This guy is extrememely logical, except for just one fault in his sorites (logical chain)

So where did he go wrong? See what follows the excerpt below

We've had some amazing, record-breaking weather in the past few years, including a rare October snow. But the big question is: Why? NBC10 Chief Meteorologist Glenn "Hurricane" Schwartz offers an explanation as to what could be contributing to these extremes.
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It is unbelievable! The chance of it happening by chance is microscopically small! But there’s a simple, easy explanation it happening. We’re talking about the many all-time records of extreme weather we’ve seen in Philadelphia in less than three years. The records include:

FROM WINTER 2009-10

Snowiest winter ever recorded (since 1880s)
Snowiest February ever recorded
Snowiest month ever recorded (Feb.)
2nd and 3rd biggest snowstorms ever recorded

FROM 2010

Hottest summer ever recorded
Hottest June ever recorded
3rd Hottest July ever recorded
Most 90+ degree days ever recorded
4th Hottest Sept. ever recorded
Wettest March ever recorded

FROM 2011

Hottest July ever recorded
Wettest August ever recorded
3rd Wettest September ever recorded
Wettest Aug/Sept ever recorded (any 2 months)

Some of these all-time records were not broken by just a few percent, as is usually the case, but by 60-percent! I’ve been a meteorologist for nearly 40 years, and have never seen anything like this! In fact, I wouldn’t have believed such a thing was even possible in so short a time. But it did happen.

How can we explain such an amazing number of extremes? Remember, this is just for Philadelphia, and there have been similar multiple all-time records set over other parts of the country and elsewhere in the world. What is going on?

In science, we try to explain every unknown. Sometimes we can’t, and we have to settle for answering “we don’t know” to certain questions. There’s a difference between a credible explanation and proof, though, and we don’t need absolute proof to explain things.

The first step is to see if there are any similarities in most or all of the records. In this case, ALL of the records involve HEAT and/or MOISTURE.

What about the snow? That’s the moisture part. While we haven’t seen cold temperature records, we have seen higher amounts of snow in the storms that have occurred. It’s just a colder version of the extreme rainfall and flooding we’ve seen. The common element is an increase in WATER VAPOR, which has been measured to have increased worldwide in recent decades.

So, the ONLY reasonable explanation is that “global warming” is having some effect on this extreme weather. Computer models (and simple meteorological logic) have shown for a long time that higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would lead to more heat and more water vapor.

I even believe our record October snowstorm is more evidence of global warming rather than the opposite, which would seem more logical (how many times have you heard skeptics say that a snowstorm or snowy winter refutes global warming?)

SOURCE

So what's the fault in his logic? He makes a false assumption: He assumes that the globe has been warming in recent years. But even Warmist scientists now admit that there has been no warming for 12 years or so (and skeptical scientists even see a cooling trend). And if something doesn't exist it cannot cause anything! He's one hell of a crappy meteorologist not to know that.





Jack-booted thug calls Republicans jack-booted thugs

If anybody is trying force their will on everybody else by hook or by crook, it's the fanatical Lisa Jackson

U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson took on congressional Republicans for trying to blame a sour economy on environmental regulations yesterday in a speech at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

Jackson accused House and Senate Republicans of deliberately misusing EPA's assertion that it would need 230,000 people to enforce greenhouse gas regulations. The number, she said, was drawn from an agency document arguing for "tailoring" the regulations to exempt small businesses.

"Those jack-booted thugs knew that," she said of the Republicans.

The EPA chief has been on an offensive lately against Republican charges that environmental regulations are threatening the U.S. economy. Yesterday, she reprised the assertion she made in a Los Angeles Times op-ed last month that Republicans consider coal-fired power plants, industrial boilers and other polluting facilities "too dirty to fail."

More HERE




Auto Dealers Rebut "Scientist" group (One of whose members is a dog)

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and seven other green groups sent the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) a letter (dated October 19) criticizing NADA’s opposition to President Obama’s plan to increase new-car fuel economy standards to 54.5 miles per gallon by Model Year (MY) 2025.

The UCS letter parrots the administration’s claims about the many wonderful benefits more stringent fuel economy standards will achieve during MYs 2017-2025. In a letter dated November 2, NADA points out that the claimed benefits depend on assumptions, such as future gasoline prices and, most importantly, whether consumers will want to buy the cars auto makers are forced to produce.

