More secrecy and indifference to due process from government Warmists

The Oxburgh inquiry did make some limited criticism of the frauds at UEA but basically exonerated them. Steve McIntyre was curious to learn about how they came to their conclusions:

In response to my inquiry asking for a copy of any document setting out the terms of reference of the inquiry, Lord Oxburgh stated:

"I am afraid that I am not able to be very helpful as none of the documents about which you inquire exists"

And later:

"The only written record, apart from any notes that individuals may have kept privately but of which I am unaware, is our final report that was agreed unanimously. Similarly the terms of reference were given to me verbally and are encapsulated in the introductory paragraphs of our report."

In response to a previous inquiry, Kerry Emanuel, a member of the Oxburgh panel, stated:

"As for the written documentation, such as our charge, we were at one point asked not to circulate those, and while that restriction may no longer be in force, I feel a little reluctant to pass those along without checking first. The cleanest way for you to get that material is to ask Ron Oxburgh for it"

SOURCE

See here for more background





Glaciers' wane not all down to humans

Wow! The article below is from "Nature" -- normally a fanatically Warmist publication. "The times they are a'changing" -- slowly

The Great Aletsch Glacier is ill. Over the course of the twentieth century, the largest Alpine glacier, in Valais, Switzerland, receded by more than two kilometres, and Switzerland's 1,500 smaller glaciers are not faring any better.

Is it all down to man-made global warming? Not according to a recent study, which finds that about half of the glacier loss in the Swiss Alps is due to natural climate variability — a result likely to be true for glaciers around the world.

"This doesn't question the actuality, and the seriousness, of man-made climate change in any way," says Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, who led the study. "But what we do see is that current glacier retreat might be equally due to natural climate variations as it is to anthropogenic greenhouse warming."

"This is the first detailed attribution of known climate forces on glacier behaviour," says Georg Kaser, a glaciologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, who was not involved in the study. "Given the importance of glaciers to local water supply, this is essential information."

Researchers have long suspected that glaciers respond sensitively to natural climate swings such as those caused by the rhythmic rise and fall of North Atlantic sea surface temperatures by up to 1 °C roughly every 60 years. This Atlantic multidecadal oscillation (AMO), driven by changes in ocean circulation, is thought to affect phenomena including Atlantic hurricanes and rainfall in Europe.

In most places, historical records of glacier retreat and local climate are too sparse for researchers to separate the effect of this natural cycle from that of man-made warming. In the relatively well-monitored Swiss Alps, however, Huss and his team managed to gather some 10,000 in situ observations that had been made over the past 100 years, and constructed three-dimensional computer models of 30 glaciers. By comparing a time series of daily melt, snow accumulation and ice and snow volume readings of the glaciers with a widely used index of the AMO, they teased out the impact of natural climate variability. Although the mass balance of individual glaciers varied, the long-term overall trend followed the pulse of the AMO.

Since 1910, the 30 glaciers have lost a total of 13 cubic kilometres of ice — about 50% of their former volume. Brief periods of mass gain during cool AMO phases in the 1910s and late 1970s were outweighed by rapid losses during warm phases in the 1940s and since 1980, when temperatures rose and more precipitation fell as rain than as snow. The scientists believe that these changes are due to the combined effects of the natural cycle and anthropogenic global warming, which now seems to have a greater role than early in the twentieth century.

Natural climate variability is likely to have driven twentieth-century glacier shrinkage and thinning in other parts of the world, says Kaser. For example, his own research on the glaciers of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania suggests that their dramatic recession is mainly due to multidecadal fluctuations in air moisture.

"The widespread idea that glacier retreat is the sole consequence of increased air temperature is overly simplistic," he says. "Glaciologists have known for more than 50 years that glaciers are sensitive to a variety of climate variables, not all of which can be attributed to global warming."

Questions about the effect of global warming on glaciers hit the headlines earlier this year, after an error was found in the latest assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, which wrongly stated that most Himalayan glaciers could disappear by the year 20353. The resulting furore put the IPCC's credibility under scrutiny, and has triggered an independent review by the InterAcademy Council in Amsterdam, which represents 15 national academies of science.

But scientists don't expect the latest findings on Swiss glaciers to rekindle the controversy. "Without studies like this, climate science would actually be less credible than it is," says Martin Beniston, a regional climate modeller at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, who was not involved in the study. "Problems related to global warming are caused by a subtle mix of human activity and natural changes, and these new findings are a rare opportunity to illustrate this complexity in a comprehensible way. It is a question of scientific honesty to admit that not all the effects of climate change are solely the result of increased greenhouse gases."

Beniston adds that recognizing the role of natural climate shifts doesn't diminish the problem. "Even if greenhouse gases contribute just 50% to glacier retreat, this is anything but negligible." Although Himalayan glaciers may not be as vulnerable as the IPCC report originally suggested, the European Alps, where most glaciers are already in decline, could lose up to 90% of their glaciers by the end of the century, says Kaser.

The authors of the latest study cautiously suggest that a phase shift in the AMO might give a reprieve to Great Aletsch and other Alpine glaciers in the next decades, but Beniston is doubtful. "We may see a temporary slowdown, but I fear in the long run the still fairly modest greenhouse effect will outweigh any Atlantic relief."

SOURCE






Our hero Barbara Boxer

We've spent a lot of time and, well, energy warning against costly carbon controls, yet we must admit the fruits of our earnest labors pale in comparison to those of Senator Barbara Boxer. That's odd because Boxer is an avowed environmentalist and chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Her honest job description might be, "To pass the most annoying, burdensome legislation possible."

However, it's hard to argue with the lady's results. Her resolute leadership has torpedoed two major climate bills -- so far. While we continue to disagree with Boxer vehemently, her record of unmitigated failure is a "platform" around which we can rally.

Democratic challenger and popular blogger Mickey Kaus tried to make an issue of her ineffectiveness in the run-up to today's primary. He invited her to a debate on May 25, which she refused to attend. Kaus had a cardboard box stand in for her on the podium. With the aid of some audio clips, he debated the box. One of the audio clips was of Boxer flipping out when a member of the U.S. military referred to her as "ma'am." The most effective dig was yet to come after the debate, on Kaus's campaign website: "The box gave an honest answer when asked to list Sen. Boxer's major legislative accomplishments."

Boxer's bungling of global warming legislation has been impressive. If we had decided to plant a mole in the Democratic Party to scuttle the legislation, we're honestly not sure we could have done any better. In late 2007, for example, soon-to-retire Senator John Warner, a powerful Republican representing Virginia, lent bipartisan cover to a major cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme he co-authored with Joseph Lieberman. After passing through committee that December, the Warner-Lieberman climate legislation had the big mo, and gave us a big headache.

Then Boxer got hold of it. Over the next six months, she changed it, adding hundreds of pages. By the time she unveiled her version of the bill, the topic had become stale. The legislation fizzled and the defeat was embarrassingly bipartisan. Cap-and-trade is a Democratic Party platform plank, but ten senators from Boxer's own party sent her a letter explaining that they could not vote for her bill.

June 29, 2009 left the high water mark for climate change policy. On that day, the House of Representatives enacted a cap-and-trade scheme, the Orwellian-titled American Climate and Energy Security Act. It was the first time the Congress had put a price on carbon, a.k.a. taxed energy. Environmentalists were thrilled, and we were dismayed.

We needn't have feared, because Boxer released the companion bill in the Senate. She outraged Republicans on her committee by refusing to deliberate the bill. In particular, she barred any economic analysis. Republicans boycotted, thereby denying Boxer a quorum for a vote. She found a procedural loophole, and passed it out anyway. Her Democratic colleagues in the Senate were put off by Boxer's partisan pique. The legislation was immediately shelved and now John Kerry is trying to put together a new bill, without the aid of Boxer.

Boxer's political kiss of death no doubt arises from her peculiar notions of how climate policy works. In an October 2009 interview with C-Span, she praised a recent, precipitous drop in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Now, she was right about that. Emissions had fallen. But regulation had next to nothing to do with it. The drop was caused by an economic recession. Inadvertently, Boxer praised economic stagnation and undercut the Obama administration's entire rationale for green jobs. She affirmed a causal connection between greenhouse gas emissions reductions and decreased economic growth.

On energy and climate policy, we could not be further from the positions staked out by Boxer. And that's why we find it so heartening that she looks set to sail through her party's Potemkin nomination process. As long as she is in charge of climate policy, we can all breathe a little easier.

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Why they love the ritual of recycling

The real purpose of recycling is not to ‘save the planet’ but to remind us how wasteful and destructive we are

‘You should treat people with respect instead of having a bunch of bin inspectors, bin police.’ Eric Pickles, the communities secretary in Britain’s new Lib-Con coalition government, has announced that the government will not be pressing ahead with a ‘bin tax’ or ‘pay-as-you-throw’ schemes designed to charge householders based on the amount of non-recycled waste they dispose of.

Yet Pickles is proposing a new approach that is simply a bit more ‘carrot’ than ‘stick’. (On the same day, however, Bristol city council announced plans to introduce smaller bins and fine residents up to £1,000 if they don’t separate their waste correctly. Plus ça change…) The incentive schemes Pickles is offering in place of a ‘bin tax’, which would reward people for recycling rather than punish them for not recycling, still assume that the tedious business of separating our waste for recycling is the best way of dealing with rubbish. Which it isn’t.

