I shouldn't laugh! Pathetic Warmists excited by alleged temperature change for May of only two HUNDREDTHS of one degree!

That's not data.  It's a statistical abstraction. They don't give many figures below but you can find them here

Driven by exceptionally warm ocean waters, Earth smashed a record for heat in May and is likely to keep on breaking high temperature marks, experts say.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Monday said May's average temperature on Earth of 59.93 degrees Fahrenheit (15.54 degrees Celsius) beat the old record set four years ago.

However, California is having a record hot first five months of the year, a full 5 degrees above normal.

May was especially hot in parts of Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Spain, South Korea and Australia, while the United States was not close to a record, just 1 degree warmer than the 20th century average.

Georgia Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb and other experts say there's a good chance global heat records will keep falling, especially next year because an El Nino weather event is brewing on top of man-made global warming.

An El Nino is a warming of the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean that alters climate worldwide and usually spikes global temperatures.

May was 1.33 degrees (0.74 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th century world average.

The last month that was cooler than normal was February 1985, marking 351 hotter than average months in a row.

This possibly could quiet people claiming global warming has stopped, but more importantly it 'should remind everyone that global warming is a long-term trend,' Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer said.  Which is his way of admitting that the temperature change noted is trivially small

Setting or tying monthly global heat records has happened frequently in recent years. The last global monthly cold record was set in December 1916.

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More Warmist clutching at straws

The following study has been hyped by Warmists (e.g. here) and is alleged to show that global warming will kill people.  But if you can read statistics, the hilarity in it never stops.

For a start, they study summer months only, whereas the big killer is winter!  Had they included all seasons, they would have found that global warming will save lives  -- and that would never do!

I am a bit too exhausted from laughing at that one to say much more but I will note that their hazard ratios are a joke.  They are almost unity -- indicating no effect of temperature.  And the The Federal Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Second Edition says (p. 384): "The threshold for concluding that an agent was more likely than not the cause of an individual's disease is a relative risk greater than 2.0."  The bozos below found a relative risk of only half that!
 
Summer temperature variability and long-term survival among elderly people with chronic disease

Antonella Zanobettia et al.

Abstract

Time series studies show that hot temperatures are associated with increased death rates in the short term. In light of evidence of adaptation to usual temperature but higher deaths at unusual temperatures, a long-term exposure relevant to mortality might be summertime temperature variability, which is expected to increase with climate change. We investigated whether the standard deviation (SD) of summer (June–August) temperatures was associated with survival in four cohorts of persons over age 65 y with predisposing diseases in 135 US cities. Using Medicare data (1985–2006), we constructed cohorts of persons hospitalized with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, congestive heart failure, and myocardial infarction. City-specific yearly summer temperature variance was linked to the individuals during follow-up in each city and was treated as a time-varying exposure. We applied a Cox proportional hazard model for each cohort within each city, adjusting for individual risk factors, wintertime temperature variance, yearly ozone levels, and long-term trends, to estimate the chronic effects on mortality of long-term exposure to summer temperature SD, and then pooled results across cities. Mortality hazard ratios ranged from 1.028 (95% confidence interval, 1.013– 1.042) per 1 °C increase in summer temperature SD for persons with congestive heart failure to 1.040 (95% confidence interval, 1.022–1.059) per 1 °C increase for those with diabetes. Associations were higher in elderly persons and lower in cities with a higher percentage of land with green surface. Our data suggest that long-term increases in temperature variability may increase the risk of mortality in different subgroups of susceptible older populations.

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Greenpeace chief commutes - by plane: Executive flies 250 miles from Luxembourg to Amsterdam despite organisation's anti-air travel campaign

A Greenpeace senior executive commutes to work by plane despite the organisation’s anti-air travel campaign, it emerged yesterday.

Pascal Husting, Greenpeace International’s programme director, has been flying 250 miles between Luxembourg and Amsterdam at the charity’s expense since 2012.

Each trip costs Greenpeace £200 and would generate 142kg of carbon dioxide emissions, according to airline KLM.

Over two years this would amount to 7.4 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions - the equivalent of consuming 17 barrels of oil, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

But Mr Husting defended the arrangement and said he would rather not take the journey but it was necessary because the alternative is a twelve hour round trip by train.

He told the Daily Telegraph: ‘I spend half my life on Skype and video conference calls.  ‘But as a senior manager, the people who work in my team sometimes need to meet me in the flesh, that’s why I’ve been going to Amsterdam twice a month while my team was being restructured.’

He said that from September he would switch to making the trip once a month by train due to ‘the work of restructuring my team coming to an end, and with my kids a little older’.

Mr Husting’s travel arrangements were revealed just days after Greenpeace was forced to apologise for losing £3million of public donations in an unauthorised currency dealing.

In a statement online John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said: ‘As for Pascal’s air travel. Well it’s a really tough one. Was it the right decision to allow him to use air travel to try to balance his job with the needs of his family for a while?

‘What kind of compromises do you make in your efforts to try to make the world a better place?

‘I think there is a line there. Honesty and integrity to the values that are at the heart of the good you’re trying to do in the world cannot be allowed to slip away. For what it’s worth, I don’t think we’ve crossed that line here at Greenpeace.’

But Greenpeace members were outraged by the senior executive’s commuting habits and called Mr Pascal a ‘hypocrite’.

Greenpeace volunteer of 30 years, Richard Lancaster, said: ‘I have to say I’m deeply troubled by these revelations - I had hoped and assumed Greenpeace was better than this.

‘I volunteer with Greenpeace but work in the commercial world and if I took a job in another country I’d expect to move to where the job is and if I couldn’t for family reasons I wouldn’t take the job - so I find Pascal’s travel arrangements almost unbelievable.’

According to Greenpeace flying is ten times worse for climate change than taking the train and is responsible for 13 per cent of the UK’s impact on the climate.

SOURCE





India targets Prince Charles' aide in war on Greenpeace

British Greenpeace activists are a threat to India's economic development, according to an intelligence report

India's intelligence agency has targeted an adviser to Prince Charles and British activists in a campaign against Greenpeace and other foreign groups it claims are a threat to its economy.

The Indian government last week banned direct foreign funding of local campaign groups, after a report by its Intelligence Bureau warned that organisations funded by Greenpeace and other international institutions were growing throughout the country and "spawning" mass movements which now pose a "significant threat to national economic security."

The decision was revealed after the Indian government indicated it was ready to further exploit its large coal reserves and asserted its right to increase carbon emissions for economic development. Prakash Javadekar, the environment minister, said India had a "right to grow" and that it could not address climate change until it had eradicated poverty.

According to the Intelligence Bureau report, Greenpeace and other environmentalist groups had stalled the development of new coal mines, challenged its plans for more coal-fired power stations, and delayed other vital infrastructure projects in campaigns which had reduced India's GDP growth by two to three per cent. Much of their work, it said, is funded by the US-based Centre for Media and Democracy, which the report described as a Democratic Party-oriented group supported by liberals like George Soros and "multiple far-left foundations".

The report, which was leaked last week, singled out Dr Vandana Shiva, an Indian scientist and adviser to Prince Charles on sustainable agriculture.

She has been his long-term collaborator on organic farming since they participated in the Reith Lectures in 2000. He is said to find her inspiring and keeps a bust of her at his Highgrove home. During his visit to India in November last year, the prince visited her organic farm in Dehra Dun to highlight her campaign against the use of genetically-modified seeds.

Dr Shiva has blamed the high cost of GM cotton seeds for the suicides of 284,000 heavily indebted farmers since 1995.

According to the Intelligence Bureau report, "six NGOs, including Greenpeace, are at the forefront of anti-GMO activism in India" and the movement "was initiated in 2003 by Vandana Shiva". It also emphasises her role as a consultant to Greenpeace Australia and her group, Navdanya, as a recipient of foreign donations. Her campaign was highlighted along with other movements blamed for "anti-developmental activities" which included Greenpeace plans for "crop circle" protests against the cultivation of genetically-modified soya and corn. The group had planned to capture the demonstrations on Google Earth, the report said.

The report named four British environmentalists and cyber-experts among 12 foreign activists it said were planning to organise protests against coal fired power stations and had been involved in upgrading Greenpeace India's computer security systems. It discussed the work of Matt Philips, a British energy analyst and cited a claim by Pakistan's former intelligence chief that his previous employer, the charity Save the Children, was linked to the American CIA spy agency.

Two other British activists, Fiona Stewart and Emma Gibson, had visited Greenpeace's headquarters in Bangalore in January an "upgraded its communications systems and installed sophisticated and encrypted software in its servers and computers", the report said.

Dr Vandana Shiva said India's Intelligence Bureau's report was an "attack on civil society" which she said she would defend.

She had decided to campaign against the introduction of genetically-modified seeds into India in 1987 after she attended a conference at which agricultural chemicals industry representatives said they would "take patents on seeds so they could collect royalties from every farmer, in every season, in every country of the world", she said in the Asian Age newspaper.

Her court action against the genetically-modified seed company Monsanto delayed its plans to cultivate Bt Cotton in India for four years. Her NGO Navdanya has since collected a vast seed bank to help farmers cultivate low cost organic crops and avoid the debts she believes have been caused by the costs of using genetically-modified seeds.