The UCS letter neglects to mention that, according to the administration’s own estimates, the MY 2025 standard would add at least $3,100 to the average cost of a new vehicle. NADA also notes other likely consumer impacts:

* Vehicles that currently cost $15,000 and less effectively regulated out of existence.

* Weight reductions of 15%-25%, with potential adverse effects on vehicle safety in collisions.

* 25% to 66% of the fleet required to be hybrid or electric, even though hybrids today account for only 2-3% of new vehicle sales.

The “concerned” scientists also completely ignore NADA’s critique of the legal basis of Obama’s fuel economy agenda. EPA and the California Air Resources Board are implicitly regulating fuel economy. Yet EPA has no statutory authority to prescribe fuel economy standards, and federal law expressly prohibits states from adopting laws or regulations “related to” fuel economy.

To help restore the statutory scheme Congress created, NADA supports Reps. Steve Austria (R-Ohio) and John Carter’s (R-Texas) amendment to the fiscal year 2012 EPA/Interior appropriations bill. The amendment would bar EPA from spending any money in FY 2012 to develop greenhouse gas/fuel economy standards for MY 2017 and beyond, or to consider or grant a waiver for California to develop such standards.

More HERE




The Democrats' Blue-Collar Blues

Why is the president considering tanking thousands of union jobs in a 9% unemployment economy?

By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

'Blue and green should never be seen without a color in between," runs the old design line. An imperiled President Obama is learning the political pain of mixing colors.

His greens are certainly in evidence, camped in ever greater numbers in front of the White House to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that will move oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The pipeline officially needs State Department approval, though this week Mr. Obama further elevated the controversy by announcing that he would be making the final call.

Which gets us to his blues, or rather the 20,000 blue-collar construction jobs that would come with the pipeline, and the further 118,000 spin-off jobs. The unions—from the Teamsters, to the Plumbers and Pipefitters, to the Laborers—are out in force pushing for this giant job creator. "We can't wait to get America building again," blares a union-sponsored website in support of Keystone, poking at the president's latest political rhetoric.

Keystone is more than just the administration's latest headache. It's the clear culmination of an Obama governing philosophy that has consistently put green priorities ahead of blue-collar workers, and that is now one of the biggest threats to his re-election.

This isn't a constituency Mr. Obama should ever have dared to slight. Working-class white males were the Hillary Clinton bloc in 2008 and helped her trounce him in key states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio. Mr. Obama would go on in the general election to lock up the college-educated, the affluent, the women, the minorities, the first-time voters—you name it. He lost the white working class by 18 points.

Rather than court this constituency, Mr. Obama has spent three years waging war on them. Under the sway of (former) green czar Carol Browner, Environmental Protection Agency Director Lisa Jackson and the environmental lobby, the Obama administration has done more to kill working-class industries than any modern predecessor.

The EPA has labored over an ozone rule (estimated job losses: 7.3 million), power plant rules (1.4 million), a boiler rule (789,000), a coal-ash rule (316,00), a cement rule (23,000), and greenhouse gas rules (even Joe Biden can't count that high). The administration blew up Louisiana's offshore deepwater drilling industry, insisted Detroit make cars nobody wants to buy and, just to stay consistent, is moving to clamp down on the country's one booming industry: natural gas.

Those going the way of the dodo are utility workers, pipefitters, construction guys, coal miners, factory workers, truck drivers, electrical workers and machinists. Many of these are union Democrats who don't care if their union bosses are publicly sticking with the president. They are pessimistic about the future and increasingly angry over the president's attack on their work.

A Pew poll this year found an astonishing 43% of the white working class didn't believe they'd be better off in 10 years—the most negative views of any group polled, by far. It helps explain why, in the 2010 election, the white working class surged to give the GOP a record 63% of their vote, 30 points more than for Democrats. It's why a poll out of the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania just found that 59% of union households now say they want someone in the White House other than Barack Obama.

Despite the media obsession with America's changing demographics, blue-collar, white workers still make up 40% of the electorate, even more in states Mr. Obama needs. The latest 2012 census data suggest that white working-class voters could make up some 55% of the Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan votes.

