A compliment from Al Gore?

He went on Reddit, writing as follows:

Hello Reddit, I'll be here from 1:00-1:30pm EST to answer your questions.  I'd also like to take this opportunity to invite Reddit to take part in the Climate Reality Project's 24 Hours of Reality: The Dirty Weather Report. This is a live internet broadcast, intended to unite people around the world in demanding action to address the climate crisis. Despite overwhelming scientific consensus, climate change deniers continue to stand in the way of meaningful solutions and the reality-based community cannot afford to stay silent any longer.

"climate change deniers continue to stand in the way".

That is cheering.  We deniers have stopped the Warmists! Al Gore says so.  Perhaps we should have a few victory celebrations.

There are at least 15 deeply researched separate lines of evidence that all confirm man-made global warming. They are all consistent, each with the others. Every National Academy of Science on the planet agrees with the consensus. The Academies describe the evidence as "indisputable". Every professional scientific society in every field related to climate science and earth science also agree. And 97-98% of climate scientists worldwide most actively publishing also agree. Animals and plants also agree -- in that they are moving their ranges by latitude and altitude to find climate niches similar to the ones in which they evolved. Even if you leave climate science completely out of it and just measure extreme temperatures, the statistical record of global temperatures shows that three-standard deviation events have increased from 0.25% of the time (from 1951-1980) to 10% of the time now. There is as strong a consensus as you will find in science, with the possible exception of the existence of gravity.

Gore goes on above using language no scientist would.  What is "deeply researched"?  You can exert great research efforts, going as deep as the Marianas trench if you like, but if your asssumptions are wrong or your methodology flawed you will still be wrong.  A scientist might have said "rigorously" researched but that would  be a large claim for any Warmist research.

And what ARE these lines of evidence?  Can he not name them?  It would be fascinating to hear.  He does name one of them:  That extreme temperature events have become more frequent since 1980.  He neither names the direction of those events nor their magnitude, however, which is a hoot.  About half of those events will be unusual COLD.  And Warmists compare years down to hundredths of a degree Celsius so even tiny and inconsequential changes will make Gore's list.

If that's the best he can do, the prospects for the rest of the "deeply researched" evidence seem very bleak indeed.  The man is a charlatan -- JR

SOURCE




Time To End The Denial

Millions dead from floods, tornadoes and drought! Enough talk already- government must take action  to restore the climate to the pristine state it was in eighty years ago.










More HERE  (See the original for links)





Link between global warming and drought questioned

The claim that warming causes drought is totally irrational anyway.  Warmer oceans should evaporate off more and thus cause MORE rainfall

THE world has been suffering more droughts in recent decades, and climate change will bring many more, according to received wisdom. Now it is being challenged by an analysis that questions a key index on which it is based.

Predictions of megadroughts affecting Africa and the western side of North America may be wrong. We could even be headed for wetter times, says Justin Sheffield of Princeton University.

This potential handbrake turn for climate forecasts hangs on the accuracy of our main measure of drought, the Palmer Drought Severity Index. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 science assessment cited studies using the PDSI to conclude that "droughts have become more common since the 1970s" as the world has warmed - a position we take to be true in this week's cover story (see "Climate downgrade: Arctic warming"). The report predicted droughts will increase with global warming.

The problem with the PDSI, says Sheffield, is that it does not directly measure drought. Instead, it looks at the difference between precipitation and evaporation. But since evaporation rates are hard to determine, it uses temperature as a proxy, on the assumption that evaporation rises as it gets hotter.

Sheffield points out that temperature is only one factor influencing evaporation. He inferred evaporation rates using the Penman-Monteith equation, which includes factors such as wind speed and humidity, and found "little change in global drought over the past 60 years" (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature11575). His new calculations back up his own previous analysis that the most significant of recent droughts mostly occurred in the 1950s and 60s, before global warming got going.

The PDSI was created in the 1960s by US meteorologist Wayne Palmer to help allocate aid to drought-hit farmers, and was then widely adopted by climate scientists for its simplicity. Sheffield says he finds its continued use "a little strange".

Roger Pielke Jr of the University of Colorado in Boulder says that since the PDSI uses a formula that assumes higher temperatures cause more droughts, it was hardly surprising that it finds a link.