The report was "biased" in favour of foreign companies she blames for farmers' debts and suicides, she said.

"They're not allergic to foreign funding for defence or railways but only foreign funding to build civil society", she said.

Greenpeace India said the report was a "malicious" attempt to speed up environmental clearances for coal and nuclear power projects and a "concerted effort by parties with a vested interest to ensure elimination of any opposition", said its India director Samit Aich.

India was the world's fastest growing carbon gas emitter in 2012 but has rejected calls to reduce them as unfair. Its ministers say western economies were to blame for polluting the Earth's atmosphere during their industrialisation and that India's own development cannot be held back to meet new emission targets.

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India invokes 'right to grow' to tell rich nations of its stand on future climate change negotiations

In what may be a strong signal to rich nations on the issue of climate change, New Delhi on Tuesday said the developing countries, including India, have a "right to grow" and in the process their "net emission (of greenhouse gases) may increase".

Though India reiterated its commitment to reduce emissions, it made its preference clear. It said the country cannot address the challenges of climate change unless it eradicates poverty through economic growth.

Underlining that the problem of emission has not been created by the developing nations and hence responsibility for addressing it should not be solely put on them, environment minister Prakash Javadekar said, "We have to reduce our carbon emissions. But, I (India) have not created the carbon emission problems, which have been done by others. But I am not into any blame game. The issue is that I have a right to grow. India and developing countries have right to grow. These are the emerging economies".

His statement assumes significance in the light of a meeting of 'governments, leaders from finance, business, local government and civil society' in New York in September this year to "bring bold and new announcements and action" to keep the earth below the globally agreed two degree temperature rise.

Noting that poverty is an "environmental disaster", Javadekar said "unless we tackle poverty, unless we eradicate poverty, we cannot really address the climate change."

"To that end, we need to grow. Our net emission may increase," he said while speaking at a function on the occasion of the "World Day to Combat Desertification".

The remark is expected to further strengthen the resolve of the BASIC group of nations on the issue of climate change. This bloc of four biggest emerging economies - Brazil, South Africa, India and China - has consistently been articulating developing countries' point of view at every forum while seeking bigger actions from rich nation to cut down emissions as part of their historical responsibility.

Although the new government in India has not undermined the efforts to deal with the problem, the remark has certainly indicated hardening of stand by India as far as role of rich nations is concerned towards their 'bigger' responsibility to not only cut down emissions but also help out poor nations in taking various mitigation and adaptation measures.

Javadekar articulated India's point of view barely three weeks after the new government showed some seriousness and gave new nomenclature to the environment ministry by adding 'climate change' as its core functioning. The ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) is now the ministry of environment, forests and climate change (MoEFCC) under the new government.

Interestingly, Javadekar had showed the same seriousness while speaking at a function to mark the 'World Environment Day' on June 5. He had said that India would provide a "new vocabulary to the world in environment conservation" as New Delhi was more conscious to its role.

It is to be seen whether his remark was merely a 'rhetoric' or something which meant real works on the ground to fight the challenge of climate change.

In certain quarters, the change in narrative is only seen as India's new found zeal to 'project' its efforts to the global community more proactively now. New Delhi will possibly highlights its own works to deal with climate change more proactively while seeking rich nations to work more.

India too had voluntarily pledged to reduce its carbon emission by 20 to 25%, over the 2005 levels, by the year 2020. But, it has been blamed for not doing enough to deal with the issue of greenhouse gas emission.

Amid this backdrop, Javadekar had on June 5 said India should not be portrayed as a "villian" in the debate on climate change but should instead provide new dimensions to the discourse.

"The world has always provided a vocabulary (on climate change) and we have reacted. We will provide a new vocabulary to which the world will react and we will take the discourse to a new height because we bother about climate change. We will work by keeping energy efficiency as the central theme," he had said.

But, the question now is whether this "right to grow" pitch will find a prominent place in the climate change discourse when rich and poor nations sit together to work out a global climate deal?

SOURCE




An Australian environmental authority attacked for allowing development

A parliamentary inquiry is to be held into the performance of NSW's Environment Protection Authority after a string of controversies that have dogged the agency, including botched prosecutions, accusations of cover-ups, mismanagement and a referral to the corruption watchdog.

Labor's environment spokesman, Luke Foley, successfully moved for the inquiry in the NSW Upper House on Thursday after warning that the EPA appeared more focused on protecting polluting industries than looking after the community and human health.

It also follows the introduction of a private member's bill last year by opposition MP Ron Hoenig calling for the EPA to be stripped of its powers to prosecute serious environmental offences because it was "incompetent" and does not have the "guts" to go after environmental criminals. Mr Hoenig wanted the powers to be given to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

EPA chief executive officer Barry Buffier said the inquiry would be an "opportunity to increase public awareness and understanding about the important role we play in protecting the communities and environment of NSW".

The inquiry comes after months of revelations by Fairfax Media about controversies over the EPA's performance, including its management of coal dust pollution in the Hunter, the mercury and other toxic chemical contamination in the Botany Hillsdale region and its alleged failure to protect koala habitats in the Royal Camp State Forest.

It also follows the EPA's abandonment of its biggest ever prosecution case, which was launched against the chemical company DuPont for allegedly polluting the ground and killing trees and plants around its Girraween site. DuPont had maintained it was not responsible for the pollution.

Community groups around the state, which have led the complaints about the EPA, have welcomed the inquiry saying it is in the best interests of the people.

The Hunter Community Environment Centre spokesman Dr John Mackenzie said they were pleased it would focus on the agency's repeated mishandling of coal dust monitoring in the region, which was referred to the Independent Commission Against Corruption earlier this year.

"We are hopeful that the inquiry will improve the EPA’s ability to be a strong and effective environmental regulator," said Dr Mackenzie. "This inquiry is also vital for restoring community confidence in the EPA, given that its performance in recent years has fallen well shy of community expectations."

Botany resident Sharon Price said: "We look forward to a long-awaited, positive outcome."

The inquiry will specifically look into the land contamination issues at Botany and Hillsdale, the coal dust pollution in the Hunter, and the ground water contamination in the Piliga by Santos. Mr Foley has raised concerns about exploration company Santos being given a ''pathetic $1500 fine for the contamination of a water aquifer with uranium at levels 20 times higher than safe drinking water guidelines''.

It will also look into the regulation of cruise passenger ships at the White Bay Cruise Terminal and the regulation of forestry practices in Royal Camp State Forest.

SOURCE

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Gore Blames Syria Civil War on Global Warming

Ya gotta laugh.  He offers not a shred of proof for the way he connects everything to global warming.  And he has a good reason for that.  There has been no warming for 17 years so nothing recent CAN be attributed to warming.  Neither droughts in the middle East nor anything else can be caused by something that does not exist.  But the wackiest part below is his claim that Canadian oil has to be shipped via the USA to reach China.  That Canadians could simply ship it via the Pacific obviously eludes him. Mr Harper  has threatened to do just that in fact. See map below. Al's geography is as bad as his climate science



Al Gore sat down for a wide-ranging interview with Rolling Stone. Some highlights - he says Obama will very likely reject Keystone.  He also says that the climate-related drought was one of the underlying causes for the current civil war in Syria.

Syria Excerpt -

"Syria is one of the countries that has been in the bull's-eye of climate change. From 2006 to 2010, a historic drought destroyed 60 percent of the country's farms and 80 percent of its livestock - driving a million refugees from rural agricultural areas into cities already crowded with the million refugees who had taken shelter there from the Iraq War. As early as 2008, U.S. State Department cables quoted Syrian government officials warning that the social and economic impacts of the drought are "beyond our capacity as a country to deal with." Though the hellish and ongoing civil war in Syria has multiple causes - including the perfidy of the Assad government and the brutality on all sides - their climate-related drought may have been the biggest underlying trigger for the horror."

Keystone Excerpt -

"Something else is also new this summer. Three years ago, in these pages, I criticized the seeming diffidence of President Obama toward the great task of solving the climate crisis; this summer, it is abundantly evident that he has taken hold of the challenge with determination and seriousness of purpose.

He has empowered his Environmental Protection Agency to enforce limits on CO2 emissions for both new and, as of this June, existing sources of CO2. He has enforced bold new standards for the fuel economy of the U.S. transportation fleet. He has signaled that he is likely to reject the absurdly reckless Keystone XL-pipeline proposal for the transport of oil from carbon-intensive tar sands to be taken to market through the United States on its way to China, thus effectively limiting their exploitation. And he is even now preparing to impose new limits on the release of methane pollution."

SOURCE




CO2 is off the hook!  We have a new villain!

It's all predictions.  No evidence of any change

As global nightmares go, the greenhouse effect has managed not to keep policy makers awake nights devising plans of action. Scientists see an assortment of theoretical catastrophes just over the horizon, but the more dire their predictions, the more difficult it seems to find an appropriate response.