The power to trial pay-as-you-throw schemes was legislated for in the UK Climate Change Act of 2009. Five local authorities were allowed the opportunity to test out the scheme. However, none of them actually tried it. Pickles’ new alternative is based on a different scheme piloted in Windsor and Maidenhead, a local authority west of London. An American company, RecycleBank, is working with the council to offer householders rewards for recycling. Residents sign up for a RecycleBank account and then receive points for how much material they put in their recycling bins. They can then exchange those points for discounts at local shops or give their points, as cash, to charity.

Getting rewarded for doing ‘the right thing’ seems like a pretty good idea. ‘It does not put the costs up’, Pickles told BBC News. ‘Actually, what it does is it increases the recycling rate and puts money into the local economy.’ But this money is not being magicked up out of thin air. Rather it represents the saving made by councils by not having to pay the punitive costs for sending rubbish to landfill because instead they are encouraging local residents to sort the rubbish out. As RecycleBank boss Matthew Tucker told spiked last year: ‘For every tonne that we help a council divert from landfill, we take a percentage of that saving. If the council doesn’t save, we don’t make any money.’ (For a fuller discussion of the pros and cons of recycling, see Recycling: an eco-ritual we should bin, by Rob Lyons).

The saving comes from the severe regime put in place to encourage councils (with a financial gun to their heads) to stop using landfill to dispose of waste. There are two elements to this. Firstly, there is the landfill tax. This is charged on every single tonne of ‘active’ waste (in other words, anything that might decompose, including wood and plastic as well as food) that goes to landfill. The current rate is £48 per tonne. On top of this, councils are also set targets for a maximum total amount of waste going to landfill. If they breach those levels, a fine of £150 per tonne is imposed.

There are numerous other ways to dispose of waste other than landfill and recycling. For example, many more councils in the UK now use incinerators (or, to use the proper parlance, energy-from-waste facilities) to burn waste and generate electricity. If a combined heat and power scheme is tacked on, then the waste heat can also be used to heat local offices, factories and homes. So some councils have quickly built energy-from-waste facilities to get round these fines and taxes.

However, there are also recycling targets imposed by law in addition to the landfill taxes, targets and fines, with the aim that one third of waste will be recycled within five years.

This is Alice-in-Wonderland economics. Landfill is so much cheaper than recycling that in order to get councils to change their waste disposal policies, absolutely swingeing charges must be put on to landfill. Only then does recycling start to make financial sense. Yet with a little ingenuity, we can get most of the benefit of recycling more cheaply and more conveniently.

For example, one of the main justifications for recycling is to cut greenhouse gas emissions. In turn, one of the main sources of such emissions in relation to waste is the methane gas - the same stuff that powers your cooker or central heating - produced when waste rots at the dump. But modern landfill schemes can capture this gas - called biogas - and burning it already makes a small but pretty reliable contribution to UK energy production.

Even recycling itself doesn’t need to be such an almighty pain in the neck. While Pickles and others have highlighted the rewards side of the Windsor and Maidenhead success story, the other element is something called co-mingling. Basically, instead of following endless arcane rules on which kind of rubbish goes into each of the veritable epidemic of multi-coloured containers that local authorities currently provide, with co-mingling there are just three containers: wet waste, like food; dry recyclables, like paper, plastic, card, metals and so on; and everything else. The dry recyclables are then separated out by machine at a depot. The machines aren’t quite as good as doing it all by hand - yet - but they’re still pretty good.

By taking out much of the confusion and hassle associated with separating waste, householders are more likely to do it. This convenient solution, however, doesn’t play well with greens. This is partly because of an obsession with recycling every last iddy-biddy bit of waste. But the main reason why co-mingling irritates greens is because if you take away the complexity of recycling, the ritual of thinking about it and doing it - if it’s barely any more than shoving stuff in the bin, just like it used to be - then we don’t have that daily eco-message drummed into our heads: ‘We are greedy, wasteful people who throw too much stuff away.’

There would be no point in spending lesson after lesson at primary school teaching kids about how to recycle, and why to recycle, if it’s just sticking stuff in the same bin. For greens, the attraction of complex, confusing systems of recycling is that they remind us, as we carry them out, what wasteful and destructive creatures we are. It is more like penance than a practical activity.

When pressed, the more sensible recycling advocates will admit that separating out our waste - like another fashionable idea, banning plastic shopping bags - has little impact on the environment. They will also admit that recycling schemes will always require a certain amount of subsidy. (What’s a few hundred million quid between friends when the national debt is heading rapidly towards a trillion pounds?) Household recycling is a waste of money and time that only makes sense as a form of self-punishment for the eco-sin of consumption.

In other words, those who want us to recycle our rubbish are really trashing us.

SOURCE





Climate summits as dumb as G20

Let’s hope our media in future will apply the same healthy skepticism to the UN’s never-ending global gabfests on climate change as they are to the looming G8/G20 fiasco scheduled for later this month in Canada.

Because whether it’s another UN meeting on global warming of the type we saw in Copenhagen last December or the upcoming G8/G20 in Muskoka and Toronto, both are examples of pointless, wasteful globalization run amok.

Both see world leaders descend on unsuspecting cities with armies of sherpas and bureaucrats in tow, needlessly disrupting the lives of the locals in response to artificial dates set on a calendar, rather than prior negotiations producing any international agreement of substance. Both are unnecessary, outdated dinosaurs in an age of instant global communications.

In both cases, the physical preparations for holding these wasteful extravaganzas, and the uber-excess exhibited in staging them, overshadow any previously agreed to motherhood statement that may emerge. (Copenhagen failed to produce even that.)

Finally, both processes see the leaders of the developed world decreeing to people in the developing world how they must live, an exercise in futility and arrogance, which presumes human behaviour can be changed by international edicts imposed from the top down, rather than by internal, domestic support built from the ground up.

One interesting sidelight of comparing G8/G20 meetings to climate change negotiations is that the same people who call themselves anti-globalization protesters when it comes to the former, typically and hypocritically, support the latter, even though climate change treaties are globalization on steroids.

My QMI colleague Greg Weston broke on Sunday a story that has become emblematic of the justified public anger in Canada over the $1 billion taxpayer-financed cost of staging the G8/G20 in Muskoka and Toronto.

While spent mainly on security, the budget includes such inanities courtesy of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government as constructing a fake lake in the Toronto media centre, ostensibly so international media unable to follow the G8 leaders to Muskoka — meaning virtually all of them — will know what our cottage country is like and promote it as a tourist destination to their domestic audiences. In other words, it’s just another example of outrageous, wasteful spending.

Just as it was when the UN held another of its never-ending global warming gabfests in Bali, Indonesia, one of the world’s most exclusive holiday resorts, in December 2007. This, presumably, so delegates flown in from around the world on the public’s dime courtesy of their captive, domestic taxpayers, could look appropriately hot and sweaty as they expressed concern about “global warming” in outdoor media interviews, while racing between meetings in five-star, air conditioned hotels, generating in 12 days enough greenhouse gas emissions to power a mid-sized African country for a year.

The next big UN meeting on climate change is scheduled for December in (of course) Cancun, to pick up wherever it was Copenhagen left off.

Let’s hope, this time, the media treat this event with the skepticism it deserves, as they are the G8/G20 in Canada. Including asking any delegate pointing to the Gulf of Mexico and crying crocodile tears about the horrendous BP oil spill, exactly how they got to Cancun — as in by jet, or by flapping their magic green fairy wings? Because denouncing BP, which deserves it, is easy. Getting off oil is hard.

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Dangerous paranoia about "chemicals"

There is a report published a few years ago called Making Sense of Chemical Stories, which attempts to point out some very basic concepts that most people are not grasping about chemicals. We need to see things clearly and not through a telescope of activism which makes it impossible to see the whole picture. We live in a world where pollution has become “the cause” for celebrities of every ilk. Movies, television and sports notables will come out and take a position on subjects of which they know little or nothing about. We have been inundated by so many articles and television shows regarding chemicals that we in the developed world (which owes so much to chemicals) have become chemophobic.

Malaria in the developed world is thought of as being impossible. Why? DDT largely eliminated it in developed countries! Our economy, which supports a life style that most would not be willing to give up, came about as a result of an innovative chemical industry. Our ability to feed ourselves, and huge portions of the rest of the world, is a direct result of that research. Research that resulted in the Green Revolution, for which Norman Borlaug was largely responsible, literally saved millions of lives with extensive use of high yield varieties of crops, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Chemistry!

During my young years it was not uncommon for mothers to take their dry foods such as pasta, rice and beans and dump them into a boiling pot of water and wait with a strainer to filter out the dead bugs that would float to the top. We would be outraged now if that happened. The chemical industry provided the answers for that. Pesticides were developed that gave us not only abundant foods, but mostly pest free foods.

Why then do we strive to be kept away from “that stuff”? Why do we have the attitude that all manufactured chemicals must be avoided at any cost? The universe (that includes us by the way) is made up of chemicals. I see advertisements that claim something is chemical free. If it is chemical free it doesn’t exist. We can’t survive without them because we are them. In fact Americans live longer, healthier lives than Americans have ever lived as a result of our chemical rich society and environment.

I have great cartoon in my computer that shows two cavemen sitting in a cave and one of them says, “Something is just not right. Our air is clean, our water is pure, we get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free range, and yet nobody lives past 30.”

In 1840 when everything was “natural” the average life span was approximately 40. Today, when everything that is important in our lives was created by manufactured chemicals the average life span is about 80. What part of that is so hard to grasp? We live longer as a direct result of those chemicals and it is obvious that these chemicals, when properly used, are not damaging the environment or us, no matter what the activists say, the BP oil spill notwithstanding.

