Global Cooling: Just a coincidence or a natural solar cycle?

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No doubt we all know there are spots on the Sun? Don’t rush out to look; that’s dangerous. If you have a telescope, or even a pair of binoculars, you can focus the Sun’s image onto a piece of paper, held away from the eyepiece. Galileo was the first to see the Sun through his newly-invented telescope, and to report the spots. It caused an uproar in astronomy (and religion), because Aristotle and various revered philosophers had declared the Sun to be a perfect object. Some churchmen refused to believe it, and also refused to come and see for themselves.

Nowadays we have satellites to observe the Sun constantly, since solar flares and outbursts of matter (coronal mass ejections, CMEs) can damage humans in space, communications and observation satellites, and power and communications systems on Earth. The most significant is NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. The people who operate these systems are especially watchful this year, since we’re at the peak of activity in Solar Cycle 24, when sunspots should be most numerous and the Sun’s magnetic field strongest. That’s why the Sun watchers are puzzled. For several days (as of 20 July), there have been no spots.

Our systematic, scientific observation of sunspots goes back to 1755, when we started assigning numbers to sunspot cycles; the current is Cycle 24, and one of the weakest, especially in comparison with #21, #22, and #23. The association between sunspots and terrestrial climate goes much farther back, to the sunspot minimum called the Maunder Minimum, 1645-1720, when virtually no sunspots were observed – and when Earth experienced its coldest temperatures of the Little Ice Age, the coldest period in the last 11,500 years. There was another minimum, the Dalton Minimum, from 1790 – 1820, marked by cold temperatures, that included Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, Charles Dickens’ narratives of cold, snowy London, and America’s Year Without a Summer (1816). The Dalton minimum included SC#5; so far, our SC#24 looks a lot like SC#5. There is a correlation between weak sunspot cycles – which tend to occur several in a row – and cold terrestrial climate. Let’s remember, correlation is not causation, and, until a few years ago, no causation was known.

The mean irradiance from the Sun onto the Earth is well measured, at approximately 1365 watts per sq meter, normalized to Earth’s mean distance from the Sun. It changes very little, 3 or 4 watts/sq meter, much less than 1%. For that reason, most climatologists have dismissed a causal relationship between sunspots or other measures of solar activity with Earth climate.

However, in recent years, Prof Henrik Svensmark of Denmark has proposed another mechanism for climate change resulting from solar changes. The Sun’s magnetic field – which is most of OUR  magnetic field – also declines with declining sunspot number. The Sun’s magnetic field shields Earth and the other solar system planets from high-energy cosmic rays, coming from supernovae out in the Milky Way Galaxy. Fortunately, there are no supernovae within a few hundred light-years of Earth. These high-energy cosmic rays (called Galactic Cosmic Rays, or GCRs) ionize molecules in Earth’s atmosphere if they get through the magnetic shield; the ionized molecules then attract water vapor molecules, leading to cloud formation. If the magnetic shield is weak (as it is now), there are more GCRs, more clouds, and colder temperatures. If you’d like to know more, he explains it all in a paperback book, The Chilling Stars, by Svensmark and Calder.

The Svensmark hypothesis has been demonstrated, both in the laboratory at CERN and in nature. The Solar magnetic field occasionally gives a little hiccup, called a Forbush Event, when the field strength drops significantly and more GCRs stream into the atmosphere. Three to four days later, microwave sensors detect increased cloud water content over the oceans (they’re not sensitive to cloud changes over land). So we can call this the Svensmark Theory, since, with corroborating evidence, it’s more than just a hypothesis. Of course, it’s not yet “settled science”  as Obama the Community Organizer tells us global warming is.

Why do I tell you this now? Well, a funny…….coincidence is going on. Here we are, in the middle of SC#24, when there should be 70 or 80 sunspots, and there are none, or one or two. So, what’s the temperature doing?

Well, last week we had what those funny people at the national TV networks referred to as “the poor man’s polar vortex”, when more than 2,000 low temperature and low maximum temperature records were broken. Memphis, Tennessee 69 F…Greenwood, Mississippi  72 F…Little Rock, Arkansas  71 F…Monroe, Louisiana  73 F…Texarkana, Arkansas  69 …Longview, Texas 71 F…Joplin, Missouri  50 F (tie)….and guess what’s coming next week…and the week after that?

noaa charts

On the left is NOAA’s forecast for 31 July – 4 August; on the right, 2 Aug – 8 August.