A new scientific study has confirmed a swiftly changing view of what causes the greenhouse effect -heightening both the urgency of the problem and the difficulty of controlling it. The study finds that the leading role in the earth's warming belongs not to carbon dioxide, as long believed, but to an assortment of rare, mostly artificial gases, many never seen in the atmosphere before the 1960's.

That supports the view of atmospheric scientists that the world is rushing toward global climate change on a startling scale. Already the changes in the atmosphere are thought to have changed the balance of incoming and outgoing energy, holding in infrared radiation the way the glass of a greenhouse does.

Beginning in a decade or two, scientists expect the warming of the atmosphere to melt the polar icecaps, raising the level of the seas, flooding coastal areas, eroding the shores and sending salt water far into fresh-water estuaries. Storm patterns will change, drying out some areas, swamping others and generally throwing agriculture into turmoil. Federal climate experts have suggested that within a century the greenhouse effect could turn New York City into something with the climate of Daytona Beach, Fla.

But the new view of the greenhouse effect, as much as the old, highlights the difficulty of finding practical weapons against what remains an uncertain demon.

So far, the greenhouse effect has not been clearly felt. In the generations since scientists first theorized that increased carbon dioxide would alter the earth's temperature balance by trapping heat in the atmosphere, no one has been able to measure a significant warming. Scientists have explanations for that, and they believe their temperature curves will soon soar off the scale. But for now the greenhouse effect remains part of a hypothetical, if not so distant, future.

Even if officials were moved by the urgency of the problem, it would be hard to know what they should do. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated last year, for example, that a drastic 300 percent worldwide tax on fossil fuels to discourage their use - a tax conceivable in a world of scientists, if not in a world of politicians and business executives - might make a tiny difference of about five years.

So the Government waits. "It's a creeping problem, an incremental problem, and we're very bad at dealing with incremental problems," says Stephen H. Schneider, a climate expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "There always seems to be an intermediate problem of higher value."

Until recently, the culprit seemed to be strictly carbon dioxide, which has been increasing steadily for the last century. But the new study, to be published next month in the Journal of Geophysical Research, confirms that an even greater greenhouse effect is likely to come from 30 or more trace gases, mostly emitted by industry and agriculture. These gases are more efficient at trapping heat on its way out to space, and they are increasing much faster than carbon dioxide.

That seriously complicates the problem of finding effective controls. And it suggests to climate experts that they should be giving more credence to the high end of the most recent predictions. But those predictions have great uncertainty built in. "Whenever you work with a climate model, you are trying to play God," says V. Ramanathan, one of the authors of the new study. For example, as the bright polar icecaps melt, they might reflect significantly less sunlight back out to space - and since the earth would then absorb that much more energy, the warming would be amplified. For similar reasons, big changes in temperature could come from small changes in cloud patterns, and scientists aren't sure whether the changes will warm or cool.

Eroded Beaches

In an October 1983 report, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that the sea level could rise as much as 11 feet by the end of the next century - or as little as 2 feet. It settled on 5 to 7 feet as the likely range. The higher figure would put substantial pieces of Florida and Louisiana under the waves and flood parts of some coastal cities. Even the lower figure would cut away chunks of shoreline. Experts estimate that a one-foot rise in the ocean could erode 100 to 1,000 feet of sand beach all along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts.

One certainty is that people will first feel the greenhouse effect not in slight changes but in extremes. Areas that now get severe floods once a century might get them once a decade. Temperate locales will get many more heat waves and many fewer cold snaps. In the long run, to be sure, not all the news would be bad. Plenty of places could benefit from extra warmth, and if the corn belt loses territory to the south it could gain it to the north. But in the century to come scientists expect painful dislocations. Some argue that the Government ought to be aggressive about acting, even in small ways, to buy time. One way or another, a lesson is under way in people's ability inadvertently to change the face of the planet.

"The only way to be certain is to perform the experiment on ourselves," says Mr. Schneider. "For better or worse, that's what we're doing."

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EPA’s Energy Cost Prediction Akin to ‘If You Like Your Doctor, You Can Keep It’

Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) on Thursday compared the Environmental Protection Agency’s prediction that electricity bills will go down as a result of proposed carbon emissions regulations for power plants, because people will use less energy to the campaign promise that then-candidate Barack Obama made that health insurance premiums would go down and his pledge that “If you like your doctor, you can keep it.”

“When you say that utility bills are gonna go down by 8 percent, it reminds me of candidate Obama saying that under his health care plan, insurance premiums would decrease by $2500 per family without increased taxes and without a mandate. Of course now they’re up $2500 per family. When you say that you’re gonna give states flexibility, it reminds me of ‘If you like your doctor, you can keep it,’” said Cassidy.

On June 2, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy signed the Clean Power Plan. Among other things, the EPA predicts that by 2030, these new measures will “cut carbon emissions from the power sector by 30 percent below 2005 levels” and “shrink electricity bills roughly by 8 percent by increasing energy efficiency and reducing demand in the electricity system.”

“And we show that with the significant increase in energy efficiency that will be implemented as a result of the rule, that electricity bills in 2030 we predict will go down, because ... people will be using less energy,” EPA Assistant Administrator Janet McCabe testified Thursday before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on the EPA’s proposed carbon emissions regulations.

“We also show that the price of electricity will go up a little bit -- but overall bills will come down,” McCabe added.

Cassidy told the story of a family who was in danger of losing their home. Refinancing saved their mortgage, and they ended up paying less, but the cost of food, gas, and insurance went up.

“They’ve been denied the economic benefits of projects like Keystone XL Pipeline, which now Canada’s gonna ship their oil to China to create Chinese jobs, and you want to raise their utility prices,” he said.

“Now you may say that conservation will on net decrease, but let’s be clear. Let’s not mislead. The reality is poor people – those who are lower income – are less able to invest in those conservation measures. This is just going to be a bull’s eye on other family’s ability to do things such as keep their homes,” Cassidy said.

Cassidy accused the administration of raising to “an art level,” the misleading of the American people by manipulating statistics. He said companies will lean towards investing outside the U.S., because “their input cost of energy” will go up.

McCabe disagreed with this assessment, saying “there are many things that go into making those decisions.”

Cassidy noted that Louisiana has announced $90 billion in “construction projects involving polymer, petrochemical, gas to liquids – industry that will create great paying jobs for working Americans.”

He asked McCabe if her agency has analyzed the impact that the new EPA regulation would have on the expansion of the manufacturing base.

“No, no we didn’t,” McCabe said.

“Yeah, so these jobs are on the bubble. There are more families that will lose their homes, and you’ve not done the analysis,” Cassidy said.

“This administration is so busy saving the earth. They’re willing to sacrifice the American family,” Cassidy said, adding that the president and his administration have been insensitive to their plight.

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Executive fiats in the other Washington

Two western state governors intend to get low carbon fuel standards, by legislation or decree

Paul Driessen

Progressives believe in free speech, robust debate, sound science and economics, transparency, government by the people and especially compassion for the poor – except when they don’t. These days, their commitment to these principles seems to be at low ebb … in both Washingtons.

A perfect example is the Oregon and Washington governors’ determined effort to enact Low Carbon Fuel Standards – via deceptive tax-funded campaigns, tilted legislative processes and executive fiat.

The standards require that conventional vehicle fuels be blended with alternative manmade fuels said to have less carbon in their chemical makeup or across the life cycle of creating and using the fuels. They comport with political viewpoints that oppose hydrocarbon use, prefer mass transit, are enchanted by the idea of growing fuels instead of drilling and fracking for them, and/or are convinced that even slightly reduced carbon dioxide will help reduce or prevent “dangerous manmade climate change.”

LCFS fuels include ethanol, biodiesel and still essentially nonexistent cellulosic biofuels, but the concept of lower carbon and CO2 naturally extends to boosting the number of electric and hybrid vehicles.

Putting aside the swirling controversies over natural versus manmade climate change, its dangers to humans and wildlife, the phony 97% consensus, and the failure of climate models – addressed in Climate Change Reconsidered and at the Heartland Institute’s Climate Conference – the LCFS agenda itself is highly contentious, for economic, technological, environmental and especially political reasons.

California has long led the nation on climate and “green” energy initiatives, spending billions on subsidies, while relying heavily on other states for its energy needs. The programs have sent the cost of energy steadily upward, driven thousands of families and businesses out of the state, and made it the fourth worst jobless state in America. Governors Jerry Brown, John Kitzhaber and Jay Inslee (of California, Oregon and Washington, respectively) recently joined British Columbia Premier Christy Clark in signing an agreement that had been developed behind closed doors, to coordinate policies on climate change, low carbon fuel standards and greenhouse gas emission limits throughout the region.

California and BC have already implemented LCFS and other rules. Oregon has LCFS, but its law terminates the program at the end of 2015, unless the legislature extends it. As that seems unlikely, Mr. Kitzhaber has promised that he will use an executive order to impose an extension and “fully implement” the state’s Clean Fuels Program. “We have the opportunity to spark a homegrown clean fuels industry,” the governor said, and he is determined to use “every tool at my disposal” to make that happen. He is convinced it will create jobs, though experience elsewhere suggests the opposite is much more likely.