A cup of coffee contains 11 chemicals that are considered carcinogenic. You will be exposed to more carcinogens in that one cup of coffee than all the carcinogenic potential of all of the pesticide residue on all of the food you will eat in one year.

City councils all over the country have taken up the cause of banning potentially harmful substances that have already been tested, regulated and approved for use by the Environmental Protection Agency. We have to ask; why they have decided to take up this task? Is it because they spent three hundred million on research and came to a different conclusion than did the EPA? Is it because these city councils are filled with toxicologists and chemists who looked at the original research and decided that the scientists who performed the research were lackeys of the chemical companies and their work should be dismissed? Or is it perhaps a case of merely taking the word of anti-chemical activists who may have even less scientific acumen and less qualified to determine the worth of these products than these local politicians. Then again, they may even number themselves among them. Try and picture a society that would elect all of their officials from the Sierra Club or PETA.

A city council in California wanted to ban dihydrogen monoxide because it burns human tissue in its gaseous state and prolonged use in its solid state could cause severe tissue damage. What is dihydrogen monoxide? Water! Were they embarrassed when they found out what it actually was? Probably not, after all, their intentions were good. I would rather their actions were correct.

The EPA is spending a fortune to promote IPM and Green Pest Control. The School Environmental Protection Act (SEPA) has been introduced and re-introduced in Congress. Why? Because they “know” so many things that simply aren’t true and they have the power and money to promote these untruths. Name one thing you know for sure about IPM. You can’t. It is indefinable and Green Pest Control is even worse. Everyone has his own ideas about IPM. Such foolishness is seen for what is worth in the third world where children are dying because of a lack of pesticides. Is it our desire to become one with the third world? The actions of anti-pesticide activists indicate that is exactly what they want, and EPA is part and parcel of this outcome.

When we read labels at the grocery store it gives the impression we are being poisoned because we clearly don’t understand the chemical terms. Whether chemicals are naturally occurring or manufactured they have been given names and reading those names do not give most of us any clue as to whether they are safe or not. In short, we don’t know what is good or what is bad. DDT has saved more lives than any chemical naturally occurring or otherwise in human history, and yet we hear how terrible it is. And I will state this again. Everything everyone “knows” about DDT is a lie. Those who actually read books about the “research” done by Rachel Carson realize that she was not a great scientist. She was a great writer, but it turned out to be science fiction.

(I would like to recommend reading Klaus and Bolander’s 1972 issue of “Ecological Sanity” and Roberts and Tren’s “The Excellent Powder, DDT’s Political and Scientific History”, which just came out. )

If we actually look at the facts we will find that most of what comes from the greenies is a lie. Not necessarily lies of commission, which they are guilty of, but mostly lies of omission. The end result is the same. For them to satisfy their egos and enact their entire slate of feel good policies people must die. Why? Because their policies kill people! We have the evidence of science and the truth of history, which proves it beyond any shadow of a doubt. The “conventional wisdom” of the activists was nothing more than the “philosophical flavor of the day”, and has not become traditional wisdom. Wisdom becomes traditional when it stands the test of time. Greenie wisdom has not stood against the march of time or the uncovering of the facts, that is why they have to move from one "crisis" to another. Something must always be on a back burner for them to expoit because it soon becomes obvious that the latest one is a lie, such as anthropogenic climate change AKA Global Warming. No matter how many times a lie is told (even if everyone believes the lie) it will never become the truth! As Benjamin Franklin said, “truth will very patiently wait for us”. What is of concern is how much damage will be done until we find it. The world has suffered upwards of 90 million deaths from malaria and upwards of 13 billion unnecessary cases as a result of banning DDT in 1972. How much patience can the world afford while truth waits for us?

Recently there appeared a CNN special report called “Toxic America” which falsely claimed “that trace levels of environmental chemicals are causing myriad disease in America, from cancer to diabetes and more. Dr. Elizabeth Whelan from the American Council on Science and Health stated “It was worse than I could have imagine. “ She went on to say that “The most shocking part of it was that they recruited people from certain towns who thought that they were harmed by chemicals, and brought them all together to talk about how dangerous these substances are.” ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross agreed with Whelan saying that, “Their segment about so-called ‘toxic towns’ was bizarrely unscientific. When a physician bills himself as an expert and gathers people in a room who believe they were sickened by chemicals, taking a show of hands to see who believes they were harmed, there’s no scientific basis to that whatsoever.”

These "chemical scare” specials from the media are a no win situation for real scientists unless the entire scientific community stands up and condemns them. The emotional drama of parents who have lost children to cancer, and who believer trace chemical elements are reasonable for their death, will be so emotionally overwhelming to any viewing audience that no matter how accurately you present the actual science and no matter how logical your arguments are; emotions will triumph over actual science every time. And our corrupt media and the green movement knows it.

Everything we are told should bear some resemblance to reality. At the end of WWII the world’s population was approximately 2 billion people. Currently we have about 6.7 billion. It took thousands of years to get to 2 billion and yet in less than 75 years we have soared to 6.7 billion and we live in a chemical rich society. When tested, our bodies will show over 2 hundred different chemicals produced by the chemical companies…and we live longer healthier lives than ever in human history. Somewhere there is a serious disconnect between what we see going on in reality and what we are being told. Is it possible that what we are being told is merely the propaganda of an irrational and misanthropic movement with an agenda? Could be!

SOURCE

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The EPA's Reckless Endangerment

This week, the Senate is expected to vote on S.J. Res. 26, Senator Lisa Murkowski’s resolution that would overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) carbon dioxide endangerment finding that was infamously issued on December 7th, 2009.

The resolution is cosponsored by most of the Senate Republican Caucus as well as Democrat Senators Blanche Lincoln (LA) and Ben Nelson (NE), leading “aides predict it will easily clear the 51-vote threshold for passage,” as reported by Roll Call.

The American people can only hope. The EPA’s alarmist decision greatly understates the impact of restricting and reducing carbon emissions — which means limiting energy use — on global population sustainability and economic growth. The American people (and everyone else) depend upon petroleum, gasoline, diesel, coal, and natural gas to do just about everything, including getting to work, delivering goods and services, heating their homes in the summer and cooling them in the winter, and providing hot water.

But it goes deeper than that. The population explosion over the past 200 years is entirely owed to the Industrial Revolution that was fueled in large part by increased energy output. The necessary consequence of dramatically reducing energy consumption — and the food production, medical advancement, and economic growth that depends on it — would have to be a commensurate, significant decrease in the human population.

Really, it all depends on just how draconian the agency’s restrictions of carbon emissions are. How much of a price will be placed on carbon emissions by the agency? If it’s too high, the impact could be devastating, resulting in the means of sustaining the world’s population being suddenly restricted or gradually reduced.

Either way, people will die.

Ironically, in its finding, the agency claimed that the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “threaten[s] the public health and welfare of current and future generations” with increased heat waves, more-intense hurricanes, floods, storm surges, rising sea levels, erosion, wildfires, drought, and even allergens and pathogens. The EPA also predicts the displacement of indigenous populations, the eventual decrease of food production and agriculture, and the reduction of forest productivity.

With predictions that dire, one would expect that the finding shall become the foundation for the EPA to incrementally regulate, restrict, and eventually prohibit emissions of carbon dioxide by motor vehicles and industry.

Maybe, if the people are lucky, the very air we all exhale shall remain unregulated, although given the broad nature of the finding, there certainly would be nothing to stop regulation in this arena — except for the Constitution. Liberty lovers may be out luck, however. The lack of constitutional authority for a federal agency to issue such a dictatorial proclamation has already been ignored by the Supreme Court in 2007, when the nation’s highest court ruled that carbon dioxide could be regulated by the EPA as a “pollutant.”

Making matters worse, in its finding the EPA disregarded the downward trend in global temperatures over the past decade despite increased carbon emissions, as documented by APS Physics Christopher Monckton of Brenchley. It ignored the failed projections of increased temperatures by the International Panel on Climate Change and other proponents of the man-made global warming hypothesis. It suppressed internal dissent at the agency, as when Dr. Alan Carlin submitted comments against the EPA’s finding.

The EPA even overlooked the impact of the Climategate scandal where it was revealed that global temperature data was manipulated and exaggerated by climatologists, and then utilized to promote public policies such as the endangerment finding, the punitive carbon emissions cap-and-tax now being considered in Congress, and the damaging Copenhagen Protocols that would have been an extension of the Kyoto-era restrictions on energy output.

That alone should be cause for Senators to vote in the affirmative on Murkowski’s resolution repealing the EPA’s endangerment finding. It is devoid of all of the most important recent revelations in climate science, including the serious doubt that has been cast upon the premise that man is even responsible for fluctuations in the Earth’s temperature.

In the end, the finding — and whatever tyrannical restrictions on energy use result from it — will ultimately prove more dangerous than man-made global warming ever could have been. As written by Monckton, “The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.”

SOURCE






The EPA Runs Amuck

By Alan Caruba

Here’s what my friend, Dr. Kenneth P. Green, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, had to say about the energy and environment “advisor” to President Barack Obama:

“Carol Browner’s selection as ‘energy coordinator’ (sometimes called energy czar) virtually guarantees that the Obama administration’s energy and environmental policies will be anything but moderate.”

“Her two terms as Environmental Protection Agency boss were marked by adversarialism, punitive enforcement actions, draconian tightening of environmental regulations and the message that business is destructive of the environment and dishonest about the cost of environmental regulations.”

And that was just the nice things he had to say about Browner. It is worth noting that Browner has been the lead spokesman about the BP oil spill for the Obama administration after it became obvious that Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Interior, was generating negative public reaction to his ‘get tough’ approach and there have been few public statements issued by Dr. Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy.