“Following in the footsteps of the record-setting cool air mass in mid-July, a second blast of air with polar origins will invade the eastern U.S. to close July,” says the Washington Post. “This taste of September…should produce temperatures 10-20 degrees below normal across a large swath of the eastern U.S.    by early Tuesday.”

A “taste of September”…closing July? Expect a cool August over the eastern US. Beyond that, who knows? This cold surge accompanies forecasts of severe weather for Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, West Virginia. More severe weather as the surge moves south.

NWsailboatExtending the pattern backwards, solar cycles 23, 22, and 21 were strong, much stronger than the present weak SC#24, which is halfway through. Three and one-half cycles is 39 years, taking us back to 1975, when the post-World War 2 cooling ended and the recent warming began. Older readers will remember TIME and Newsweek articles in 1974 about the “coming ice age.” This time we may face another 30 years of cold – with less electrical generation, thanks to Obama’s EPA. New England will be especially hard hit, since they have done the most to shut down coal and oil-fired generators. New England depends on natural gas to fire their electrical generators – but there are no natural gas pipelines into New England. Hmmmm.

Moron of the week: The clown who tried to sail his yacht through the “Northwest Passage”, i.e., along the coast of Alaska and Canada to Greenland. In 2008 – the year after his Nobel Peace Prize – Al Gore predicted that, in five years (2013), “the Arctic Ocean would be ice free.” Approximately 40 individuals and boat crews, including a crew of 4 Irish idiots in a rowboat, tried to negotiate the NW Passage on the basis of Al’s prediction. None of them made it; all had to be rescued by the Coast Guard. So, a year later, another clown tried it. Guess the result? Too bad it wasn’t Gore himself. There’s more ice this year, and it’s thicker, harder multiyear ice.

EPA Still Wants to Garnish Your Wages Without a Court Order

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A few weeks ago, EPA quietly tried to reinterpret its authority and wanted to garnish wages from those who owe it a debt. After a storm of criticism from Members of Congress and the public, EPA pulled back.

However, the agency is still trying to grant itself this power, only this time it’s going through the standard notice-and-comment process that most federal regulations go through.

What’s is the problem EPA wants to solve by having the ability to dig to go after your wallet? Will this stop polluters? Is EPA inundated with deadbeats?

Apparently not, according to Catrina Rorke and Sam Batkins at the American Action Forum who looked at EPA’s data.

They point out that, over the past six years, EPA has imposed more than $2.3 billion in “non-major” fines against companies and individuals that committed “infractions that do not involve large facilities emitting tons of toxic pollutants annually.”

However, Rorke and Batkins found, “the majority of fines for individuals involve paperwork infractions – not environmental contamination.” Individuals or businesses were fined for failing to file notification or reports with EPA.

And as for a delinquency problem, here’s their key finding:

[T]he average length of time that individuals were delinquent paying EPA was zero quarters. In other words, people generally pay their fines on time.

So why does EPA want to be able to garnish an individual’s wages? Based on its data, it’s not to ensure a cleaner environment nor solve delinquency problems. Roark and Batkins conclude (correctly in my view):

EPA’s proposal to grant itself wage garnishment authority more closely resembles a power grab than an appropriate administrative step to rectify an observed issue in their fine repayment process.

Stay tuned.

CLICHES OF PROGRESSIVISM #15 – We Are Destroying the Earth and Government Must Do Something by Sandy Ikeda

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People often complain that mankind is destroying the earth: that insatiable consumption and relentless production have laid waste to irreplaceable swaths of our planet, and that these activities have to stop or someday it will all be gone.

Which raises the question: What does it means to “destroy” something?

When you burn a log, the log is destroyed, but heat, light, smoke, and ashes are created. It’s in that sense that physics tells us that matter is neither created nor destroyed.  Similarly, cutting down a forest destroys the forest, but in its place are houses and furniture and suburbs.

The real question is: Is it worth it?

What people usually mean when they say mankind is destroying the earth is that human action causes a change they don’t like. It sounds odd to say that my wife, by eating a piece of toast for breakfast, is “destroying” the toast. But if I wanted that toast for myself, I might well regard her action as destructive. It’s the same action, but the interpretation depends on purpose and context.