This explains the White House's recent decision to delay or scale back some EPA regs, including on greenhouse gases and ozone. A red-faced Mrs. Jackson has issued all manner of excuses. But the reality is the rule changes were a direct give-back to the blue-collar unions, which have been publicly protesting the regulations and privately warning the administration about electoral death. The White House had also been getting an earful from vulnerable congressional Democrats, who threatened to start voting with Republicans against these job-killers if the White House didn't take them off the table.

More telling is that the White House is moving in a way that suggests even it knows these gestures come too late. Mr. Obama is throwing his campaign attention at Southern and Rocky Mountain states he won in 2008 (North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada, Colorado), looking for a way to 270 that goes around the Rust Belt.

This might also help explain Mr. Obama's continued dithering on Keystone XL. Most presidents would eat dog food for the chance to generate a job bonanza and billions in investment with a project his own State Department says poses no environmental threat. But the green lobby hates it, and that green lobby is a staple of the liberal, educated, affluent base, and that's the group the Obama team is ever more convinced it's going to need in 2012.

And so we have a president who is seriously considering tanking thousands of union jobs, in a 9% unemployment economy, and while on a jobs tour. If that sounds crazy, well . .

SOURCE






Alarming the Children: creating climate activists in Africa

Outside of religion, outside of totalitarian regimes, has there ever been such targeting of the young to win recruits for a cause such as we are seeing being used by climate campaigners around the world? With fear as the spur to catch their attention: you are going to be doomed/suffer greatly/kill polar bears/etc etc unless you, your parents, your teachers, your communities, your businesses, your governments follow the party line - a line which calls for weakening your society's ability to respond to climate variation by, for example, subsidising windfarms and discouraging more reliable and less expensive ways to generate electricity.

By what stretch of a tortured imagination, can it be found desirable to abandon the basic adult responsibility of protecting the young from being terrified of their future? The fact that this abandonment is based ultimately on computer models that can be tweaked to produce anything the owners of them want to see [apart from verisimilitude] is even more jaw-dropping.

Here it is happening in Africa. Read this extract from a press release by UNICEF dated 31 October 2011:

'UNICEF urges media to hear the voices of children on climate change

PRETORIA, 31 October 2011 - As South Africa prepares for the 17th Conference of Parties (COP 17) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Durban from 28 November to 9 December 2011, UNICEF is urging media to consult with children on what they believe to be the key issues surrounding climate change, its impact on the children of South Africa, and what role children can play to address climate change.

A new study commissioned by UNICEF in partnership with the Department of Environmental Affairs and the Department of Women, Children and People with Disabilities, to be launched in mid-November 2011, highlights the importance of child participation in designing effective responses to climate change.

The study ‘The Impact of Climate Change on Children in South Africa’ highlights the expected impact of climate change on children’s health, education, nutrition, safety and access to adequate housing and sanitation in South Africa – both directly and indirectly. However, in spite of their increased vulnerability, children cannot be viewed simply as victims of climate change. Children need to be – and have a right to be – actively involved in the discussions and planning of mitigation and adaptation strategies, as well as policies and plans by various levels of government.

The study also reveals that there are a number of existing initiatives in South Africa through which children are participating in the climate change agenda. These could be strengthened to create a solid foundation for effective participation by children on climate change issues that can feed into, and strengthen policy and national response.'

SOURCE





For Tiffany, All that Glitters Isn’t Gold

The fashionable jeweler has joined an effort to block an Alaskan gold mine from operating.

Occupy Wall Street’s demands seem incoherent and childish, but one of the reasons the protesters have struck a chord with the American people is the unsavory conduct of a number of major corporations. News stories have focused on a few big financial firms, but if you want to see a venerable company in another field behaving badly, take a look at Tiffany & Co.

Tiffany has decided to curry favor with their rich and famous and largely politically correct clientele by going green in a shamelessly hypocritical way. Three and a half years ago, the upscale jewelry store chain signed on to a campaign by an obscure environmental pressure group to stop a major new copper and gold mine in Alaska.