Simon Brown of the UK Met Office in Exeter says Sheffield's analysis is probably right. "There has been a growing acknowledgement that the PDSI should not be trusted when doing climate change studies," he says. But one of the lead authors of parts of the 2007 IPCC report, Kevin Trenberth of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, is sceptical [Trenberth would be]. He backs work by Aiguo Dai of the State University of New York, Albany, who reported last year that using the Penman-Monteith equation "only slightly reduces the drying trend".

Sheffield's findings raise important questions, says Steve Running at the University of Montana in Missoula. "If global drought is not increasing, if warmer temperatures are accompanied by more rainfall and lower evaporation rates, then a warmer wetter world would [mean] a more benign climate."

SOURCE



Why you should care that courts overturn EPA’s carbon pollution standard

The 2012 elections ensure that President Obama’s “war on coal” will continue for at least two more years. The administration’s preferred M.O. has been for the EPA to “enact” anti-coal policies that Congress would reject if such measures were introduced as legislation and put to a vote. Had Gov. Romney won the presidential race and the GOP gained control of the Senate, affordable energy advocates could now go on offense and pursue a legislative strategy to roll back various EPA global warming regulations, air pollution regulations, and restrictions on mountaintop mining. But Romney lost and Democrats gained two Senate seats.

Consequently, defenders of free-market energy are stuck playing defense and their main weapon now is litigation. This is a hard slog because courts usually defer to agency interpretations of the statutes they administer. But sometimes petitioners win. In August, the U.S. Court of Appeals struck down the EPA’s Cross State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR), a regulation chiefly targeting coal-fired power plants. The Court found that the CSAPR exceeded the agency’s statutory authority. Similarly, in March, the Court ruled that the EPA exceeded its authority when it revoked a Clean Water Act permit for Arch Coal’s Spruce Mine No. 1 in Logan Country, West Virginia.

A key litigation target in 2013 is EPA’s proposal to establish greenhouse gas (GHG) “new source performance standards” (NSPS) for power plants. This so-called carbon pollution standard is not based on policy-neutral health or scientific criteria. Rather, the EPA contrived the standard so that commercially-viable coal plants cannot meet it. The rule effectively bans investment in new coal generation.

We Can Win This One

Prospects for overturning the rule are good for three main reasons.

(1) Banning new coal electric generation is a policy Congress has not authorized and would reject if proposed in legislation and put to a vote. Once again the EPA is acting beyond its authority.

The proposed “carbon pollution” standard requires new fossil-fuel electric generating units (EGUs) to emit no more than 1,000 lbs of carbon dioxide (CO2) per megawatt hour (MWh). About 95% of all natural gas combined cycle power plants already meet the standard, according to the EPA. No existing coal power plants come close; even the most efficient, on average, emit 1,800 lbs CO2/MWh.

A coal power plant equipped with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology could meet the standard, but the levelized cost of new coal plants already exceeds that of new natural gas combined cycle plants, and “today’s CCS technologies would add around 80% to the cost of electricity for a new pulverized coal (PC) plant, and around 35% to the cost of electricity for a new advanced gasification-based (IGCC) plant,” the EPA acknowledges.

In short, the EPA has proposed a standard no economical coal plant can meet. Not surprising given President Obama’s longstanding ambition to “bankrupt” anyone who builds a new coal power plant and his vow to find other ways of “skinning the cat” after the 2010 election-day “slaughter” of 29 cap-and-trade Democrats. But the big picture is hard to miss: Congress never signed off on this policy.

The only time Congress even considered imposing GHG performance standards on power plants was during the debate on the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. Section 216 of Waxman-Markey would have established NSPS requiring new coal power plants to reduce CO2 emissions by 50% during 2009-2020 and by 65% after 2020 – roughly what the EPA is now proposing. Although Waxman-Markey narrowly passed in the House, it became so unpopular as “cap-and-tax” that Senate leaders pulled the plug on companion legislation.

Team Obama is attempting to accomplish through the regulatory backdoor what it could not achieve through the legislative front door. The “carbon pollution” rule is an affront to the separation of powers.

(2) The “carbon pollution” standard is regulation by misdirection – an underhanded ‘bait-and-fuel-switch.’