When a missile obliterates a building and kills the people in it, it may serve a political purpose, even though the friends and family of those killed and the owners of the building are harmed. The perpetrator’s gain is the victim’s loss. In the political realm, one person’s gain is necessarily another person’s loss. You rob Peter to pay Paul; you kill Jack to appease Jill. It’s a “zero-sum game.”

In the economic realm, however, a thing is destroyed to the extent that it loses its usefulness to somebody for doing something. Someone may want to bulldoze my lovely home just for fun. If she pays me enough I may let her do it and be glad she did. When not physically coerced, a trade won’t happen unless each side expects to gain. If it does happen, and if the people who traded are right, then all do in fact gain. Each is better off than before. The trade has created something: value. If they are wrong, they destroy value and suffer a loss, which gives them an incentive to avoid making mistakes.

In free markets, gains manifest themselves in profit, either monetary or psychic. (In the short run, of course, you can sustain a monetary loss if you think there’s a worthwhile non-monetary aspect to the trade that will preserve the profit.) Now, the free market is not perfect, despite what some economics professors say about the benefits of so-called “perfect competition.” People don’t have complete or perfect knowledge and so they make mistakes. They trade when they shouldn’t, or they don’t trade when they should. Fortunately, profits and losses serve as feedback to guide their decisions.

There’s another source of market imperfection. People may be capable of making good decisions but they don’t trade, or trade too much, because the property rights to the things they would like to trade aren’t well-defined or aren’t effectively enforced. In such cases their actions or in actions create costs they don’t bear or benefits they don’t receive. The result is that their decisions end up destroying value.

If I free-ride off the ocean—if, for example, I don’t pay for dumping garbage into it—then the ocean will become more polluted than it should be. If there is a cleaner, more efficient source of energy than fossil fuels, but no one can profitably use it because the State prevents anyone from doing so (for example by prohibitions or excessive taxation), then the value that would have been created will never appear.

Our aesthetic sense is part of what makes us human. If we wish to protect a lake or a valley from development because we think it beautiful, how do we do that?

To some extent it’s possible to do what the Nature Conservancy does and purchase the land that we want to protect. But that’s not always possible, especially when the land is controlled not by private persons but by the State, which makes special deals with crony capitalists in so-called public-private developments. In any case, even the free market is not perfect. Economic development and material well-being mean that some beautiful landscapes and irreplaceable resources will be changed in ways not everyone will approve of.

Remember, though, that economics teaches us that an action is always taken by someone for something. There are no disembodied costs, benefits, or values. In a world of scarcity, John believes saving rainforests is more important than saving the whales. Mary believes the opposite. If we are to get past disagreements on aesthetics—essentially differences of opinion—that can turn into violent conflict, we need to find some way to settle our differences peacefully, some way to transform them into value-creating interactions.

Imperfect though it may be, the free market has so far been the most effective method we know of for doing that.

Sandy Ikeda
Associate Professor of Economics
Purchase College, SUNY

Summary

  • Physics teaches us that matter is not really destroyed but rather transformed, so the ever-present question is, “Is it worth it?”
  • Market transactions transform resources, as well as ownership of them, and if enhanced value doesn’t result from those transactions, the resulting losses tend to minimize future mistakes.
  • For further information, see:

“Government Versus the Environment” by Russell Madden: http://tinyurl.com/ndc96h2

“The Problem of Environmental Protection” by Dwight R. Lee: http://tinyurl.com/nub9uet

“Economists and Scarcity” by Steven Horwitz: http://tinyurl.com/mztsuf4

“Remembering Julian Simon” by Paul Cleveland and Erin Hagert: http://tinyurl.com/ngchvyo

ABOUT SANDY IKEDA

Sandy Ikeda is an associate professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism. He will be speaking at the FEE summer seminars “People Aren’t Pawns” and “Are Markets Just?”

The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) is proud to partner with Young America’s Foundation (YAF) to produce “Clichés of Progressivism,” a series of insightful commentaries covering topics of free enterprise, income inequality, and limited government.

Our society is inundated with half-truths and misconceptions about the economy in general and free enterprise in particular. The “Clichés of Progressivism” series is meant to equip students with the arguments necessary to inform debate and correct the record where bias and errors abound.