The current administrator of the EPA is Lisa Jackson who learned her trade working under Browner until she was picked to head the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. A Browner acolyte, Jackson has presided over an EPA run amuck.

Jackson will be remembered for leading the EPA fight to get carbon dioxide declared a “pollutant” that can then be regulated under the Clean Air Act. This is the same reasoning put forth by the constantly renamed Cap-and-Trade Act that is was a “climate” bill and has now become something else. It is based on the same totally bogus “science” that gave us “global warming” until Mother Nature decided that the Earth should begin to cool about a decade ago.

President Obama just announced that, just like the much-hated healthcare reform bill, he is going to devote himself to getting Cap-and-Trade passed by Congress. Combined, they should be called The Destroying America’s Economy Act.

Suffice to say that, other than oxygen, carbon dioxide is the other gas on which all life on Earth depends. It’s what all vegetation “breaths” and, coincidently, it is what all humans and other animals exhale. It has nothing to do with the climate.

Dr. Green points out that, “When it comes to climate change, she is a disciple of Al Gore for whom she worked from 1988 to 1991,” adding that “Browner believes that ‘climate change is the greatest challenge ever faced’ and that the EPA is the agency to face it.”

I have been watching the EPA in action since it was created in the 1970s by Mr. Watergate himself, Richard Nixon. It has since expanded like a cancer cell, doing a lot of damage along the way. There must be a sign on the wall of EPA headquarters that says, “If it’s a chemical, we will ban it.” On May 24, the EPA announced it was discussing the perils of oil dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico. Please, let’s do nothing to disperse the oil!

From its earliest days, the EPA set out to ban or limit the use of any and all pesticides nationwide. They have never stopped. It is essential to understand that what passes for EPA “science” is merely a charade to advance their agenda.

It can cost up to $15 million or more for a company to get a pesticide registered for use. If you take away the pesticides, all that’s left is the pests, but this simple truth is lost on the EPA. They have come up with a proposed new “permit requirement that would decrease the amount of pesticides discharged to our nation’s waters and protect human health and the environment.” If you really want to protect human health, you have to kill the billions of insect and rodent pests that have always spread disease.

So far in the last month, the EPA has announced they will release “a draft health assessment for formaldehyde that focuses on evaluating the potential toxicity of inhalation exposures to this chemical.”

Also announced was news that the EPA “is initiating a rulemaking to better protect the environment and public health from the harmful effects of sanitary sewer overflows and basement backups.” They are “reviewing” Florida’s coastal water quality standards, a move that will wreak havoc on its agricultural and tourist industries.

Another EPA announcement noted that “It just got harder for a TV to earn the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star. Starting May 1, 2010, TV’s that carry the government’s Energy Star label are, on average, 40 percent more efficient than conventional models.” This is all done in the name of “reducing greenhouse gas emissions” when, in fact, this is the baseless justification for the global warming hoax.

If at this point, you are beginning to think the EPA is just a tad intrusive regarding your basement backup problems, the kind of television set you should purchase, and other previous decisions such as how much water your toilet can use or the banning of incandescent light bulbs nationwide, you will be happy to know that in May the EPA took the time to “encourage ways to travel green by checking into an Energy Star labeled hotel.”

While in the hotel, you are advised to “turn off the lights and TV when leaving the hotel room”, “adjust the thermostat to an energy-saving setting so it doesn’t heat or cool the room while empty”, “to open curtains to take advantage of daylight when possible”, and “re-use linens to save both water and energy.”

If, by now, you’re getting the feeling that the EPA is more intrusive into the most mundane aspects of your life than any other government agency or combination of agencies, you’re right.

And very little of it has anything to do with protecting your health or the environment. It has everything to do with advancing a fanatical green agenda intended to threaten every form of energy production, manufacturing process, property rights, and your right to make a wide range of personal lifestyle decisions.

SOURCE






James Hansen and Climate Change; NASA’s Disgrace

Christopher Horner requested information from National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) through Freedom of Information (FOI) and now reports, “We have asked the court to order NASA – which has evaded our Freedom of Information Act requests for three years – to turn over documents related to global warming activities undertaken by federal employees.”

It’s the pattern of blocking seen throughout the official climate science community

Recently the University of Virginia asked the courts to block requests for information from Attorney General Cuccinelli on the Michael Mann situation. What do they have to hide? We’re talking about scientific claims at the basis of massive global energy and economic policies. The taxpayer funds the work and will be impacted, yet they’re denied access.

Who Is In Control?

Public image is a major concern for NASA, so why have they allowed James Hansen, Director of their Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) to act as he has? There is now evidence suggesting the problem has gone on for a long time; “the equation upon which all Global Warming Theory studies are built is inherently flawed.” They then make a most devastating claim, “Worse, however, than the flaw in the equation, is that this fact has remained covered up by NASA from the first Lunar landing until now, nearly 41 years.”

NASA needs to understand weather and climate because it affects the launch orbit and landing of space vehicles. In the early years they produced excellent work like Herman and Goldberg’s 1978 book Sun, Weather and Climate. Early interests somehow changed. “Much of the institute’s early work involved study of planetary atmospheres using data collected by telescopes and space probes, and in time that led to GISS becoming a leading center of atmospheric modeling and of climate change.”

Apparently Hansen caused much of the shift as he pushed his political agenda. NASA GISS employee Gavin Schmidt provided support especially by active participation in RealClimate the attack group organized to defend the Climatic Research Unit (CRU).

Many people wondered how much of his work time went to Realclimate activities and how much represented NASA’s positions.

Hansen deflected attention from his activities by claiming he was muzzled for political ends.

His former boss Dr. John S. Theon, retired Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program at NASA completely discredited this idea. “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress” – EPW

Hansen knew the situation because in public he presented himself either as Director of GISS or as a private citizen. He’s entitled to his views as a private citizen, but it’s an affront to imply that when speaking to a group on climate his position will not influence public opinion. Of course, his private views will influence his professional views.

Theon made his own views on global warming public after he retired in a communication to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man-made,” His major concern was the models. “My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,”

He made a disturbing comment about the data, which beyond the models is at the very heart of the climate problem. “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,”

Is Theon referring to Hansen when he talks about manipulating data to prove the models? Why didn’t Theon rein in Hansen? He explains the limitations of his position with Hansen. “I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results. I did not have the authority to give him his annual performance evaluation,” In the Minority Office report Theon describes Hansen as a “nice, likeable fellow,” but worries “he’s been overcome by his belief—almost religious—that he’s going to save the world.” And that’s the problem.

Either ignorance of climate science or a deliberate attempt to mislead or both

Hansen uses his bureaucratic position as Director of NASA GISS, to pursue a political agenda. He inflated the issue of human induced global warming to a global fraud in 1988 testimony before a House and Senate committee when he said; “the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now” This shows either ignorance of climate science or a deliberate attempt to mislead or both. The phrasing suggests incorrectly the greenhouse effect is new. There is no evidence, except in the computer models, that it is causing current climate change. He capped this with another unsupportable statement that he was, “99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere.”

NASA GISS Controls And “Adjusts” Data

Besides its focus on modeling and climate change NASA GISS established itself as the source of global temperatures. It’s probably the record Theon refers to in his comment about data because it has consistently been the centre of controversy.

One was discovery of the so-called the Y2K error, which resulted in a significant change in the US temperature record. The claim 1998 was the warmest year on record and 9 of 10 of the warmest years were in that decade was amended to 1934 being the warmest and 4 of the top 10 were in the 1930s.

Emails related to this incident obtained through freedom of information prompted the comment, “Climate activist and arch-druid of the AGW movement James Hansen caught out telling porkies? Now that would be a tragedy for the Climate Fear Promotion industry! “ (Porkies is English slang for lies.)

Each year global annual temperatures are produced by different agencies and every time the NASA GISS data shows a more pronounced warming. “Each time Hansen announces that the GISS has discovered a better way to statistically modify actual US ground temperatures, warming becomes even more pronounced and any cooling less pronounced.”

All adjustments enhance the warming trend to support Theon’s comment that, “some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results.” Even with adjustments model projections overestimate the warming, but then exact replication would raise more suspicions.

“Hansen is a political activist who spreads fear even when NASA’s own data contradict him”

In the July/August 2008 issue of Launch Magazine NASA Astronaut and Physicist Walter Cunningham wrote, “Hansen is a political activist who spreads fear even when NASA’s own data contradict him,”… “NASA should be at the forefront in the collection of scientific evidence and debunking the current hysteria over human-caused, or Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Unfortunately, it’s becoming just another agency caught up in the politics of global warming, or worse, politicized science.”

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Here are NASA’s own words about transparency. “NASA is expanding transparency, participation, and collaboration and creating a new level of openness and accountability. We are focusing on embedding open government into three integrated aspects of our operations—policy, technology, and culture.”

Actions of NASA GISS under James Hansen makes them a mockery.

SOURCE





Roman Warm Period (Europe -- Mediterranean) -- Summary

Climate alarmists contend that the degree of global warmth over the latter part of the 20th century, and continuing to the present day, was greater than it was at any other time over the past one to two millennia, because this contention helps support their claim that what they call the "unprecedented" temperatures of the past few decades were CO2-induced. Hence, they cannot stomach the thought that the Medieval Warm Period of a thousand years ago could have been just as warm as, or even warmer than, it has been recently, especially since there was so much less CO2 in the air a thousand years ago than there is now.

