal Association issued a statement that rings true today.

“Senator Obama,” said Carey in November 2008, “has revealed himself to be nothing more than a short- sighted, inexperienced politician willing to say anything to get a vote. But today, the nation's coal industry and those who support it have a better understanding of his true mission, to 'bankrupt' our industry, put tens of thousands out of work and cause unprecedented increases in electricity prices.”

The administration is using new interpretations of long-ago passed emission standards- standards that no administration has tried to enforce- along with vague, esoteric “visibility” standards to target older, coal-fired plants. Critics say that the EPA fails to make a case that the plants present a danger to public health or visibility, as the EPA seemed to admit when they issued a stay against adoption of the rules earlier this year.

“The stringency and cost of the new regulations provoked an outpouring of protest and some 5,800 comments” writes Heritage, “citing technical and statutory errors. Some 21 governors and more than 100 Members of Congress also raised objections. Ultimately, EPA officials were forced to acknowledge their failure to ‘calculate standards that fully reflected operational reality.’”

But as Obama tries to shore up his base of support amid blistering criticism from progressive groups, look for Obama to continue to use backdoor regulatory means to enforce, ignore or otherwise interpret laws to benefit special interests that support the president’s agenda.

Earlier this year Obama scrapped Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, instructed the Justice Department to ignore enforcement of the Defense of Marriage Act and just this week announced that the administration would be suspending deportation of illegal aliens in an effort to avoid enforcement of immigration laws.

Obama has been subject to criticism from Hispanic leaders, who are still stuck on the Democrat plantation, after the administration bragged that they deported more illegal immigrants than the Bush administration.

In addition, the president has issued more job-killing regulations than any of his predecessors- at least 75 of them through mid-year 2011, at a cost of $38 billion just for adoption. Total economic costs of federal regulations are sky-rocketing to $1.75 trillion says the federal government’s own Small Business Administration.

In short, the coal group got it right in November 2008.

President Obama has revealed himself to be nothing more than a short- sighted, inexperienced politician willing to do anything, saying anything and pay anything to get a vote.
Even while on vacation, day one.

SOURCE

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