The antecedents to this collection are two classic FEE publications that YAF helped distribute in the past: Clichés of Politics, published in 1994, and the more influential Clichés of Socialism, which made its first appearance in 1962. Indeed, this new collection will contain a number of essays from those two earlier works, updated for the present day where necessary. Other entries first appeared in some version in FEE’s journal, The Freeman. Still others are brand new, never having appeared in print anywhere. They will be published weekly on the websites of both YAF and FEE: www.yaf.org and www.FEE.org until the series runs its course. A book will then be released in 2015 featuring the best of the essays, and will be widely distributed in schools and on college campuses.

See the index of the published chapters here.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of FEE and Shutterstock.

A Great Plan to Replace the EPA

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For years now I have been saying that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must be eliminated and its powers given to the fifty states, all of which,have their own departments of environmental protection. Until now, however, there has been no plan put forth to do so.

Dr. Jay Lehr has done just that and his plan no doubt will be sent to the members of Congress and the state governors. Titled “Replacing the Environmental Protection Agency” it should be read by everyone who, like Dr. Lehr, has concluded that the EPA was a good idea when it was introduced in 1971, but has since evolved into a rogue agency threatening the U.S. economy, attacking the fundamental concept of private property, and the lives of all Americans in countless and costly ways.

AA - Jay Lehr

Dr. Jay Lehr

Dr. Lehr is the Science Director and Senior Fellow of The Heartland Institute, for whom I am a policy adviser. He is a leading authority on groundwater hydrology and the author of more than 500 magazine and journal articles, and 30 books. He has testified before Congress on more than three dozen occasions on environmental issues and consulted with nearly every agency of the federal government and with many foreign countries. The Institute is a national nonprofit research and education organizations supported by voluntary contributions.

Ironically, he was among the scientists who called for the creation of the EPA and served on many of the then-new agency’s advisory councils. Over the course of its first ten years, he helped write a significant number of legislative bills to create a safety net for the environment.

As he notes in his plan, “Beginning around 1981, liberal activist groups recognized EPA could be used to advance their political agenda by regulating virtually all human activities regardless of their impact on the environment. Politicians recognized they could win votes by posing as protectors of the public health and wildlife. Industries saw a way to use regulations to handicap competitors or help themselves to public subsidies. Since that time, not a single environmental law or regulation has passed that benefited either the environment or society.”

“The takeover of EPA and all of its activities by liberal activists was slow and methodical over the past 30 years. Today, EPA is all but a wholly owned subsidiary of liberal activist groups. Its rules account for about half of the nearly $2 trillion a year cost of complying with all national regulations in the U.S. President Barack Obama is using it to circumvent Congress to impose regulations on the energy sector that will cause prices to ‘skyrocket.’ It is a rogue agency.”

Dr. Lehr says that “Incremental reform of EPA is simply not an option.” He’s right.

“I have come to believe that the national EPA must be systematically dismantled and replaced by a Committee of the Whole of the 50 state environmental protection agencies. Those agencies in nearly all cases long ago took over primary responsibility for the implementation of environmental laws passed by Congress (or simply handed down by EPA as fiat rulings without congressional vote or oversight.”

Looking back over the years, Dr. Lehr notes that “The initial laws I helped write have become increasingly draconian, yet they have not benefited our environment or the health of our citizens. Instead they suppress our economy and the right of our citizens to make an honest living. It seems to me, and to others, that this is actually the intention of those in EPA and in Congress who want to see government power expanded without regard to whether it is needed to protect the environment or public health.”

Eliminating the EPA would provide a major savings by eliminating 80% of its budget. The remaining 20% could be used to run its research labs and administer the Committee of the Whole of the 50 state environmental agencies. “The Committee would determine which regulations are actually mandated in law by Congress and which were established by EPA without congressional approval.”

Dr. Lehr estimates the EPA’s federal budget would be reduced from $8.2 billion to $2 billion. Staffing would be reduced from more than 15,000 to 300 and that staff would serve in a new national EPA headquarters he recommends be “located centrally in Topeka, Kansas, to allow the closest contact with the individual states.” The staff would consist of six delegate-employees from each of the 50 states.”