In Massachusetts v. EPA (April 2007), the Supreme Court held that GHGs are “air pollutants” for regulatory purposes. This spawned years of speculation about whether the EPA would define “best available control technology” (BACT) standards for “major” GHG emitters so stringently that utilities could not obtain pre-construction permits unless they built natural gas power plants instead of new coal power plants.

In March 2011, the EPA published a guidance document assuring stakeholders that BACT for CO2 would not require a permit applicant “to switch to a primary fuel type” different from the fuel type the applicant planned to use for its primary combustion process. The agency specifically disavowed plans to “redefine the source [category]” such that coal boilers are held to the same standard as gas turbines.

The EPA reiterated this assurance in a Q&A document accompanying the guidance. One question asks: “Does this guidance say that fuel switching (coal to natural gas) should be selected as BACT for a power plant?” The EPA gives a one-word response: “No.”

This bears directly on the legal propriety of the “carbon pollution” standard. In general, NSPS are less stringent than BACT. NSPS provide the “floor” or minimum emission control standard for determining an emitter’s BACT requirements. BACT is intended to push individual sources to make deeper emission cuts than the category-wide NSPS requires.

Yet despite the EPA’s assurance that BACT, although tougher than NSPS, would not require fuel switching or redefine coal power plants into the same source category as natural gas power plants, the “carbon pollution” rule does exactly that.

In April 2011, the House passed H.R. 910, the Energy Tax Prevention Act, sponsored by Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), by a vote of 255-172. H.R. 910 would overturn all of the EPA’s GHG regulations except for those the auto and trucking industries had already made investments to comply with. Sen. James Inhofe’s companion bill (S. 482) failed by one vote. In June 2010, Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) Congressional Review Act resolution to strip the agency of its Mass v. EPA-awarded power to regulate GHGs failed by four votes. One or both of those measures might have passed had the EPA come clean about its agenda and stated in 2009 it would eventually propose GHG performance standards no affordable coal power plant can meet.

Much more HERE




The orgy of greed spoiling our countryside: why I campaigned in Corby

By James Delingpole

The Yorkshire moorland that inspired Wuthering Heights is about to be blighted by nine 377ft wind turbines, each one the height of Salisbury Cathedral.

Do you need to be a rabid, bat-crazy, monomaniacal, classical liberal loon to find this upsetting? I hope not, I really do. The vandalisation of Ovenden Moor, near Haworth, in the heart of Brontë country should concern us all, regardless of which way we vote or what newspaper we read.

Caring greenies ought to be dismayed by the widespread environmental havoc it will wreak: the kestrels it will slice and dice, the protected bats it will cause to implode, the huge concrete bases, the poisonous rare earth minerals mined under the most atrocious conditions in China. Bookish Left-leaning wimmin in glasses with large, red plastic frames ought surely to be concerned by the blighting of the landscape which inspired Emily – and Charlotte, and Anne.

Red meat socialists ought to be spitting blood at the injustice the Great Wind Scam perpetrates against the common man. It takes money from the poor and funnels it straight into the pockets of greedy, often toffy landowners and rapacious, mostly foreign-owned energy companies.

Here, roughly, is how the spoils will be divided among the troughers at Ovenden Moor. The landowner will be paid £401,000 pa, index-linked, for the next 25 years. The developer will get an income of around £2,679,300 pa, index-linked, over the same period. The vast bulk of this will come straight from the taxpayer in the form of compulsory subsidies, payable even if the turbines produce no power.

And the energy that will emerge from this orgy of greed and destruction? It will be neither green, clean, abundant or useful. Wind power requires full back-up from fossil-fuel-powered stations. It doesn’t save CO2, nor provide energy security, nor contribute anything to the base load power Britain so badly needs to keep the lights on.

These are just a few of the reasons why I consider the Great Wind Scam to be the biggest political scandal of our generation, and why I accepted an invitation by local wind-farm protesters to stand as their candidate in the Corby by-election.

As I said right from the start, the very last thing I wanted was to be an MP: my wife would divorce me. But what I didn’t want to do either was to let down my cause with a really crappy showing on election night. That’s why my strategy was to play the whole thing by ear. If I thought I stood a chance of becoming one of those Martin Bell-type outsiders who sweeps the board, well, whoop-di-do, I’d risk the divorce and spend two years in Westminster doing what I like best – really peeing my enemies off. If I could achieve more with a tactical, last‑minute withdrawal, well that would suit me too – not least because I’d no longer be letting down my friends in Ukip.