Likewise, they are equally loath to admit that temperatures of the Roman Warm Period of two thousand years ago may also have rivaled, or exceeded, those of the recent past, since atmospheric CO2 concentrations at that time were also much lower than they are today. As a result, climate alarmists rarely even mention the Roman Warm Period, as they are happy to let sleeping dogs lie. In addition, they refuse to acknowledge that these two prior warm periods were global in extent, claiming instead that they were local phenomena restricted to lands surrounding the North Atlantic Ocean.

In another part of our Subject Index we explore these contentions as they apply to the Medieval Warm Period. In this Summary, we explore them as they pertain to the Roman Warm Period, focusing on studies conducted in lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea.

Working with a core of 2.5 meters length, which they sampled at intervals of 2 cm in the upper 1 meter and at intervals of 5 cm below that depth, Martinez-Cortizas et al. (1999) derived a record of mercury deposition in the peat bog of Penido Vello in northwest Spain that extends to 4000 radiocarbon years before the present, which they analyzed for a number of parameters. This work revealed, in their words, "that cold climates promoted an enhanced accumulation and the preservation of mercury with low thermal stability, and warm climates were characterized by a lower accumulation and the predominance of mercury with moderate to high thermal stability."

Based on these findings and further analyses, they derived a temperature history for the region that they standardized to the mean temperature of the most recent 30 years of their record. This work revealed that the mean temperature of the Medieval Warm Period in northwest Spain was 1.5°C warmer than it was over the 30 years leading up to the time of their study, and that the mean temperature of the Roman Warm Period was 2°C warmer.

Even more impressive was their finding that several decadal-scale intervals during the Roman Warm Period were more than 2.5°C warmer than the 1968-98 period, while an interval in excess of 80 years during the Medieval Warm Period was more than 3°C warmer. Thus, Martinez-Cortizas et al. concluded, and rightly so, that "for the past 4000 years ... the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period were the most important warming periods."

Four years later, Desprat et al. (2003) studied the climatic variability of the last three millennia in northwest Iberia via a high-resolution pollen analysis of a sediment core retrieved from the central axis of the Ria de Vigo in the south of Galicia. By so doing, they found "an alternation of three relatively cold periods with three relatively warm episodes." In order of their occurrence, these periods were described by Desprat et al. as the "first cold phase of the Subatlantic period (975-250 BC)," which was "followed by the Roman Warm Period (250 BC-450 AD)," which was followed by "a successive cold period (450-950 AD), the Dark Ages," which "was terminated by the onset of the Medieval Warm Period (950-1400 AD)," which was followed by "the Little Ice Age (1400-1850 AD), including the Maunder Minimum (at around 1700 AD)," which "was succeeded by the recent warming (1850 AD to the present)."

Commenting on their findings, Desprat et al. offered the opinion that "solar radiative budget and oceanic circulation seem to be the main mechanisms forcing this cyclicity in NW Iberia," noting that "a millennial-scale climatic cyclicity over the last 3000 years is detected for the first time in NW Iberia paralleling global climatic changes recorded in North Atlantic marine records (Bond et al., 1997; Bianchi and McCave, 1999; Chapman and Shackelton, 2000)." And this body of findings suggests that the establishment of the Current Warm Period over the course of the past century or so may have been nothing more than the most recent manifestation of this naturally-recurring phenomenon.

After two more years had passed, Kvavadze and Connor (2005) analyzed various sets of data pertaining to the ecology, pollen productivity and Holocene history of Zelkova carpinifolia, a Tertiary-relict tree whose pollen is almost always accompanied by elevated concentrations of the pollen of other thermophilous taxa; and because Zelkova carpinifolia requires heat and moisture during the growing period, they say that the discovery of fossil remains of the species in Holocene sediments "can be a good indicator of optimal climatic conditions."

More specifically, they indicate that "Western Georgian pollen spectra of the Subatlantic period show that the period began in a cold phase, but, by 2200 cal yr BP, climatic amelioration commenced," noting that "the maximum phase of warming [was] observed in spectra from 1900 cal yr BP," which interval of warmth was Georgia's contribution to the Roman Warm Period.

A cooler phase of climate, during the Dark Ages Cold Period, "occurred in Western Georgia about 1500-1400 cal yr BP," according to the two scientists; but it too was followed by another warm period "from 1350 to 800 years ago," which was, of course, the Medieval Warm Period.

During portions of this latter warm epoch, they report that tree lines "migrated upwards and the distribution of Zelkova broadened." In addition, they present a history of Holocene oscillations of the upper tree-line in Abkhasia -- derived by Kvavadze et al. (1992) -- that depicts slightly greater-than-1950 elevations during a portion of the Medieval Warm Period and much greater extensions above the 1950 tree-line during parts of the Roman Warm Period, which observations imply much warmer conditions than what prevailed there around AD 1950, which was the "present" of Kvavadze and Connor's study.

Working contemporaneously, Pla and Catalan (2005) analyzed chrysophyte cyst data they collected from 105 lakes located within the Central and Eastern Pyrenees of northeast Spain to produce a Holocene history of winter/spring temperatures. A significant oscillation was evident in this thermal reconstruction in which the region's climate alternated between warm and cold phases over the past several thousand years. Of particular note were the Little Ice Age, Medieval Warm Period, Dark Ages Cold Period and, once again, the subject of this summary: the Roman Warm Period.

Last of all, we come to the paper of Garcia et al. (2007), who introduced the report of their work by noting that "despite many studies that have pointed to ... the validity of the classical climatic oscillations described for the Late Holocene (Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age, etc.), there is a research line that suggests the non-global signature of these periods (IPCC, 2001; Jones and Mann, 2004)." Noting that "the best way to solve this controversy would be to increase the number of high-resolution records covering the last millennia and to increase the spatial coverage of these records," they proceeded to do just that.

Working with a number of sediment cores retrieved from a river-fed wetland that is flooded for approximately seven months of each year in Las Tablas de Daimiel National Park (south central Iberian Peninsula, Spain), Garcia et al. employed "a high resolution pollen record in combination with geochemical data from sediments composed mainly of layers of charophytes alternating with layers of vegetal remains plus some detrital beds" to reconstruct "the environmental evolution of the last 3000 years."

In doing so, the six Spanish researchers were able to identify five distinct climatic stages: "a cold and arid phase during the Subatlantic (Late Iron Cold Period, < B.C. 150), a warmer and wetter phase (Roman Warm Period, B.C. 150-A.D. 270), a new colder and drier period coinciding with the Dark Ages (A.D. 270-900), the warmer and wetter Medieval Warm Period (A.D. 900-1400), and finally a cooling phase (Little Ice Age, >A.D. 1400)."

Noting that "the Iberian Peninsula is unique, as it is located at the intersection between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, Europe and Africa, and is consequently affected by all of them," Garcia et al. significantly advanced the likelihood that the classical climatic oscillations described for the Late Holocene -- of which the Roman Warm Period is a prime example -- were indeed both real and global in scope, as well as not-CO2-induced, which means that earth's current level of warmth need not be CO2-induced as well.

SOURCE (See the original for references)






Freer Trade is Key to a Cleaner Environment and Green Growth

In remarks on World Environment Day, the Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Pascal Lamy, pointed out that, “Trade opening has much to contribute in the fight against climate change and to the protection of the environment.”

Indeed, the most practical improvements in energy efficiency and protecting the environment over the past decades haven’t stemmed from government regulatory mandates. As shown in the analysis of the Index of Economic Freedom, the most progress has been driven by advances in freer trade and economic freedom. These unleash greater economic opportunity and prosperity, generating a virtuous cycle of investment, innovation, and dynamic economic growth. Echoing the same message, the WTO chief further noted:

The entire world is well aware of the environmental dangers posed to our planet. But the ability of governments to respond to these dangers is tied closely to the resources at their disposal. Countries which have had success in alleviating poverty and raising living standards tend to be more adept at creating the conditions for a cleaner environment.

Policy efforts aimed at imposing stricter environmental standards through a national or global regulatory body run great risk of being not only fruitless, but also counterproductive. They undercut the economic growth and efficiency indispensable to effective efforts to protect the environment. Such regulations are likely to be little more that feel-good actions! The fundamental flaw of those favoring new government directives is the fallacy that there must be a trade-off between economic growth and environmental protection. They seem to think that to get more of one, you have to have less of the other. The truth is just the opposite: to get more environmental protection you need more growth, not less.

It is encouraging that many Americans see that truth. As a March 2010 Gallup survey reveals, more Americans believe that economic growth should take priority over environmental protection when the two goals collides, with fewer willing to support environmental measures that may have a negative economic impact!

SOURCE




Busybodies take aim at plastic shopping bags

As if the nanny state wasn't intrusive enough already, busybodies in the California Assembly are sticking their noses in where they don't belong, passing a bill to ban plastic shopping bags. This is a classic case of perennial meddlers looking to boss people around for no good reason.

Plastic shopping bags are far from an environmental menace. In fact, the environmental impact of plastic shopping bags also pales in comparison to the environmental impact of paper and canvas bags.

According to the Environmental Literacy Council, plastic bags are better for air quality than paper bags because they weigh less and are more compact, requiring one-seventh the number of trucks to ship the same number of bags. And fewer truck trips carrying lighter loads mean less oil consumption and less pollution.

The council also reports that plastic bags are more environmentally benign in landfills, since they require only a fraction of landfill space compared with paper bags.

Don't let environmental activists fool you regarding reusable canvas bags, either.

