Important Global Warming Dates Coming Up

In a few months, we will reach the critical point when there has been no global warming for more than half of the RSS satellite temperature record – which extends back to 1978.

In a few weeks, we will reach the point when there have been no major hurricane strikes on the US for seven years, the longest such period since the civil war.

Alarmist scientists will continue to lie about CO2, because they have no useful job skills and would likely end up in a homeless shelter if the global warming research money quit flowing.

SOURCE




Blatant errors of fact in stupid Warmist  article from historic  university

Below is an email from Charles Battig [chas2rm2.va@embarqmail.com] to "UVA Today".  It has received no reply.  Respect for the facts is not for the UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA, it would seem

Senior News Officer

Mr. Samarrai,

Your article,  "Salt Marsh Carbon May Play Role in Slowing Climate Warming, Study Shows"  contains  statements  regarding the mechanics of climate and carbon dioxide interactions  which suggest a lack of understanding and scientific knowledge on your part.  By doing so you cast needless doubt on the accuracy of the remainder of the article, the work of the researchers whom you depict, and the UVA Today image.

Carbon dioxide is not the "predominant" greenhouse gas as you claim.  Water vapor is the primary greenhouse gas and is understood to account for approximately 95% of the greenhouse gas effect.  Carbon dioxide  makes up about 3.6 percent of the effect. The fraction of  total carbon dioxide generated that is  attributable  to human activity is estimated at 3.22 percent.  Thus human activity is estimated to contribute about 0.117 percent of the greenhouse effect...a long way from being "predominant." "A large portion of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is produced by human activities"...NOT.

"A warmer climate melts polar ice, causing sea levels to rise."   Do you understand that there are two poles? If you are speaking of North polar ice (Arctic), it could all melt, as it has in the past, and there would be no change in sea level (try Googling Archimedes).  The Antarctic (pole) has been adding to its total ice mass.

There has been no increase in atmospheric global temperatures for 12+ years; the rate-of-rise of sea level has recently stalled, and the longer term rate-of-rise remains stable at approximately 10-12 inches per century.

Does your "generally accepted scientific theory" include solar, solar radiation wavelength, and cosmic particle interactions?

I find it regrettable that such errors pass your editorial board.

Yours truly, Charles Battig, MD

Received via email



SoloPower: Another Solyndra in Waiting?

The Department of Energy's loan guarantee program has already had two significant failures in the solar industry, the best known being Solyndra. Now a third company, San Jose's SoloPower, seems to be following in Solyndra's footsteps and threatening to leave taxpayers on the hook for millions more.

Last August, as Solyndra was going bankrupt, the Department of Energy issued a loan guarantee in the amount of $197 million to help SoloPower manufacture their thin-film solar power product. Like Solyndra, SoloPower has a nice-looking product. Its panels are thin and flexible and don't require heavy brackets to mount on a roof. And like Solyndra, the company's plans to expand were welcomed by politicians excited about the promise of hundreds of new jobs.

But as was the case with Solyndra, SoloPower's product advantages don't necessarily mean the company will survive stiff competition from China. Industry analyst Andrew Soare of Lux Research tells Fox News that China can still undercut US manufacturers by 30 percent, making it difficult to see how SoloPower can compete in the marketplace. It's this ability to undercut price that doomed Solyndra and Abound, another failed solar power company with a government-backed loan.

William Yeatman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute says of SoloPower, "It looks like it will fail for the same reasons as Solyndra." If it does, taxpayers will once again be on the hook. So far, the stimulus-funded DOE loan program has lost $600 million on solar company bankruptcies.

SOURCE




New British CO2 tax will double UK electricity bills

There's a nasty shock in store for the British householder when a new 'carbon' tax comes into force

Fast approaching, if largely unnoticed, is yet another massive shock the Government has in store for us with its weirdly distorted energy policy. It is surprising to see what an abnormally high proportion of the electricity needed to keep our lights on has lately been coming from coal-fired power stations. Last Wednesday evening, for instance, this was over 50 per cent, with only 1.3 per cent coming from wind power. Yet by next March, we learn, five of our largest coal-fired plants, capable of supplying a fifth of our average power needs, are to be shut down, much earlier than expected, under an EU anti-pollution directive.