Mr. Inslee is equally committed to implementing a climate agenda, LCFS and “carbon market.” If the legislature won’t support his plans, he will use his executive authority, a state-wide ballot initiative or campaigns against recalcitrant legislators – utilizing support from coal and hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer. Indeed, Inslee attended a closed-door fundraiser in Steyer’s home the very day he signed the climate agreement. The governor says he won’t proceed until a “rigorous analysis” of LCFS costs and technologies has been conducted, but he plans to sole-source that task to a liberal California company.

Their ultimate goal is simple. As Mother Jones magazine put it, “if Washington acts strongly on climate, the impact will extend far beyond Washington…. The more these Pacific coast states are unified, the more the United States and even the world will have to take notice.”

But to what end? In a world that is surging ahead economically, to lift billions out of abject poverty and disease – with over 80% of the energy provided by coal, oil and natural gas – few countries (or states) are likely to follow. They would be crazy to do so. Supposed environmental and climate benefits will therefore be few, whereas damage to economies, families and habitats will be extensive.

The Oregonian says the LCFS is “ultimately a complicated way of forcing people who use conventional fuels to subsidize those who use low-carbon fuels. It’s a hidden tax to support ‘green’ transportation. It will raise fuel prices … create a costly compliance burden … [and] harm Oregon’s competitiveness far more than it will help the environment. And that assumes it works as intended.” It will not and cannot.

LCFS laws will raise the cost of motor fuels by up to 170% over the next ten years – on top of all the other price hikes like minimum wages and the $1.86 trillion in total annual federal (only) regulatory compliance costs that businesses and families already have to pay – the Charles River Associates economic forecasting firm calculates. If these LCFS standards were applied nationally, CRA concluded, they would also destroy between 2.5 million and 4.5 million American jobs.

Ethanol gets 30% less mileage than gasoline, so motorists pay the same price per tank but can drive fewer miles. It collects water, clogs fuel lines, corrodes engine parts, and wreaks havoc on lawn mowers and other small engines. E15 fuel blends (15% ethanol) exacerbate these problems, and low-carbon mandates (“goals”) would likely require 20% ethanol and biodiesel blends, trucking and other groups point out.

Those blends would void vehicle engine warranties and cause extensive damages and repair costs. The higher fuel costs would affect small business expansion, hiring, profitability and survival. The impact of lost jobs, repair costs, and soaring food and fuel bills will hit poor and minority families especially hard.

Some farmers make a lot of money off ethanol. However, beef, pork, chicken, egg and fish producers must pay more for feed, which means family food bills go up. Biofuel mandates also mean international aid agencies must pay more for corn and wheat, so more starving people remain malnourished longer.

Biofuels harm the environment. America has at least a century of petroleum right under our feet, right here in the United States, but “renewable” energy advocates don’t want us to lease, drill, frack or use that energy. However, the per-acre energy from biofuels is minuscule compared to what we get from oil and gas production. In fact, to grow corn for ethanol, we are already plowing an area bigger than Iowa – millions of acres that could be food crops or wildlife habitat. To meet the latest biodiesel mandate of 1.3 billion gallons, producers will have to extract oil from 430 million bushels of soybeans – which means converting countless more acres from food or habitat to energy.

Producing biofuels also requires massive quantities of pesticides, fertilizers, fossil fuels – and water. The US Department of Energy calculates that fracking requires 0.6 to 6.0 gallons of fresh or brackish water per million Btu of energy produced. By comparison, corn-based ethanol requires 2,500 to 29,000 gallons of fresh water per million Btu of energy – and biodiesel from soybeans consumes an astounding and unsustainable 14,000 to 75,000 gallons of fresh water per million Btu!

Moreover, biofuels bring no net “carbon” benefits. In terms of carbon molecules consumed and carbon dioxide emitted over the entire planting, growing, harvesting, refining, shipping and fuel use cycle, ethanol, biodiesel and other “green” fuels are no better than conventional gasoline and diesel.

Put bluntly, giving politicians, bureaucrats and eco-activists power over our energy would be even worse than having them run our healthcare system and insurance websites. Spend enough billions (much of it  taxpayer money) on subsidies and propaganda campaigns – and you might convince a lot of people they should pay more at the pump and grocery store, and maybe lose their jobs, for illusory environmental benefits. But low-carbon mandates are a horrid idea that must be scrutinized in open, robust debate.

It’s time we stopped letting ideology trump science, economics and sanity. We certainly cannot afford to let despotic presidents and governors continue using executive orders to trample on our legislative processes, government by the people, constitutions, laws, freedoms, livelihoods and living standards.

Fiats are fun cars to drive. Executive fiats are dictatorial paths to bad public policy.

Via email





Democrats use climate change as wedge issue on Republicans

When President Obama stood before students in Southern California a week ago ridiculing those who deny climate science, he wasn't just road testing a new political strategy to a friendly audience. He was trying to drive a wedge between younger voters and the Republican Party.

Democrats are convinced that climate change is the new same-sex marriage, an issue that is moving irreversibly in their favor, especially among young people, women and independents, the voters who hold the keys to the White House in 2016.

Wedge issues are those in which one side believes strongly that it has the moral high ground. Just as Republicans held the upper hand on same-sex marriage in 2004, Democrats now see climate change as a way to drive their base voters to the polls while branding Republicans as antiscience and beholden to special interests.

It's not just their own polling telling Democrats that. Stanford political scientist Jon Krosnick [My comment on Krosnick as a pollster is here] found in a new survey that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe climate change is happening and that humans are to blame.

"If I were a campaign consultant, which I'm not," Krosnick said, "it's a no-brainer to advise that if a candidate is comfortable being on the green side of this issue, this is something to trumpet, because it will win more votes than it will lose."

Pushing EPA rule

Polls show large majorities of Americans favoring action on climate change, even if it causes electricity prices to rise. That's one reason Obama has moved ahead forcefully on a rule proposed this month by the Environmental Protection Agency to limit carbon dioxide pollution from the nation's power plants, the biggest step against climate change yet taken by any administration.

It would seem to be a risky bet in a midterm election year in which Democrats' control of the Senate rests on races in a handful of fossil-fuel-dependent states such as Louisiana, Alaska and West Virginia. Republicans clearly think so.

"Much of the Republicans' ability to capture the Senate goes through energy-producing states," said Republican analyst Ford O'Connell. He believes Obama is less worried about Senate Democrats than he is about burnishing his legacy.

After the rule was announced, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of Senate Republicans, ran robocalls in four states dependent on coal-fired electricity, saying the rule would raise energy costs.

GOP attack

Committee spokeswoman Brook Hougesen said the Democrats' "war on coal" is just the beginning, and will soon spread to oil and "cripple entire industries and destroy jobs."

"People need to drive their car, they enjoy watching television, using the iPhones and iPads, sending e-mails and using Facebook," Hougesen said. "They want their energy costs lowered, not raised."

On Thursday, Senate Republicans blocked a must-pass Senate energy appropriations bill by demanding a provision to kill funding for the EPA rule. The move could force a partial government shutdown this fall, if it means Congress is unable to pass the spending bill.

But rather than shy away from the fight, Democrats and their allies are waging a vigorous counterattack.

"The climate deniers in the GOP are beginning to sound like the Flat Earth Society, and what will help them in GOP primaries and gerrymandered districts is going to kill them with swing voters in national elections," said Brad Woodhouse, president of the liberal Americans United for Change.

Chris Lehane is the top political strategist for former Silicon Valley hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer's NextGen Climate Action, a political action committee planning to spend $100 million in state and local races. He's promising to use climate change as a wedge issue.

It "plays into what I call the Republican troglodyte brand," Lehane said - "anti-immigrant, antiwomen, antiscience."

SOURCE




Obama’s Climate McCarthyism Demeans Presidential Office

President Barack Obama demeaned the dignity of the presidency by ridiculing tens of thousands of scientists for simply disagreeing with his lay opinions on global warming. While the political left throws shrill temper tantrums against anybody who “disrespects” the Office of the Presidency by asking Barack Obama a challenging question (something they had no qualms about during the Bush administration), Obama himself is setting the applicable ground rules for disrespectful political discourse and climate McCarthyism.

At a commencement address Saturday at the University of California, Irvine, Obama encouraged students to heap scorn on Ph.D. scientists at some of the world’s most prestigious universities and scientific research institutions if they disagree with Obama’s global warming policies.

“When President Kennedy set us on a course for the moon, there were a number of people who made a serious case that it wouldn’t be worth it,” Obama said. “But nobody ignored the science. I don’t remember anyone saying the moon wasn’t there, or that it was made of cheese.”

President Obama is correct that no Ph.D. scientists – and likely no sane individuals – seriously argued that the moon was made of cheese or was merely an illusion. Does that analogy apply to the global warming debate?

Distinguished professors and scientific researchers on the staffs of Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, NASA, NOAA, etc., have published research and publicly expressed their findings that humans are not creating a global warming crisis. More than 30,000 scientists, including more than 16,000 with post-graduate science degrees and more than 9,000 with Ph.D.s, have taken the affirmative step of signing a petition summarizing such science. Almost certainly, tens of thousands more – and likely hundreds of thousands more – similarly agree but are unaware of the petition or haven’t taken the affirmative step to read it, review it, and submit their signatures.