Reusable canvas bags are likely to become downright gross in no time. The next time you buy ice cream, notice how much of it sticks to the outside of the carton, ready to turn a canvas shopping bag into a gooey mess and a feeding station for ants and cockroaches. Notice, too, how much juice leaks from the fruit salad container and how much bacteria-infested gook leaks from meat packages.

Keeping canvas bags sanitary and reusable will require frequent additional cycles for your washer and dryer. These extra laundry cycles, of course, result in more energy use, more air pollutants from electricity generation, and more water pollution from detergents.

And, since most people don't keep an immaculate calendar dictating which days and at what times they will stop by the grocery store, they will have to keep the trunks of their cars stuffed with numerous heavy, bulky canvas bags. As a result, every automobile trip -- wherever the destination -- would mean more automobile weight due to the stash of canvas bags. More automobile weight means more gasoline will get burned and more pollutants be released into the air.

In addition, the popular notion of plastic shopping bags entangling and choking marine life is an urban myth, more befitting of a Mark Twain tall tale than a serious discussion on the environment. According to U.S. Marine Mammal Commission senior analyst Dr. David Laist, "Plastic bags do not figure in entanglement. The main culprits are fishing gear, ropes, lines and strapping bands."

He adds that, "The impact of bags on whales, dolphins, porpoises and seals ranges from nil for most species to very minor for a few species. For birds, plastic bags are not a problem, either."

In reality, the only environmental harm caused by plastic shopping bags is the sight blight that happens when people litter. But why should plastic shopping bags be treated any differently in this regard than soda cans, water bottles, juice boxes and other items? It seems that a far better solution is to impose heavier fines on littering, which would have the additional benefit of reducing all forms of litter.

But why bother with a simple, unobtrusive solution when you can find a new excuse to be a buttinsky?

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here

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CO2 ACCELERATES heat loss

Warmism assumes that it keeps heat in. The following is the conclusion of a short paper by a modeller who looks at all influences on heat loss together. He also finds, as paleoclimatologists do, that CO2 levels are a response to, rather than a cause of, temperature changes. The author is Fred H. Haynie, who refers to himself as a "Retired Environmental Scientist". An example of his academic journal articles is here. "OLR" is "outbound longwave radiation".

I used the model to calculate average monthly CO2 concentrations for each of the regions and included those values in a regression. The resulting significant coefficient for CO2 was negative -- indicating it accelerates OLR rather than resisting it.

This is unlikely a direct effect and more likely by indirectly lowering the resistance of some other process. The contributions of CO2 and the Unknown factor tend to balance out and when CO2 is not included in the regression, the contribution of the Unknown is only around 0.02 and decreasing slowly.

The following plot is for the Arctic where the effects of water on OLR are the least. Also, the apparent statistical significance of both CO2 and the unknown factor could be to non-linearities that are not identified in the models.

Globally, the measurable effects of atmospheric water on reducing the rate of OLR are orders of magnitude greater than any probable effects of atmospheric CO2. Any possible “greenhouse” effect of atmospheric CO2 is not measurable with monthly, regional averages; being lost in the error associated with the water variables and model design.

The concentration of atmospheric CO2 is likely being controlled by the global three dimensional distribution of the different phases (vapor, condensed, and frozen) of water. As such, it is probably a good lagging response to global climate change.

More HERE

A correspondent summarizes Haynie's paper as follows:

Assumption: The earth loses thermal energy by radiating to space, i.e., by outbound long wave radiation (OLR).

Assumption: Components in the atmosphere slow down the rate of energy loss.

Assumption: If a CO2 greenhouse effect is measurable, it should be a statistically significant contributor to the total atmospheric resistance to OLR.

Testing these assumptions against climate scenarios provided by NOAA, the factors of precipitable water, precipitation rate, and sea surface temperature are found to be statistically significant.

On the same basis, and using data from Scripps, CO2’s impact comes out as slightly negative, indicating that it accelerates OLR rather than resisting it.

However, since other factors exceed any CO2 signal, it’s safer to say that its impact is lost in the noise and as such is simply not measurable.





Warming in Last 50 Years Predicted by Natural Climate Cycles

By Roy Spencer

One of the main conclusions of the 2007 IPCC report was that the warming over the last 50 years was most likely due to anthropogenic pollution, especially increasing atmospheric CO2 from fossil fuel burning.

But a minority of climate researchers have maintained that some — or even most — of that warming could have been due to natural causes.

For instance, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) are natural modes of climate variability which have similar time scales to warming and cooling periods during the 20th Century. Also, El Niño — which is known to cause global-average warmth — has been more frequent in the last 30 years or so; the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) is a measure of El Niño and La Niña activity.

A simple way to examine the possibility that these climate cycles might be involved in the warming over the last 50 years in to do a statistical comparison of the yearly temperature variations versus the PDO, AMO, and SOI yearly values. But of course, correlation does not prove causation.

So, what if we use the statistics BEFORE the last 50 years to come up with a model of temperature variability, and then see if that statistical model can “predict” the strong warming over the most recent 50 year period? That would be much more convincing because, if the relationship between temperature and these 3 climate indices for the first half of the 20th Century just happened to be accidental, we sure wouldn’t expect it to accidentally predict the strong warming which has occurred in the second half of the 20th Century, would we?

Temperature, or Temperature Change Rate?

This kind of statistical comparison is usually performed with temperature. But there is greater physical justification for using the temperature change rate, instead of temperature. This is because if natural climate cycles are correlated to the time rate of change of temperature, that means they represent heating or cooling influences, such as changes in global cloud cover (albedo).

Such a relationship, shown in the plot below, would provide a causal link of these natural cycles as forcing mechanisms for temperature change, since the peak forcing then precedes the peak temperature.

Predicting Northern Hemispheric Warming Since 1960

Since most of the recent warming has occurred over the Northern Hemisphere, I chose to use the CRUTem3 yearly record of Northern Hemispheric temperature variations for the period 1900 through 2009. From this record I computed the yearly change rates in temperature. I then linearly regressed these 1-year temperature change rates against the yearly average values of the PDO, AMO, and SOI.

I used the period from 1900 through 1960 for “training” to derive this statistical relationship, then applied it to the period 1961 through 2009 to see how well it predicted the yearly temperature change rates for that 50 year period. Then, to get the model-predicted temperatures, I simply added up the temperature change rates over time.

The result of this exercise in shown in the following plot :

What is rather amazing is that the rate of observed warming of the Northern Hemisphere since the 1970’s matches that which the PDO, AMO, and SOI together predict, based upon those natural cycles’ PREVIOUS relationships to the temperature change rate (prior to 1960).

Again I want to emphasize that my use of the temperature change rate, rather than temperature, as the predicted variable is based upon the expectation that these natural modes of climate variability represent forcing mechanisms — I believe through changes in cloud cover — which then cause a lagged temperature response.

This is powerful evidence that most of the warming that the IPCC has attributed to human activities over the last 50 years could simply be due to natural, internal variability in the climate system. If true, this would also mean that (1) the climate system is much less sensitive to the CO2 content of the atmosphere than the IPCC claims, and (2) future warming from greenhouse gas emissions will be small.

SOURCE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)





Global Temperature Is Warmest on Record, NASA’s Hansen Says: Reality Check

Some natural warming plus a lot of crooked data manipulation behind the claim

There was indeed a global pop in temperatures despite the harsh (in places record) winter in the Northern Hemisphere. The El Nino was at least a moderate strength El Nino. It and the record negative arctic oscillation helped make the higher latutudes warmer and suppress clouds and winds in the subtropics and tropics, helping keep water temperatures in this the widest latitudal belt above normal.

The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation which went into its warm mode in 1995 rebounded from a slide with the helps of these effects. Drought in India and southeast Asia after two successive monsoon failures related to low solar, high latitude volcanoes and summer El Ninos also contributed to the pop.

As La Nina comes on and the PDO dives, and tropical activity and increasing winds in the Atlantic cool the waters, the global temperature will dive again like it did in the late 1990s and late 200s.

Hansen, NOAA NCDC, Hadley CRU/UKMO all have reason to find warmth and verify their scary projections from their Tinkertoy models despite the many shortcomings found in these models. Hansen has a proven history of manipulating data to come closer to verifying projections.

E-mail messages obtained by CEI in a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that NASA concluded that its own climate data was inferior to those of the CRU and NOAA. In 2007, a USA Today reporter asked if NASA’s data “was more accurate” than other climate-change data sets, NASA’s Dr. Reto A. Ruedy replied with an unequivocal NO! “My recommendation to you is to continue using NCDC’s data for the U.S… and [East Anglia] data for the global…”

NASA’s GIStemp program recalculates old temperatures with every new data run. Like CRU and NOAA, NASA has managed to cool off the prior warm period (like Michael mann did with the Medieval Warm Period. See below (enlarged here) how in 1980, Hansen had the 1960s 0.3C colder than the 1950s. By 1987, it was just 0.05C colder and by 2007 it had become 0.05C warmer.

This was also done with the 1930s and 1940s, a notoriously warm period where most of the nation (and North America) heat records were set. See below (enlarged here)

NASA makes frequent changes to the data as noted. John Goetz in a guest post on Watts Up With That noted how NASA changed 20% of the station data 16 times in the 2 1/2 years ending in 2007. Recall also in 2007, Steve McIntyre found a ‘millennium bug’ in the NASA software that caused excess warmth post 2000. NASA quickly adjusted the data down 0.12 to 0.15C. This also pushed 1934 back into the lead as the warmest year that lasted all of one year (NASA kept the old data the same because the world was watching) before NASA returned all that warmth and then some. See below

Hansen is a man on a mission to save the planet and this includes civil disobedience. As Michael Goldfarb described it “Recently, but presumably still in his capacity as a private citizen and defender of the Earth, Hansen wrote an op-ed for the Guardian in which he described coal-fired power plants as “factories of death.” This on the heels of testifying in a British court on behalf of six Greenpeace activists on trial for causing $60,000 in criminal damage to a coal-fired power station in England.” Could this civil disobedience carry over to the data?