One reason why these plants are being hammered through their remaining quota of hours allowed by the EU is that a new UK tax comes into force next April, which aims to make fossil-fuel power significantly more expensive. In 2010, George Osborne announced his intention to impose, from April 2013, a “carbon floor price” of £16 on every tonne of CO2 emitted by British industry, rising to £30 a tonne by 2020 and £70 a tonne by 2030.

An explicit purpose of this tax is to make the cost of electricity from fossil fuels so uncompetitive compared with “renewables” that it will, in the Treasury’s words, “drive £30‑£40 billion” of investment into “low carbon” sources such as wind and nuclear. On paper, the effect of Osborne’s new tax on our electricity bills looks devastating.

Using the latest figures from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), our power plants burnt 40 million tonnes of coal in 2011, emitting 116 million tonnes of CO2. They also generated 175,000 gigawatt hours from gas, at just over half a tonne of CO2 per gigawatt. At £16 a tonne, this CO2 would cost £3.5 billion – on top of our total current wholesale electricity cost of some £19 billion. Thus the new impost would represent nearly 20 per cent added to our electricity bills next year, and would almost double them by 2030.

Some of this, however, we already pay through the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS), which counts towards our £16 floor price. Osborne’s calculation in 2010 was that, initially, we would have to chip in less than an additional £2 per tonne to make up the £16 price. (The ETS price at that time was predicted to continue rising towards £40.) Since then, however, with falling demand due to the EU’s recession, the price of EU carbon permits has fallen dramatically. To reach the initial £16 level, the Treasury says we will now have to pay nearly another £5, making our electricity significantly more expensive. But since it made that guess the EU price has slipped still further, to well under £6 – leaving a gap of £10 a tonne to be made up by Osborne’s tax, rapidly rising every year thereafter.

Thus, to meet that tax level in the years after 2013, we in Britain will have to pay electricity bills soaring to a level far higher than any others in Europe. All this is to promote the building of thousands more heavily subsidised windmills, which will in turn require us to build more gas-fired power stations to provide back-up for the constant fluctuations in wind speed. And these will be paying Mr Osborne’s fast-rising tax on all the CO2 they emit, with the bill to be picked up by the rest of us on a scale which, within 18 years, could alone almost double the cost of our electricity.

In short, the Treasury has made an incredibly damaging miscalculation. Even if there is little chance that our Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Ed Davey, could get his head round such lunacy, perhaps someone might lay out for Mr Osborne the bill that his delusional new tax is going to land us all with.

SOURCE




Obama's Abandoned Power Plants

If voters knew how America's economy would look after two terms of President Barack Obama's administration, Mitt Romney would win in a landslide.

In the 2008 campaign, President Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that the “notion of no coal...is an illusion.” He noted that he favors a cap-and-trade system “[s]o if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

While Obama did not get to implement cap-and-trade, he found other ways to shut down coal burning power plants.

In the name of a rigidly anti-prosperity ideology, Obama's administration, through the Environmental Protection Agency, is continuing its war on jobs and reliable sources of energy. And like most onerous regulations, the true costs are not immediately visible.

As announced by Lisa Jackson, the chief EPA Administrator, three new regulations for air emission standards have been announced, which will cost American consumers more than $13 billion per year. Also, according to estimates by the Senate Republican Policy Committee, other rules dealing with coal ash and air could cost an additional $90 billion annually.

Obama's claim to have an "all-of-the-above" energy strategy is a ruse. Instead, his administration seems determined to extend our economic recession, while government bureaucrats find creative ways to make energy more expensive.

More than 2,000 employees of the coal industry were laid off this year, and that industry expects 10,000 more layoffs in direct and related jobs. In addition, as reported by Human Events, leaked documents from the Obama administration estimates that one rule on water quality requirements will be responsible for an additional 7,000 fired workers.

The new regulations are so extreme that, in effect, they require all new power plants must be powered by natural gas, an imperfect fuel.

This may make the natural gas lobbyists who work with the Obama administration happy, but the incredible amounts of methane expanded natural gas would not please environmentalists.