As host of the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change, which I host approximately once per year, I routinely have to turn away dozens upon dozens of highly qualified university science professors who have heard of the conference and hope to secure a speaking slot. With a limitless budget and time schedule, I could easily have hundreds of university science professors and thousands more professional scientists give presentations calling attention to the flaws in President Obama’s global warming alarmism.

Indeed, multiple surveys of professional meteorologists and climate scientists reveal that if a consensus on the issue exists at all, it is that whatever global warming is occurring is of mixed natural and human causation and does not justify the economy-killing prescriptions championed by self-serving politicians like Barack Obama.

To the limited extent global warming alarmists publicly debate the issue, their track record for success is about the same as that of China at soccer’s World Cup. For those who are skeptical, take a look at how one the global warming movement’s most visible advocates, Gavin Schmidt, fared the one time he participated in a public debate. After getting beaten so soundly that even he admitted it was a mistake to debate other scientists on the issue (and blamed his loss on one of his opponents being taller than him), is it any wonder he and his fellow alarmists avoid public debates the way John Edwards avoids National Enquirer reporters? Perhaps forgetting how badly Schmidt fared in his one-time debate, a Florida State University faculty member who was trained by Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project agreed to publicly debate me on the topic and fared just as miserably. Here is video of the debate that climate alarmists claim “is over.”

This brings us back to Obama’s attempt to vilify and ridicule scientists who disagree with his lay scientific conjecture. Perhaps it is true that ridicule and vilification are common, if regrettable, aspects of contemporary politics. Most Americans would hope that the President of the United States would not demean the office by engaging in such mean-spirited and sophomoric behavior, but we have also come to realize that politicians will be politicians, no matter how much power they have attained. But this isn’t about one ambitious politician smearing another ambitious politician. This is about the President of the United States – a non-scientist – making a grossly dishonest mischaracterization and analogy at the expense of expert scientists and then encouraging our nation’s best and brightest to shout down those scientists utilizing further dishonesty and McCarthyism to further political agendas. And the moment somebody questions the President about such reprehensible conduct – no matter how calmly the question is asked – the political left goes into conniptions about how appalling and reprehensible it is to disrespect the Office of the President of the United States in such a manner.

Sorry, Barack, but you have only yourself to blame for so pitifully demeaning the Office of the President.

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

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  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 or here

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News that is music to Al Gore's ears

The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulaff, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters, and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes.

Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.

Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds. Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise enough to make most coastal cities uninhabitable.

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I apologize. I neglected to mention that this report was from November 2, 1922, as reported by the AP and published in The Washington Post 92+ years ago. Verified by Snopes.




The scandal of fiddled global warming data

When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data.

There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data.

In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.

When I first began examining the global-warming scare, I found nothing more puzzling than the way officially approved scientists kept on being shown to have finagled their data, as in that ludicrous “hockey stick” graph, pretending to prove that the world had suddenly become much hotter than at any time in 1,000 years.

Any theory needing to rely so consistently on fudging the evidence, I concluded, must be looked on not as science at all, but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberrations of group psychology.

SOURCE





Goldman Sachs are on the job!

A war-cry from former Goldman Sachs boss Hank Paulson excerpted below.  It's basically just the usual appeal to authority but, perhaps because he is a Republican, he does actually mention some evidence.  He mentions melting in the Arctic but fails to mention that the Antarctic is gaining mass overall.  He mentions melting in the West Antarctic but fails to mention that it's got lots of volcanoes under it.  He mentions recent windstorms but fails to mention that they are far fewer than they were.  So he is not quite as brain dead as most Warmists and that might persuade some people

THERE is a time for weighing evidence and a time for acting. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout my work in finance, government and conservation, it is to act before problems become too big to manage.

For too many years, we failed to rein in the excesses building up in the nation’s financial markets. When the credit bubble burst in 2008, the damage was devastating. Millions suffered. Many still do.

We’re making the same mistake today with climate change. We’re staring down a climate bubble that poses enormous risks to both our environment and economy. The warning signs are clear and growing more urgent as the risks go unchecked.

The solution can be a fundamentally conservative one that will empower the marketplace to find the most efficient response. We can do this by putting a price on emissions of carbon dioxide — a carbon tax. Few in the United States now pay to emit this potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere we all share. Putting a price on emissions will create incentives to develop new, cleaner energy technologies.

We are building up excesses (debt in 2008, greenhouse gas emissions that are trapping heat now). Our government policies are flawed (incentivizing us to borrow too much to finance homes then, and encouraging the overuse of carbon-based fuels now). Our experts (financial experts then, climate scientists now) try to understand what they see and to model possible futures. And the outsize risks have the potential to be tremendously damaging (to a globalized economy then, and the global climate now).

Already, observations are catching up with years of scientific models, and the trends are not in our favor.

Fewer than 10 years ago, the best analysis projected that melting Arctic sea ice would mean nearly ice-free summers by the end of the 21st century. Now the ice is melting so rapidly that virtually ice-free Arctic summers could be here in the next decade or two. The lack of reflective ice will mean that more of the sun’s heat will be absorbed by the oceans, accelerating warming of both the oceans and the atmosphere, and ultimately raising sea levels.

Even worse, in May, two separate studies discovered that one of the biggest thresholds has already been reached. The West Antarctic ice sheet has begun to melt, a process that scientists estimate may take centuries but that could eventually raise sea levels by as much as 14 feet. Now that this process has begun, there is nothing we can do to undo the underlying dynamics, which scientists say are “baked in.” And 10 years from now, will other thresholds be crossed that scientists are only now contemplating?

It is true that there is uncertainty about the timing and magnitude of these risks and many others. But those who claim the science is unsettled or action is too costly are simply trying to ignore the problem. We must see the bigger picture.

I’m a businessman, not a climatologist. But I’ve spent a considerable amount of time with climate scientists and economists who have devoted their careers to this issue. There is virtually no debate among them that the planet is warming and that the burning of fossil fuels is largely responsible.

Some members of my political party worry that pricing carbon is a “big government” intervention. In fact, it will reduce the role of government, which, on our present course, increasingly will be called on to help communities and regions affected by climate-related disasters like floods, drought-related crop failures and extreme weather like tornadoes, hurricanes and other violent storms. We’ll all be paying those costs. Not once, but many times over.

This is already happening, with taxpayer dollars rebuilding homes damaged by Hurricane Sandy and the deadly Oklahoma tornadoes. This is a proper role of government. But our failure to act on the underlying problem is deeply misguided, financially and logically.

In a future with more severe storms, deeper droughts, longer fire seasons and rising seas that imperil coastal cities, public funding to pay for adaptations and disaster relief will add significantly to our fiscal deficit and threaten our long-term economic security. So it is perverse that those who want limited government and rail against bailouts would put the economy at risk by ignoring climate change.

This is short-termism. There is a tendency, particularly in government and politics, to avoid focusing on difficult problems until they balloon into crisis. We would be fools to wait for that to happen to our climate.

Climate change is the challenge of our time. Each of us must recognize that the risks are personal. We’ve seen and felt the costs of underestimating the financial bubble. Let’s not ignore the climate bubble.

More HERE





Presidential Pollinator Protection: More Activity as Substitute for Accomplishment

An article by Justin Sink appeared in the online edition of The Hill on 06/20/14 stating that Obama has sent out an executive order to all Cabinet secretaries and agency heads requiring “the federal government to develop a plan for protecting pollinators such as honey bees, butterflies, birds and bats in response to mounting concerns about the impact of dwindling populations on American crops.”

Obama also claims, “the problem is serious and requires immediate attention to ensure the sustainability of our food production systems, avoid additional economic impact on the agricultural sector, and protect the health of the environment".

Consistency is important, it’s unfortunate that Obama is wrong so -consistently. It’s also unfortunate that so many who have posted commentaries on the problems with bees, birds, bats and butterflies are equally so. If the logical fallacies and misinformation were eliminated from these commentaries there would far fewer, and those left would be far more accurate.

Let's start with European honey bees. In January of 2012 I pointed out in my article,Colony CollapseDisorder: Cause – All Natural:

“First, it is not true that there has been a mysterious worldwide collapse in honey bee populations. In fact managed hives (which contain the bees which do the vast majority of our pollinating) have increased by a remarkable 45 per cent over the last five years. Lawrence D. Harder from the department of biology at the University of Calgary and Marcelo Aizen from Buenos Aires set about pinning down a couple of myths…….The bee disaster scenario is dependent upon data which is far too regional to take seriously and ‘not representative of global trends’. The truth is that there are more bees in the world than ever. They go on to say; ‘It is a myth that humanity would starve without bees.’ While some 70 per cent of our most productive crops are animal-pollinated (by bees, hoverflies and the like), very few indeed rely on animal pollination completely. Furthermore, most staple foods — wheat, rice and corn — do not depend on animal pollination at all. They are wind-pollinated, or self-pollinating. If all the bees in the world dropped dead tomorrow afternoon, it would reduce our food production by only between 4 and 6 per cent.....‘Overall we must conclude that claims of a global crisis in agricultural production are untrue.’