The cooling with the recent two year La Nina has put pressure on NOAA and NASA to accelerate adjustments – NOAA removed urban heat island adjustments for the USHCN in 2007 and announced a new warmer version of GHCN (V3) coming soon. NASA’s adjustment upward of this decade last year (shown in table above as much as 0.19C for a year) put them in a position to make the claim in the release.

More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)





Politics outweigh science in global warming debate

Global Political Agenda

No matter what the latest science or temperature readings tell us about the true causes and consequences of global warming, anthroprogenic global warming alarmists continue to embrace more regulation, greater government spending, and higher taxes in a futile attempt to control what is beyond our control: the Earth’s temperature. One of their political objectives, unstated of course, is the transfer of wealth from rich nations to poor nations or, as the social engineers put it, from the North to the South.

At the Bali Conference on Climate Change in December 2007, the poor nations insisted the cost of technology to limit emissions and adapt to the effects of climate change on their countries ought to be paid for by rich nations. Most anticipated a windfall of money flowing into their countries to develop technology or purchase carbon credits. In that scenario, selling allotments for CO2 emissions would provide a temporary boost to their cash flow while severely limiting the economic development of countries forced to purchase the carbon credits.

The December 2009 Copenhagen Conference was an attempt to formalize just such a transfer of wealth, one that would be an economic disaster for the developed nations of the world. The real economic costs of this income redistribution in the United States would be huge. Various studies have forecast that the United States would lose between three and four million jobs and the average U.S. family would lose $4,000-7,000 a year in income.

Racing Against the Facts

Without the science to back up their wild forecasts and claims, and in the face of overwhelming evidence for natural temperature variation, proponents of AGW alarmism resort to the precautionary argument: “We must do something just in case we are responsible, because the consequences are too terrible if we are to blame and do nothing.” They hope to stampede governments into committing huge amounts of taxpayers’ money before their fraud is completely exposed—before science and truth save the day.

Too many politicians are going along with this scheme, some because they have deluded themselves into thinking they can eventually reverse global warming by stabilizing CO2 emissions, others more cynically to curry favor with the media or political contributors.

There is certainly no scientific justification for a self-imposed and indeed cockamamie scheme of cap-and-trade that would raise energy costs, reward middlemen, and result in massive fraud. For a tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars such a system would eventually cost the United States, we could pay for development of clean coal, oil-shale recovery systems, and nuclear power, and have enough left over to maintain and upgrade our essential system of temperature-monitoring satellites.

Real Science Is Key

Understanding global warming and what, if anything, humans can do to affect it are scientific questions that can be answered only by science and scientific data. Yet global warming alarmists invariably try to make their case by resorting to rhetoric, dogma, opinion, and emotion. The closest thing to scientific data in their articles is the occasional chart claiming a poorly understood correlation between atmospheric CO2 and the Earth’s temperature.

Correlation is not causation. For five years, Michael J. Economides, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Houston, has had a standing offer of $10,000 for a single peer-reviewed paper showing causality between CO2 and increased temperature. None exists!

On the other hand, scientists who understand the factors affecting the Earth’s temperature—as much as they can be understood—rebut the alarmists with papers replete with facts, science, charts, and data tables.

With so many uninformed and misguided politicians ignoring the available science, however, our nation’s priorities will drift away from hard science and toward decadence. The politicization of science is tantamount to killing it. It is our collective responsibility to champion the use of responsible science to inform politicians.

There are hopeful signs some once-true believers are beginning to harbor doubts about anthropogenic global warming. We can only hope the focus of the discussion returns to scientific evidence before we perpetrate an economic disaster on ourselves and generations to come.

SOURCE





Infantile Australian climate professor pronounces debate as "infantile"

The Age — formerly a decent newspaper — never fails to take an opportunity to parrot PR for Team AGW. Last week they gave a free shot to Will Steffen, Executive Director, ANU Climate Change Institute.

A SCIENCE adviser to the federal government has described the debate in the media over the basics of climate change science as ”almost infantile”, equating it to an argument about the existence of gravity.

It takes a tax-payer funded Professor to equate AGW to gravity. It must have taken years of education to be able to issue pronouncements like this eh? If Australian taxpayers were hoping to get a bit more than just bluster and name-calling from certain public servants, they’re bound to be asking for their money back soon.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the existence of gravity is proven each day you don’t get flung off the planet when you get out of bed. We can measure gravity to twelve significant digits, but our value for climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide varies from 0 to 10. Pick a number. We can’t even get one significant digit fixed. Quantifying gravity involves dropping a rock with a clock and a ruler. Quantifying carbon’s effect on climate change involves understanding cloud-formation, ice sheet changes, evaporation, humidity levels in air 8000 m above Singapore, and ocean currents at the bottom of the endless abyss that we can’t even measure.

Speaking at a Melbourne summit on the green economy, Professor Will Steffen criticised the media for treating climate change science as a political issue in which two sides should be given a voice.

Is it political? Heck No. It’s not about managing our economy, assessing risks, choosing between different courses of action… err… it’s pure science. Prof Steffen has modeled our future, there’s no need to involve the economists-consumers-engineers-investors-medical-experts-or those pesky kids we’re supposedly saving-the-planet-for. Managing the country is pure science now; free speech and democracy-babble, who needs it!

This censorship of speech, and appeal to authority is the antithesis of science, and Steffen simplifies things ad absurdium. In Australia, he appears to have been appointed Carbon-King-of-Bluster. Find me a sentence where he substantiates a claim with something that amounts to more than “…it’s true because I say so”.

It’s a no-brainer. If you go over the last couple of decades you see tens of thousands of papers in the peer-reviewed literature, and you have less than 10 that challenge the fundamentals – and they have been disproved,” Professor Steffen said after an address at the Australian Davos Connection’s Future Summit.

“Tens of Thousands” of papers eh? So why doesn’t he dig out a few and help his colleague Dr Andrew Glikson who is at least honest enough to engage in a debate and try to answer the question: Can you name any paper that supports the claim that positive feedback occurs and will double or triple the direct effect of carbon dioxide? Without that amplification the big scare campaign is all over (and so is much of the funding that feeds the associated junkets, conferences, grants, Institutes, and certain “science advisers” to the government ).

And which 10 papers exactly have been disproved? Steffen can’t name them, won’t try, and helpfully leaves things vague as a one-size-fits-all whitewash. Pure bluster. Adam Morton dutifully prints all that without checking, as if it’s a pronouncement from the Mount and one of the ten commandments.

Don’t give me the excuse that he’s written giant documents with thousands of references, so the evidence is there “somewhere”. It only takes a few minutes to name and explain one paper. Waving vaguely at tomes is part of the shell game. If he wants rational discourse, this is where it starts, with details.

Right now, this almost infantile debate about whether ‘is it real or isn’t it real?’, it’s like saying, ‘Is the Earth round or is it flat?’

Actually, the only one trying to debate whether “it’s” real or the world is flat is him. No one else wants to reduce public conversation to meaningless descriptors as much as he does. What “it” is he talking about? Does he mean “climate change”? He’d sure like us to debate that, because he’d be on safe preschool-climate-science terms where he could win: Yes Esmeralda, the climate does change! But the rest of us keep asking him to debate the real issue instead of his fake-o-strawman-substitute.

[Climate change] is a hugely important question and yet we are not having a rational discourse in the media in Australia on this question. That is my biggest frustration.

This is quite funny really. (I laughed). So Steffen is frustrated that the discourse is irrational? This is the man who uses his academic authority to mock opponents (that he won’t debate) with strawman arguments that are irrelevant. He claims he wants rational discourse, but works hard to stifle any discussion that doesn’t agree with him. He actively contributes to the nightmare of government spin and irrationality.

Asked about the scepticism of Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, he said scientists respected leaders from both sides of politics who showed respect for scientific expertise.

“Respect for expertise” is code for argument from authority: Trust me I’m an expert. It’s the cop-out.

Real scientists don’t have any respect for the fawning servants of bureaucracy or fame. We admire those who can reason, and not those who pour confusion on conversations with confounding pomposities. The ingratiates who take our money but call us names, while they dodge debates and hail vainglorious victories over points we never raised: these we mock

SOURCE






How to shoot down windmill promoters

The following is from a newsletter put out by Greenies who OPPOSE wind power. The email followed a strategy discussion of how to defeat a bad wind energy bill (the disastrous Massachusetts Wind Energy Siting Bill).

What I have reproduced is fairly long but there is in fact more to it. If you ask to be put on the mailing list of John Droz jr. (aaprjohn@northnet.org) you can get the whole of it. Droz is a physicist and his site is here

When I first got involved with the Wellfleet (Cape Cod, Massachusetts) situation in November, what I (and others in our community) knew about wind turbines would fit in a thimble. However, we knew enough to understand that erecting 400 foot, kinetic industrial towers in the middle of a national park was an insane idea. It seemed like such a sacrilege, that we barely knew where to start arguing with the proponents. What do you say to someone who is so seriously unhinged that he or she actually thinks that it’s a great idea to industrialize a national park?

We rapidly grew to appreciate the human health hazards (e.g. acoustic effects), the profoundly detrimental environmental consequences (e.g. for wildlife), the impact on property values and, most tragically, the despair and ruin that they caused in the lives of decent, well-meaning people burdened to live in the shadow of these behemoths.