In five months, natural gas prices have increased by 52%, with the Obama administration's rules largely to blame. According to Reuters data, as demand is expanding globally, natural gas is quickly approaching a price which is $2 more than the same per unit, which results in higher energy prices for cash-strapped consumers who already heat their homes with natural gas.

Even though industry has been able to dramatically decrease noxious pollutants from coal over the past 40 years, Obama's heavy-handed rules have slashed coal production by one-third. In my state of Ohio, the coal industry has been devastated by drastic EPA regulations.

As you can see from this map, 175 fully-functional coal burning plants are being retired across the country, which puts further strain on our outdated energy grid while putting thousands of employees out of work.

Environmentalist groups aligned with the Obama administration, such as the Sierra club, are happy to see coal burning plants shut down, and have nearly 400 more plants targeted. But with the White House's emphasis on efficient "green energy" such as solar panels, they would not want to see the recent Heritage Foundation study which shows such a switch would increase a family's $200/month energy bill to $700.

President Barack Obama is playing favorites with sources of energy, while destroying jobs and hurting consumers. America is in desperate need of a new direction on energy policy.

SOURCE




Hollywood’s Frackin’ Fraud

Hollywood is releasing another of its preachy environmental epics this fall designed to take advantage of the public’s ignorance about an oil and gas drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing or fracking for short.

Producers of the 2012 environmentalist tale titled Promised Land already had their eyes on the Oscars following in the footsteps of Julia Roberts’ Oscar winning performance in Erin Brockovich, and Meryl Streep’s nomination for Silkwood.

Starring ardent Obama supporter Matt Damon, the movie seems to have been inspired by eleven residents from Dimock, Penn., who claimed that fracking had destroyed their water and their lives.  The claims received so much national attention that Hollywood celebrities actually trekked to flyover Pennsylvania to show their concern by bringing drinking water to the people.

Unfortunately for the producers of Promised Land, after they had spent millions producing the movie, the story of the people of Dimock fell apart when their claims were actually tested.

The environmentalist movement, which has made attacks on fracking one of their core fundraising issues, their friends and advocates at Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency tested the ground water in the wells of those who filed complaints and determined that “there are not levels of contaminants present that would require additional action by the Agency.”

In other words, the water is just fine.  Fracking has had zero impact upon it.

The implication of the EPA release is even more damaging in that the EPA notes that they had tested water submitted by the residents which, “indicated the potential for elevated levels of water contaminants in wells.”

This means that the EPA has, in nice language, determined that the Dimock eleven flat out lied, and the samples they submitted could not be replicated when actual field testing occurred.

Hollywood itself has struggled with factual manipulation in the fracking arena.  Josh Fox, producer of the Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland, has been forced to admit that his big scene in the movie is not exactly what it seemed.

The point of Gasland was to show how damaging fracking was to the water supplies of communities, and it has a big reveal where the Michael Moore-wannabe documentarian turns on a water spigot and lights the water on fire.  And for those wondering, no, the water wasn’t taken from Lake Erie.

Once again since truth couldn’t get in the way of the point of the movie, the documentary fails to reveal that the people who lived in that community had filed reports that due to high methane content in their ground wells from as far back as 1936, they were able to light their water on fire.

Phelem McAleer, director of the film, Not evil just wrong, confronted Gasland maker Josh Fox about the fact that the water burned well before fracking occurred, and got Fox to admit that he was well aware of the historic reports.  Fox dismissed them and chose not to share them with his viewers because they did not fit his advocacy goal in the movie.

Besides the revelation that this has been going on for almost 80 years, kind of takes the edge off the dramatic impact

Now, after the critical success of Gasland, Hollywood is on the fracking trail in an attempt to build the storyline that hydraulic fracking is destroying small towns across America.

At least, unlike Gasland, with Promised Land, you know that it is fiction and should be viewed for entertainment value only.

SOURCE

***************************************

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN.   My Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

The graphics problem:  Graphics hotlinked to this site sometimes have only a short life and if I host graphics with blogspot, the graphics sometimes get shrunk down to illegibility.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here and here

*****************************************