Sink goes on to say;

“under the president's order, the government will establish a new task force tasked with developing a "coordinated research action plan" to help better understand and prevent the loss of pollinating species.” And that “government agencies will also be tasked with developing plans to enhance habitats for pollinating species on federal lands. And agencies will partner with local governments, farmers, and the business community in a bid to increase the quality and availability of available habitats for the species.”

This will be just another excuse for huge land grabs by the federal government, as if under the Endangered Species Act the use of “suitable habitat” rulings aren’t bad enough already.

Obama claims that"given the breadth, severity, and persistence of pollinator losses, it is critical to expand federal efforts and take new steps to reverse pollinator losses and help restore populations to healthy levels”. Now here’s the part that should be of even more concern. The President says; "these steps should include the development of new public-private partnerships and increased citizen engagement." Who exactly will make up these groups of ‘citizens’ in these ‘public-private” groups? Will it be the Sierra Club, Greenpeace or other green/left activists who will use any excuse to stand against modern life, progress, chemicals, genetically modified foods, and more? Or will it be the National Pest Management Association, The Farm Bureau, Croplife America or Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment, who are responsible for defending the nation against insects, disease and starvation?

Let's now deal with the slaughter of bats - which are all protected - and birds - many of which are protected or endangered. It's the green movement that must take responsibility for their slaughter through their promotion of wind energy.  Bats are killed extensively by the “low-pressure air pockets created around the swirling blades of the turbines cause bats' lungs to implode, instantly killing them”.

This is a direct result of following the same idiotic green energy production ideas that failed under Jimmy Carter, and another lack of consistent thinking that should concern everyone. These Cuisinarts are causing massive slaughters worldwide of protected birds and bats; massively larger than environmentalists claimed was being caused by DDT (which was a lie and doesn’t kill bats at all) and the government has given them a pass!

As I pointed out in my article, "Green Power and Precautionary Double Standards”;We absolutely know these monsters are killing at least 573,000 birds every year, including some 83,000 eagles, hawks and other raptors - in clear violation of US laws. Other estimates put the toll at closer to 13,000,000 birds and bats annually. Why are the "precautionary" activists stone-cold silent about that? Why? Because “unintentional kills are to be expected”! If you killed a bald eagle in an “unintentional” accident would you get the same kind of pass? No! Because this double standard is deliberate.

(Editor's Note:  Since this article was published some have finally stepped up, but they also fail in consistent thinking because they're willing to accept kills in smaller numbers.)

What about butterfly protection? That is nothing more than a direct attack on genetically modified crops.  In reality there’s no real evidence GMO’s impact butterflies negatively, except for a Cornell study in 1999, and even the author, Professor John Losey, noted the study was a "laboratory study” and not to be taken too seriously against real world activity. The butterflies in the study were forced to feed on corn pollen, which proved something entomologists already knew – Bt enhanced corn pollen can kill Monarchs. Apparently he doesn’t believe this study lays ground work for any real concern saying; "our study was conducted in the laboratory and, while it raises an important issue, it would be inappropriate to draw any conclusions about the risk to Monarch populations in the field based solely on these initial results."

In the real world Monarch butterflies don’t like, and generally don’t eat corn pollen, or anything corn pollen rests on if given other options. As for Bt enhanced corn pollen landing on other plants such as milkweed - it had better be right next to the corn field since corn pollen is heavy and doesn’t travel far, and there is very little milkweed around corn fields. Also the study did not display how much Monarchs would have to eat to be harmed or how much exposure there would have to be to Bt in the real world....

This play by the President is nothing more than activity as a substitute for accomplishment, with potentially other motives behind it. As for that $50 million the President has requested for the Department of Agriculture to create a public-private movement to reverse this trend -Does anyone really believe a dime will make it to the National Pest Management Association, The Farm Bureau, Croplife America, Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment or any other responsible group?  

More HERE




Some Things the Media Claim Were Caused by ‘Global Warming’

It seems like with global warming embedded in our politics (for now), anything we don’t fully understand can now be ‘legitimately’ blamed on the weather. Forget the trusty old excuse about the dog eating your homework: A sampling of news stories tells us instead that global warming might really be the cause of all our problems. Allegedly, thanks to global warming:

Your breakfast got even less exciting. Your morning coffee is going to be more expensive. Also, the cost of cereal could climb by as much as 30 percent because of global warming according to an Oxfam report(their recommendation to General Mills and Kellogg’s: “intensify” effort to cut greenhouse gases, which ironically would also likely increase the cost of cereal and beverages). Thankfully, populations of feral cats and dogs are liable to increase, and these could suffice as possible “bridge food” for climate change refugees.

History and culture have been redefined. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack Dawson didn’t make it off the Titanic in 1912 thanks to global warming. Two years later the world engaged in WWI, followed by the Great Depression, and WWII, all of which apparently slowed the pace of global warming. In current cultural events, the arts world has been subjected to climate change…the musical. And a horror movie. Some congregations have been subjected to a new topic for bad sermons. And employees are less productive at work.

America’s adversaries have been aided. Climate change has boosted Russian rice, corn and sunflower seed crops and promises to unlock some of the natural resources trapped in Siberian permafrost. And rather than failed diplomacy, climate change was the catalyst for Boko Haram. Meanwhile, North Korea has emerged as an example of combating climate change.

Nature got a little bit wilder. Salamanders are shrinking in size, but the return of bus-sized snakes is more likely. Meanwhile the coquis frog in Puerto Rico croaks a little higher, butterflies in Ohio are showing up a bit earlier, and there is an abundance of rock snot in West Virginia streams and not enough tissues to deal with it. It also has been discovered that global warming killed a 16-year-old polar bear (even though the average lifespan of a polar bear is 15-18 years).

Vacation plans are being ruined. Airline passengers might want to use those seatbelts on their next flight because of greater turbulence. Thanks to global warming, life in Asia is generally miserable and England will be too wet, and too dry…and too cold…and too hot. That hike you may have been planning to the peak of Mt. Everest will be harder, in case it wasn’t hard enough already, and out of good eco-conscience you probably shouldn’t run another marathon because of all the unnecessary CO2 emissions. And the migration of the Baird’s sparrow away from North Dakota to Canada is threatening to cut into the hordes of tourists coming to bird watch.

What has been called the dangerous, more expensive, more uncertain future of climate change may in fact just be climate, which always changes.  Nevertheless, the Obama administration wants to implement costly global warming regulations that not only will have almost zero impact on global average temperatures, but also will  drastically change for the worse how Americans access and use energy, an important building block of the American economy and quality of living

Now that’s a real problem—one Congress actually can do something about.

SOURCE





Australia:  Greenie-inspired attempt to lock away a large semi-wilderness area knocked on the head in the courts

QUEENSLAND’S Wild Rivers legislation has been declared invalid in Cape York, ending a five-year struggle by indigenous groups to preserve the right to pursue economic opportunities in the region.

A Federal Court judge yesterday ruled that a Queensland minister erred in law five years ago in declaring three rivers on the cape as "wild”.

The main objection of indigenous groups was that the legislation stopped potential economic development of the region in far north Queensland by "locking up” the rivers and the areas around them. They claimed the previous state Labor government had undertaken the Wild Rivers plan to win green preferences in city seats it needed to retain power.

The Federal Court decision centred on the Bligh government’s action in declaring the Archer, Lockhart and Stewart rivers on Cape York as wild rivers on April 3, 2009, only weeks after the state election that saw the ALP government returned.

Federal Court judge Andrew Greenwood found yesterday that the decision was made too quickly and without enough consideration of the views of the traditional owners.

"The decision to make the declarations was a function of urgently delivering on an election promise ... the declarations got ahead of the formulation of the material addressing the preconditions upon which the exercise of the power rested,” he wrote in his judgment.

The government had received 3062 submissions about the declarations, but 2577 of these were pro forma submissions made through the Wilderness Society’s website.

Indigenous leader Noel Pearson, who led the opposition to Wild Rivers by arguing that it deprived indigenous people of economic opportunities, said yesterday that the five-year legal struggle had diverted attention from key areas such as health and education on the cape.

He said new projects that could provide jobs for indigenous people in areas such as horticulture and tourism could now begin.

"Traditional owners should decide whether they want conservation or a mixture of both," Mr Pearson said.

"We don’t want this unilaterally imposed on them by political deals in Brisbane."

"It’s a just process, but it really shouldn’t have taken five years to reach this point.”

The Archer, Lockhart and Stewart rivers were the most prominent of the 12 rivers gazetted under the legislation. Most of the others are in western Queensland such as Coopers Creek and the Georgina and Diamantina Basins, but some are on the east coast of Cape York, such as Hinchinbrook near Ingham.

While the Newman government has set in train a process of regional land plans on Cape York that would supersede Wild Rivers, the legislation still exists elsewhere in the state and is not due to be debated until August, when it is expected to be extinguished.

"So they have made promises, but after two years, it still hasn’t happened,” Mr Pearson said.

"At the end of the day, the court victory came before anything else.” Mr Pearson was scathing in his criticism of former Labor premier Anna Bligh and former natural resources minister Stephen Robertson, who made the Wild Rivers declarations.