I love Ukip. There’s barely a single one of their policies I disagree with. Inevitably, there was much upset among my Ukip pals when I announced I’d be standing against them: they were worried that I’d take away votes from their excellent candidate, Margot Parker. This I didn’t want to do.

Equally, though, I had a lot of sympathy for my local Conservative MP, Chris Heaton-Harris, whom I got to know and like at a Tory conference in Windsor in September and who is masterminding the Tory campaign in Corby. Chris is the kind of Conservative who would have me voting Tory again: small-government, anti-EU, massively anti-wind. He, too, was worried I’d steal Tory votes – gosh how nice it is to feel important! – and was keen to show me that his party was at last seeing sense.

For example, he was the one who drew my attention to the anti-wind speeches made by Owen Paterson and the new energy minister, John Hayes, at the Tory conference. It was newspaper reports of some even stronger anti-wind remarks by Hayes which gave me just the excuse I needed to withdraw from the election with honour, claiming victory.

The timing was perfect. Obviously, I totally love the idea that the Coalition rewrote its entire energy policy because of me – and if the Guardian and Greenpeace wish to credit me with such mighty powers, as they did yesterday, then great. But politics is a bit more complicated than that. George Osborne is known to be fiercely anti-wind; Cameron, it is rumoured, appointed Hayes and Paterson quite deliberately to placate all those shire Tories mortified at the bat-chomping eco-crucifixes ruining their views and wiping out their property values. So while I’m proud to have played my small part in the war to defeat the great wind menace, I think it’s more likely that I was only ever a humble Sancho Panza rather than the true Don Quixote.

SOURCE





Australia's largest fishery to be wiped out

It's been fished for a couple of hundred years and is still there  -- but you would never know that listening to the Greenies

THE commercial fishing industry fears a $100 million assistance package will not be enough to compensate people affected by the proclamation of the world's biggest network of marine reserves.

More than 2.3 million square kilometres of ocean environment around Australia will be protected from July 2014.

Federal Environment Minister Tony Burke says the government recognises there will be impacts on some fishers which is why $100 million is being allocated under a fisheries adjustment assistance package.

Furious commercial fishers and charter operators say the move will doom their trade and end in a skyrocketing price and more imported seafood for consumers.

The Commonwealth Fisheries Association, which represents the interests of commercial fishers, is concerned compensation is being capped.

However, Protect Our Coral Sea and marine conservation groups such as the Pew Foundation welcomed the proclamation as "one of the most significant" in the nation's conservation history.

Under the plan, no new "on-the-water" changes will come into effect until July 2014 after the next federal election, after which the Coalition has promised to revoke any declaration should it win government.

Veteran Nationals senator Ron Boswell, a fierce opponent of the marine reserves, said the $100 million allocation would not go far enough.  "There is going to be a lot of people put out of business with no compensation."

Mr Burke dismissed the criticism, saying people needed to know the parameters of any assistance. "You can't have an open-ended bottomless pit," he said.

The average recreational angler in a runabout is unlikely to be affected with the closest new "no-go zones" 440km out from Brisbane, 330km from Townsville, and 210km from Cairns.

Commercial operators in the Coral Sea and the Gulf of Carpentaria including tuna long-liners and prawn trawlers out of Mooloolaba, Cairns and Karumba, will negotiate over a $100 million fisheries adjustment package.

"Australia is a world leader when it comes to protecting our oceans," Mr Burke said.  "And so we should be, we've got responsibility for more of the ocean than almost any other country on Earth.

"Many of the world's endangered marine animals, including green turtle, blue whale, southern right whale, Australian sea lion and the whale shark, are found in these protected waters," Mr Burke said.

Most of 80,000 submissions supported the national marine network plan - that will cover an area roughly equal to Australia's land mass, he said.

Catch-and-release fishing practised by the marlin fishing game boats will still be allowed in the Coral Sea except in the designated green zone over the eastern half of the proposed marine park.

Outraged third-generation aquarium collector Lyall Squire Jr, of Cairns Marine, said the decision had the potential to put his family-owned $6 million-a-year company out of business.

"We have grave fears for our survival, worse, this is not about science," said the director of Australia's largest aquarium supplier, who exports species such as clown fish, sharks and rays to Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the US.

SOURCE

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

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