To be fair, a lot of other jewelry retailers, including Target, WalMart, Zale, and Cartier, have also signed Earthworks’s “No Dirty Gold” petition. Most have done so because their web sites and in some cases their stores have been besieged by anti-mining activists. Signing the petition is a cheap way to earn a little green virtue.

But now Tiffany has started to put money and its public prestige into the effort to stop development of the proposed Pebble Mine, which is located two hundred miles southwest of Anchorage in the Bristol Bay area. Tiffany is one of the sponsors of a “roadshow” put on by “Save Bristol Bay.”

The roadshow consists of public screenings in six Western cities (Seattle, Portland, Corvallis, San Francisco, Santa Fe, and Denver) in October and a private screening in New York City on November 1st of a propaganda film that claims that the Pebble Mine would harm or even destroy Bristol Bay’s wild salmon fishery.

This charge would be extremely worrying if there were any chance that the mine would pollute the rivers, because the Bristol Bay watershed is the largest sockeye fishery in the world and has big runs of several other varieties of salmon. If this were 1911 or even 1961, that would be a legitimate concern. But in 2011, federal environmental controls are so strict that the water that new mines put back into rivers is cleaner than before the water was taken out of the river.

The company that is trying to develop the Pebble Mine has been preparing an application for a Clean Water Act permit for several years. So far they have spent $125 million on hundreds of environmental studies that cover every possible aspect of the mine’s potential impacts. If the Environmental Protection Agency concludes that the mine could ever pose any threat to the Bristol Bay watershed, then the permit will be denied.

That is the reality. But in this case at least, Tiffany is concerned with public relations, not reality. They have mindlessly accepted the anti-mining propaganda without any apparent concern for the facts or the damaging effects of their political advocacy. If the “No Dirty Gold” campaign succeeds, one of the largest copper and gold discoveries in the world will not be mined.

The economic loss to Alaska will be staggering. Hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth will not be created. One thousand high-paying jobs that the mine would provide for at least thirty years (and probably for several more decades) will vanish.

Of course, that would be just the beginning. If “No Dirty Gold” succeeds in blocking the Pebble Mine, then they will be in a stronger position to block other proposed mines around the country.

Tiffany doesn’t care about destroying one thousand American mining jobs. What’s a thousand jobs compared to enhancing Tiffany’s environmental image with their fashionable customers? After all, it’s unlikely that any miner will ever be able to afford a $3800 gold bangle imprinted with the Tiffany logo.

However, when their own profits are threatened, the company takes a very different position. In an official 2010 letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Tiffany’s general counsel objected to an obscure provision in the Dodd-Frank banking reform bill that requires the company to certify that their jewelry does not contain any gold produced in or around the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The general counsel notes correctly that there is no way to determine where refined gold has been produced. Trying to comply with the so-called “conflict mineral” provision would be “impracticable and extremely costly.”

Rather than hypocritically trying to score points by opposing so-called “dirty gold,” Tiffany needs to clean up its own act.

SOURCE





Australia: Queensland Conservative leader to open up some wilderness areas to mining

THE Steve Irwin Reserve set up by former Liberal PM John Howard will be opened up to mining, under plans by LNP leader Campbell Newman to restrict Queensland's landmark Wild Rivers Act.

Mr Newman announced yesterday that statutory protection of rivers would be repealed. It means major developments such as mining will potentially be allowed much closer to rivers under an impact assessment system.

Mr Newman will remove Cape York's Wenlock, Stewart, Archer and Lockhart rivers from legislative protection but - at this stage - leave others to stand. Mr Newman said the changes would give Cape York locals greater control of their economic future.

Terri Irwin, wife of the late Steve Irwin, said she had tried unsuccessfully to talk to Mr Newman about the issue. "Considering that a child dies every 20 seconds ... from drinking polluted water, I think it's absolutely ridiculous to be considering anything other than supporting wild rivers," Ms Irwin said.

Environment Minister Vicky Darling said Mr Newman described his scheme as a pilot plan, which made her wonder what would be next. "I'd urge Mr Newman to go up country and see what people say about wild rivers," she said.

Mr Newman said Cape York would be better protected by his plan. "It is clear wild rivers was designed more to capture green preferences, rather than for genuine, balanced environmental and development outcomes on Cape York," he said.

SOURCE

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