The Cape York leader said yesterday: "They should hang their heads in shame having put our people through five years of struggle."

The action was brought forward by traditional owner Martha Koowarta, the widow of 1980s Cape York land rights campaigner John Koowartha who successfully challenged Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s government over a land rights claim in 1982.

Mrs Koowarta, who lives in the Cape York town of Aurukun but was in Brisbane for the judgment yesterday, was elated at the outcome.

"I’m so happy," she said outside the court.

Deputy Premier Jeff Seeney said the court outcome vindicated the Liberal National Party’s opposition to the Wild Rivers scheme when it was in opposition. The court awarded costs against the government.

"I can’t say we’re happy about it, but otherwise it would be the indigenous groups who paid,” Mr Seeney said.

The main supporter of Wild Rivers was the Wilderness Society. It said that the river catchments on Cape York would now be exposed to "risky industrial development such as open-cut mining, in-stream dams and intense irrigated agriculture”.

"Queensland is blessed with some of the last remaining free-flowing rivers left on the planet and they need to be treasured,” said Queensland campaign manager Tim Seelig.

SOURCE

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

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  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 or here

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News that is music to Al Gore's ears

The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulaff, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters, and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes.

Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.

Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds. Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise enough to make most coastal cities uninhabitable.

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I apologize. I neglected to mention that this report was from November 2, 1922, as reported by the AP and published in The Washington Post 92+ years ago. Verified by Snopes.




The scandal of fiddled global warming data

When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data.

There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data.

In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.

When I first began examining the global-warming scare, I found nothing more puzzling than the way officially approved scientists kept on being shown to have finagled their data, as in that ludicrous “hockey stick” graph, pretending to prove that the world had suddenly become much hotter than at any time in 1,000 years.

Any theory needing to rely so consistently on fudging the evidence, I concluded, must be looked on not as science at all, but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberrations of group psychology.

SOURCE





Goldman Sachs are on the job!

A war-cry from former Goldman Sachs boss Hank Paulson excerpted below.  It's basically just the usual appeal to authority but, perhaps because he is a Republican, he does actually mention some evidence.  He mentions melting in the Arctic but fails to mention that the Antarctic is gaining mass overall.  He mentions melting in the West Antarctic but fails to mention that it's got lots of volcanoes under it.  He mentions recent windstorms but fails to mention that they are far fewer than they were.  So he is not quite as brain dead as most Warmists and that might persuade some people

THERE is a time for weighing evidence and a time for acting. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout my work in finance, government and conservation, it is to act before problems become too big to manage.

For too many years, we failed to rein in the excesses building up in the nation’s financial markets. When the credit bubble burst in 2008, the damage was devastating. Millions suffered. Many still do.

We’re making the same mistake today with climate change. We’re staring down a climate bubble that poses enormous risks to both our environment and economy. The warning signs are clear and growing more urgent as the risks go unchecked.

The solution can be a fundamentally conservative one that will empower the marketplace to find the most efficient response. We can do this by putting a price on emissions of carbon dioxide — a carbon tax. Few in the United States now pay to emit this potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere we all share. Putting a price on emissions will create incentives to develop new, cleaner energy technologies.

We are building up excesses (debt in 2008, greenhouse gas emissions that are trapping heat now). Our government policies are flawed (incentivizing us to borrow too much to finance homes then, and encouraging the overuse of carbon-based fuels now). Our experts (financial experts then, climate scientists now) try to understand what they see and to model possible futures. And the outsize risks have the potential to be tremendously damaging (to a globalized economy then, and the global climate now).

Already, observations are catching up with years of scientific models, and the trends are not in our favor.

Fewer than 10 years ago, the best analysis projected that melting Arctic sea ice would mean nearly ice-free summers by the end of the 21st century. Now the ice is melting so rapidly that virtually ice-free Arctic summers could be here in the next decade or two. The lack of reflective ice will mean that more of the sun’s heat will be absorbed by the oceans, accelerating warming of both the oceans and the atmosphere, and ultimately raising sea levels.

Even worse, in May, two separate studies discovered that one of the biggest thresholds has already been reached. The West Antarctic ice sheet has begun to melt, a process that scientists estimate may take centuries but that could eventually raise sea levels by as much as 14 feet. Now that this process has begun, there is nothing we can do to undo the underlying dynamics, which scientists say are “baked in.” And 10 years from now, will other thresholds be crossed that scientists are only now contemplating?

It is true that there is uncertainty about the timing and magnitude of these risks and many others. But those who claim the science is unsettled or action is too costly are simply trying to ignore the problem. We must see the bigger picture.

I’m a businessman, not a climatologist. But I’ve spent a considerable amount of time with climate scientists and economists who have devoted their careers to this issue. There is virtually no debate among them that the planet is warming and that the burning of fossil fuels is largely responsible.

Some members of my political party worry that pricing carbon is a “big government” intervention. In fact, it will reduce the role of government, which, on our present course, increasingly will be called on to help communities and regions affected by climate-related disasters like floods, drought-related crop failures and extreme weather like tornadoes, hurricanes and other violent storms. We’ll all be paying those costs. Not once, but many times over.

This is already happening, with taxpayer dollars rebuilding homes damaged by Hurricane Sandy and the deadly Oklahoma tornadoes. This is a proper role of government. But our failure to act on the underlying problem is deeply misguided, financially and logically.

In a future with more severe storms, deeper droughts, longer fire seasons and rising seas that imperil coastal cities, public funding to pay for adaptations and disaster relief will add significantly to our fiscal deficit and threaten our long-term economic security. So it is perverse that those who want limited government and rail against bailouts would put the economy at risk by ignoring climate change.

This is short-termism. There is a tendency, particularly in government and politics, to avoid focusing on difficult problems until they balloon into crisis. We would be fools to wait for that to happen to our climate.

Climate change is the challenge of our time. Each of us must recognize that the risks are personal. We’ve seen and felt the costs of underestimating the financial bubble. Let’s not ignore the climate bubble.

More HERE





Presidential Pollinator Protection: More Activity as Substitute for Accomplishment

An article by Justin Sink appeared in the online edition of The Hill on 06/20/14 stating that Obama has sent out an executive order to all Cabinet secretaries and agency heads requiring “the federal government to develop a plan for protecting pollinators such as honey bees, butterflies, birds and bats in response to mounting concerns about the impact of dwindling populations on American crops.”

Obama also claims, “the problem is serious and requires immediate attention to ensure the sustainability of our food production systems, avoid additional economic impact on the agricultural sector, and protect the health of the environment".

Consistency is important, it’s unfortunate that Obama is wrong so -consistently. It’s also unfortunate that so many who have posted commentaries on the problems with bees, birds, bats and butterflies are equally so. If the logical fallacies and misinformation were eliminated from these commentaries there would far fewer, and those left would be far more accurate.

Let's start with European honey bees. In January of 2012 I pointed out in my article,Colony CollapseDisorder: Cause – All Natural:

“First, it is not true that there has been a mysterious worldwide collapse in honey bee populations. In fact managed hives (which contain the bees which do the vast majority of our pollinating) have increased by a remarkable 45 per cent over the last five years. Lawrence D. Harder from the department of biology at the University of Calgary and Marcelo Aizen from Buenos Aires set about pinning down a couple of myths…….The bee disaster scenario is dependent upon data which is far too regional to take seriously and ‘not representative of global trends’. The truth is that there are more bees in the world than ever. They go on to say; ‘It is a myth that humanity would starve without bees.’ While some 70 per cent of our most productive crops are animal-pollinated (by bees, hoverflies and the like), very few indeed rely on animal pollination completely. Furthermore, most staple foods — wheat, rice and corn — do not depend on animal pollination at all. They are wind-pollinated, or self-pollinating. If all the bees in the world dropped dead tomorrow afternoon, it would reduce our food production by only between 4 and 6 per cent.....‘Overall we must conclude that claims of a global crisis in agricultural production are untrue.’

Sink goes on to say;

“under the president's order, the government will establish a new task force tasked with developing a "coordinated research action plan" to help better understand and prevent the loss of pollinating species.” And that “government agencies will also be tasked with developing plans to enhance habitats for pollinating species on federal lands. And agencies will partner with local governments, farmers, and the business community in a bid to increase the quality and availability of available habitats for the species.”

This will be just another excuse for huge land grabs by the federal government, as if under the Endangered Species Act the use of “suitable habitat” rulings aren’t bad enough already.

Obama claims that"given the breadth, severity, and persistence of pollinator losses, it is critical to expand federal efforts and take new steps to reverse pollinator losses and help restore populations to healthy levels”. Now here’s the part that should be of even more concern. The President says; "these steps should include the development of new public-private partnerships and increased citizen engagement." Who exactly will make up these groups of ‘citizens’ in these ‘public-private” groups? Will it be the Sierra Club, Greenpeace or other green/left activists who will use any excuse to stand against modern life, progress, chemicals, genetically modified foods, and more? Or will it be the National Pest Management Association, The Farm Bureau, Croplife America or Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment, who are responsible for defending the nation against insects, disease and starvation?