The knowledge that seemed least relevant to me – because the other consequences were so dire – was the efficacy of the technology: does wind energy actually work? Does it accomplish anything consequential? Those were way down on my list of concerns.

I knew enough to know that the proponents had no business erecting the damn things in the National Seashore. But others repeatedly said that it would be crazy – and self-defeating – to address the larger policy issue with any sort of traditional cost / benefit analysis. Are we getting our money’s worth? Does the yield justify the investment? That sort of thing. And it was deemed especially foolhardy even to suggest to a bunch of Prius driving liberals in Wellfleet who are hell bent on saving the world that wind energy doesn’t actually work. Furthermore it seemed to me that we had plenty of ammunition in our battle to let sleeping dogs lie – or to let the windmill supporters live with their illusions about the promise of wind energy – as long as they could be convinced that putting them in the park was dangerous and outrageous. So I didn’t really do my homework and answer these questions for myself.

Now, however, after encountering the vapid, idiotic, pompous and patronizing delusional drivel of the Superintendent of the Cape Cod National Seashore (an unapologetic promoter of his grand vision of a string of token wind energy projects within the boundaries of the park — you know who I mean as you have similar proponents in your community) -- over and over and over again – I am completely of the opposite view.

I now see that his arguments are hollow (meaningless, bloated, irrelevant, not applicable and false) — and his advocacy of industrializing the park is morally bankrupt. He keeps trying to inflate the shell of his argument (the “national mission to promote alternative energy”), but repeatedly ignores the substance of his core responsibility: “to preserve and protect the natural landscape in its original condition for all future generations.”

Gradually, it has become apparent that not only is it maddening to listen to such bombast — as if he had been granted a special dispensation from on high to pursue his brilliant plan, but it is downright dangerous to allow such contentions to linger unchallenged that this could EVER possibly be a good idea, or that these promoters have any clue what they are talking about.

We simply must call a spade a spade here in order to deny such imposters the opportunity to wrap themselves in the cloak of their presumed authority, or to "frame" the debate, as some of our representatives have attempted to do.

The central argument against wind turbines in this debate is simple and devastating: they don't work!

— They will not solve our energy issues (e.g. they don't reduce our dependence on imported oil).

— They will not solve our environmental problems (e.g. they don't consequentially reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions).

— They are not a substitute for conventional energy sources (e.g. because they are not reliable, have no Capacity Value, are much more expensive, etc.).

Why should citizens take this approach?

Why take this as the point of departure, instead of seeking to elicit sympathy for the very real suffering of folks in nearby communities subjected to wind development?

The reason is simple: if you allow the proponents to retain this “high moral ground” – the fictional idea that wind turbines actually accomplish something useful and that at least THEY are trying to do something about global warming, energy independence, etc. while YOU are in denial – and whining about a bit of noise that is “no louder than a refrigerator” ---- then you have likely lost right off the bat.

Making it mostly about you makes it is all too easy for these promoters to paint us as NIMBY’s and nincompoops.

They will come across as virtuous and wise — you as selfish and uninformed.

They want to change the world with their cutting edge technology — you are living in the past.

They care about our grandchildren’s grandchildren — you are a crybaby because you can’t stand paying a few more cents per KWH on your electric bill.

They are bold visionaries — you are the reason we’re here in the first place.

Etc.

Who do you think is holding the stronger hand here?

But, suppose you turn this around and you first DEMAND that they prove their case: that they provide scientific proof that the technology actually works BEFORE you move on to catalogue all of the adverse consequences. You can do this by asking a few innocent questions:

* Please show me the independent, objective studies (using real-world data, not models) that show that wind energy actually is technically, economically and environmentally beneficial?

* Please explain to me how we're going to get electricity if these things only produce power when the wind blows — and not too slow, or too fast? What are we going to do if the wind only blows at night – when we don’t need electricity – but doesn’t blow during the daytime in August – when it’s hot as hell where I live? Isn’t a lot of that “production” worthless? Has anyone ever invented a practical, affordable method of “storing” electricity for future use?

* What do we do if we have three calm days in a row? Or a calm month? How do I watch the World Series? How do I use my computer?

* How do we manage the wildly fluctuating flow of electricity produced – or not produced – by the wind turbines? Isn’t modern electricity essentially a river of current that needs to be predictably available to be useful – not a flood, but certainly more than a trickle and, heaven forbid, not a dry gulch? Isn’t that sort of a problem – especially if the oft-stated goal of “increasing alternative energy to 20% of our total output by 2020” is actually realized?

* What about the economics? The average residential US customer pays 10¢/KWH for electricity. In Denmark (where they have installed many more wind turbines) the average residential customer pays 35¢/KWH. How will paying this huge 350% increase be beneficial to citizens? How does this jive with the marketing PR that says wind energy is inexpensive?

* Will this wind project actually replace any conventional fossil-fuel electric plants? How many can we get rid of? Can we dispense with them entirely? Can we turn them on and off at will – like dimming the lights – to compensate for the unpredictable, skittering output from the wind mills? If we do a granular analysis of wind energy (not giving credit to useless gross production that is produced in the middle of the night, when nobody wants it, for example), what is the actual reduction in CO2 emissions that we can hope to achieve – starting from the assumption that consumers and businesses don’t consider availability of electricity “optional” and aren’t willing to put up with haphazard, unpredictable delivery of this miraculous form of energy that they take for granted?

* To replace a single medium sized conventional electric power plant we would only need several thousands of these 410 foot behemoths covering hundreds of square miles of territory. Exactly how many square miles of land will be needed to appreciably reduce coal use? Since they aren't making more land, how is this a "renewable" or "green" concept?

* My favorite: those who claim that "forward thinking environmentalists" should give their support to projects like the wind turbine proposal in Wellfleet for wind turbines in the middle of the national park.

* Take the opposite approach by saying: OK, Let’s do it! Let’s harness the “wind resource” within the park in the service of all humanity. But let’s not stop with a few. Since this is such a great idea, let’s REPLICATE this wonderful idea throughout the entire park system. If it’s good enough for the National Seashore, it’s good enough for the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Yellowstone too! We can’t afford to let all of those other “wind resources” go to waste!

* Surely, this is not too great a price to pay. Why, if we were just “forward thinking” enough to agree to ruin thousands of pristine habitats similar to Wellfleet – or to convert the entire State of Rhode Island into a wind farm, for example -- we could “replace” ONE small power plant, right? Well, no, we couldn’t actually “replace” the power plant, since we would have to keep it running “just in case” the wind didn’t blow (or blew at the wrong time). But who cares: at least we’d be doing something, and we’d surely all feel a lot better about ourselves! No one could say we didn’t do our part.

Then you ask the proponents how many billions of dollars they want to spend on this adventure – not for a single project, but the total figure.

Then you ask them where they’re going to put them? How do you put them in cities and towns without adversely affect citizens (e.g. by bombarding them with high intensity infrasound and “flicker” and constant mechanical noise)? How do you put them in conservation preserves, in the unsettled areas, without destroying habitat and driving off wildlife? It really makes sense to "save the world" by destroying its inhabitants?

Then you ask them how many miles of transmission lines we’ll have to construct – at what cost, and what consequences will this have – and how much power will we lose getting the electricity from the desolate, windy points (where the windmills live and the wildlife has fled) to the settled areas, hundreds of miles away?

Then you ask them who’s going to pay for all of this? And how will that be accomplished? And what happens to all of these projects if the legislature (or the federal government; or the voters) have a change of heart – or fall upon hard economic times – and the river of government subsidies slows to a trickle?

Then you ask them why they keep talking about foreign oil and “energy independence” when only about 1% of electricity is produced by burning oil – and virtually all of our electricity currently comes from home-grown sources?

Then you ask them why shouldn’t we be focusing some of those billions of dollars of investment on conservation; and on reducing vehicle emissions; and on switching over to natural gas (which is plentiful, relatively clean, and cheap) – rather than splurging on all of those exotic, noisy mammoth wind mills?

Here is the bottom line.

Don’t let these agenda promoters reduce the argument to whether or not “we” are willing to make the sacrifice in the service of a noble and necessary cause. (BTW by “we” they mean people they don’t know and don’t care about in communities with wind projects.) Tell them you think that the whole idea is nuts – and make them prove it to you otherwise.

So what do they actually LIKE about the idea? Remind me again?

They are neither virtuous nor wise. The developers are mostly cynical profiteers out to make a buck, who pull the necessary strings and grease the necessary palms to win their approvals. They are opportunists who travel to financially stressed rural areas and entice unsuspecting farmers to sign their lease agreements which neuter their rights to their own land. Most of the others are ill-informed and idealistic – and maybe a bit impulsive – who have no idea what they’re in for once the blades begin to spin. They reassure energy committees and the town fathers that everything will be fine. Talk is cheap!

“It’s no louder than a refrigerator!” “You won’t even know it’s there.” “They are beautiful, shining symbols of our freedom – and of our energy independence.”

I’m not immune to the sufferings of others – on the contrary, it breaks my heart – and I am acutely aware of the many other adverse consequences that derive from the installation and the operation of these massive machines. But after being in the trenches on this issue I am quite sure that it is a mistake to shoulder the burden of pointing out all of the bad consequences of their "brilliant" idea — instead of demanding to see the proof as to WHY are they recommending it in the first place?

What’s so inspiring about a stupid idea that doesn’t work – AND one which devastates residents, divides communities and ruins habitat in the process?

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here

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