Let's now deal with the slaughter of bats - which are all protected - and birds - many of which are protected or endangered. It's the green movement that must take responsibility for their slaughter through their promotion of wind energy.  Bats are killed extensively by the “low-pressure air pockets created around the swirling blades of the turbines cause bats' lungs to implode, instantly killing them”.

This is a direct result of following the same idiotic green energy production ideas that failed under Jimmy Carter, and another lack of consistent thinking that should concern everyone. These Cuisinarts are causing massive slaughters worldwide of protected birds and bats; massively larger than environmentalists claimed was being caused by DDT (which was a lie and doesn’t kill bats at all) and the government has given them a pass!

As I pointed out in my article, "Green Power and Precautionary Double Standards”;We absolutely know these monsters are killing at least 573,000 birds every year, including some 83,000 eagles, hawks and other raptors - in clear violation of US laws. Other estimates put the toll at closer to 13,000,000 birds and bats annually. Why are the "precautionary" activists stone-cold silent about that? Why? Because “unintentional kills are to be expected”! If you killed a bald eagle in an “unintentional” accident would you get the same kind of pass? No! Because this double standard is deliberate.

(Editor's Note:  Since this article was published some have finally stepped up, but they also fail in consistent thinking because they're willing to accept kills in smaller numbers.)

What about butterfly protection? That is nothing more than a direct attack on genetically modified crops.  In reality there’s no real evidence GMO’s impact butterflies negatively, except for a Cornell study in 1999, and even the author, Professor John Losey, noted the study was a "laboratory study” and not to be taken too seriously against real world activity. The butterflies in the study were forced to feed on corn pollen, which proved something entomologists already knew – Bt enhanced corn pollen can kill Monarchs. Apparently he doesn’t believe this study lays ground work for any real concern saying; "our study was conducted in the laboratory and, while it raises an important issue, it would be inappropriate to draw any conclusions about the risk to Monarch populations in the field based solely on these initial results."

In the real world Monarch butterflies don’t like, and generally don’t eat corn pollen, or anything corn pollen rests on if given other options. As for Bt enhanced corn pollen landing on other plants such as milkweed - it had better be right next to the corn field since corn pollen is heavy and doesn’t travel far, and there is very little milkweed around corn fields. Also the study did not display how much Monarchs would have to eat to be harmed or how much exposure there would have to be to Bt in the real world....

This play by the President is nothing more than activity as a substitute for accomplishment, with potentially other motives behind it. As for that $50 million the President has requested for the Department of Agriculture to create a public-private movement to reverse this trend -Does anyone really believe a dime will make it to the National Pest Management Association, The Farm Bureau, Croplife America, Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment or any other responsible group?  

More HERE




Some Things the Media Claim Were Caused by ‘Global Warming’

It seems like with global warming embedded in our politics (for now), anything we don’t fully understand can now be ‘legitimately’ blamed on the weather. Forget the trusty old excuse about the dog eating your homework: A sampling of news stories tells us instead that global warming might really be the cause of all our problems. Allegedly, thanks to global warming:

Your breakfast got even less exciting. Your morning coffee is going to be more expensive. Also, the cost of cereal could climb by as much as 30 percent because of global warming according to an Oxfam report(their recommendation to General Mills and Kellogg’s: “intensify” effort to cut greenhouse gases, which ironically would also likely increase the cost of cereal and beverages). Thankfully, populations of feral cats and dogs are liable to increase, and these could suffice as possible “bridge food” for climate change refugees.

History and culture have been redefined. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack Dawson didn’t make it off the Titanic in 1912 thanks to global warming. Two years later the world engaged in WWI, followed by the Great Depression, and WWII, all of which apparently slowed the pace of global warming. In current cultural events, the arts world has been subjected to climate change…the musical. And a horror movie. Some congregations have been subjected to a new topic for bad sermons. And employees are less productive at work.

America’s adversaries have been aided. Climate change has boosted Russian rice, corn and sunflower seed crops and promises to unlock some of the natural resources trapped in Siberian permafrost. And rather than failed diplomacy, climate change was the catalyst for Boko Haram. Meanwhile, North Korea has emerged as an example of combating climate change.

Nature got a little bit wilder. Salamanders are shrinking in size, but the return of bus-sized snakes is more likely. Meanwhile the coquis frog in Puerto Rico croaks a little higher, butterflies in Ohio are showing up a bit earlier, and there is an abundance of rock snot in West Virginia streams and not enough tissues to deal with it. It also has been discovered that global warming killed a 16-year-old polar bear (even though the average lifespan of a polar bear is 15-18 years).

Vacation plans are being ruined. Airline passengers might want to use those seatbelts on their next flight because of greater turbulence. Thanks to global warming, life in Asia is generally miserable and England will be too wet, and too dry…and too cold…and too hot. That hike you may have been planning to the peak of Mt. Everest will be harder, in case it wasn’t hard enough already, and out of good eco-conscience you probably shouldn’t run another marathon because of all the unnecessary CO2 emissions. And the migration of the Baird’s sparrow away from North Dakota to Canada is threatening to cut into the hordes of tourists coming to bird watch.

What has been called the dangerous, more expensive, more uncertain future of climate change may in fact just be climate, which always changes.  Nevertheless, the Obama administration wants to implement costly global warming regulations that not only will have almost zero impact on global average temperatures, but also will  drastically change for the worse how Americans access and use energy, an important building block of the American economy and quality of living

Now that’s a real problem—one Congress actually can do something about.

SOURCE





Australia:  Greenie-inspired attempt to lock away a large semi-wilderness area knocked on the head in the courts

QUEENSLAND’S Wild Rivers legislation has been declared invalid in Cape York, ending a five-year struggle by indigenous groups to preserve the right to pursue economic opportunities in the region.

A Federal Court judge yesterday ruled that a Queensland minister erred in law five years ago in declaring three rivers on the cape as "wild”.

The main objection of indigenous groups was that the legislation stopped potential economic development of the region in far north Queensland by "locking up” the rivers and the areas around them. They claimed the previous state Labor government had undertaken the Wild Rivers plan to win green preferences in city seats it needed to retain power.

The Federal Court decision centred on the Bligh government’s action in declaring the Archer, Lockhart and Stewart rivers on Cape York as wild rivers on April 3, 2009, only weeks after the state election that saw the ALP government returned.

Federal Court judge Andrew Greenwood found yesterday that the decision was made too quickly and without enough consideration of the views of the traditional owners.

"The decision to make the declarations was a function of urgently delivering on an election promise ... the declarations got ahead of the formulation of the material addressing the preconditions upon which the exercise of the power rested,” he wrote in his judgment.

The government had received 3062 submissions about the declarations, but 2577 of these were pro forma submissions made through the Wilderness Society’s website.

Indigenous leader Noel Pearson, who led the opposition to Wild Rivers by arguing that it deprived indigenous people of economic opportunities, said yesterday that the five-year legal struggle had diverted attention from key areas such as health and education on the cape.

He said new projects that could provide jobs for indigenous people in areas such as horticulture and tourism could now begin.

"Traditional owners should decide whether they want conservation or a mixture of both," Mr Pearson said.

"We don’t want this unilaterally imposed on them by political deals in Brisbane."

"It’s a just process, but it really shouldn’t have taken five years to reach this point.”

The Archer, Lockhart and Stewart rivers were the most prominent of the 12 rivers gazetted under the legislation. Most of the others are in western Queensland such as Coopers Creek and the Georgina and Diamantina Basins, but some are on the east coast of Cape York, such as Hinchinbrook near Ingham.

While the Newman government has set in train a process of regional land plans on Cape York that would supersede Wild Rivers, the legislation still exists elsewhere in the state and is not due to be debated until August, when it is expected to be extinguished.

"So they have made promises, but after two years, it still hasn’t happened,” Mr Pearson said.

"At the end of the day, the court victory came before anything else.” Mr Pearson was scathing in his criticism of former Labor premier Anna Bligh and former natural resources minister Stephen Robertson, who made the Wild Rivers declarations.

The Cape York leader said yesterday: "They should hang their heads in shame having put our people through five years of struggle."

The action was brought forward by traditional owner Martha Koowarta, the widow of 1980s Cape York land rights campaigner John Koowartha who successfully challenged Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s government over a land rights claim in 1982.

Mrs Koowarta, who lives in the Cape York town of Aurukun but was in Brisbane for the judgment yesterday, was elated at the outcome.

"I’m so happy," she said outside the court.

Deputy Premier Jeff Seeney said the court outcome vindicated the Liberal National Party’s opposition to the Wild Rivers scheme when it was in opposition. The court awarded costs against the government.

"I can’t say we’re happy about it, but otherwise it would be the indigenous groups who paid,” Mr Seeney said.

The main supporter of Wild Rivers was the Wilderness Society. It said that the river catchments on Cape York would now be exposed to "risky industrial development such as open-cut mining, in-stream dams and intense irrigated agriculture”.

"Queensland is blessed with some of the last remaining free-flowing rivers left on the planet and they need to be treasured,” said Queensland campaign manager Tim Seelig.

SOURCE

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

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  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 or here

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