“Most states,” says Dr. Lehr, “will enthusiastically embrace this plan, as their opposition to EPA’s ‘regulatory train wreck’ grows and since it gives them the autonomy and authority they were promised when EPA was first created and the funding to carry it out.”

The EPA was a good idea when it was created, the nation’s air and water needed to be cleaned, but they have been at this point. Since then, the utterly bogus “global warming”, now called “climate change”, has been used to justify a torrent of EPA regulations. The science the EPA cites as justification is equally tainted and often kept secret from the public.

“It’s time for the national EPA to go,” says Dr. Lehr and I most emphatically agree. “All that is missing is the political will.”

© Alan Caruba, 2014

RELATED ARTICLE: Fight Heats Up Over EPA Sabotage of Alaska Gold Mine

Response to Senator Bernie Sanders on the Keystone Pipeline

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Dear Senator Sanders:

As I was growing up one of the things I learned that helped this country become as successful as it did was by having cheap energy sources. Amazingly, the government that helped support achieving cheap energy is now so full of communists such as yourself and many democrats including the president who are trying to cripple the country and drive energy costs high so alternatives like wind and solar are comparably priced since their production costs resist being lowered. High energy costs drive up the cost of all goods and services.

A second thing you mention is the transporting of tar sands oil as being dangerous to transport by pipeline. Are you aware of the tens of thousands of miles of oil pipeline we have in the country today which is the safest form of transport there is.

You say there would be great envrionmental damage if the pipeline would be completed since greenhouse gases emitted are greater. I suppose you stand side by side with the former communists now posing as environmentalist in opposing Keystone. The majority of what you refer to in greenhouse gases is CO2 I assume which is what we exhale as we breathe. Perhaps we could offset that increase by enforcing our immigration laws and deporting the millions of illegal aliens that are here exhaling CO2 24 hours a day and stop mass legal immigration. Doesn’t that bother you? Tell me why environmentalists never complain about mass immigration legal and illegal adding to our environmental woes?

You tout wind and solar as real alternatives. What planet are you on? By the way senator, how many birds do the propellers on the wind farms kill annually (over 300K) and how many are killed by solar reflecting and singing feathers causing birds to crash? Why haven’t you and the other environmentalists stood up for the creatures? You and they certainly would be urinating and moaning if oil or gas was killing as many animals.

I could go on but I think you get the point Senator. You and the rest of the communists posing as environmentalists are very selective in what you recognize as a problem. Coincidentally it always has something to do with impeding our progress as a nation.

RELATED ARTICLES:

130 Environmental Groups Call For An End To Capitalism
Climate change hits all Pentagon operations, official says | TheHill

RELATED VIDEO: Environmentalists have declared that global warming can’t be stopped without ending the “hegemonic capitalist system,” saying that cap-and-trade systems and conservation efforts are “false solutions.” Read more.

Climate Catastrophe Cancelled! Geologist Debunks NOAA Climate Report Point-By-Point

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dr-don-easterbrook-mugGeologist Dr. Don Easterbrook, professor emeritus of geology at Western Washington University and author of 150 scientific journal articles and 10 books, including “Evidence Based Climate Science,” issued a point-by-point rebuttal to the new NOAA climate report and the media articles surrounding it.

Live Science: ‘Climate Records Shattered in 2013’ – By Becky Oskin, Senior Writer | LiveScience.com – July 18, 2014 – “The climate is changing more rapidly in today’s world than at any time in modern civilization,” said Thomas Karl, director of NOAA. (NOAA State Of The Climate In 2013: ‘Our Planet Is Becoming A Warmer Place’)

Climate Claim:

“The planet ranged well outside of normal levels in 2013, hitting new records for greenhouse gases.”

Dr. Easterbrook comment: 

“NOT TRUE–CO2 levels for the past 500 million years were consistently greater than 3,000 ppm. 400ppm is abnormally low.

[Climate Depot Related Links: CO2 at 400ppm: ‘Scientists note that geologically speaking, the Earth is currently in a ‘CO2 famine‘ and that the geologic record reveals that ice ages have occurred when CO2 was at 2000 ppm to as high as 8000 ppm. In addition, peer-reviewed studies have documented that there have been temperatures similar to the present day on Earth when carbon dioxide was up to twenty times higher than today’s levels’ – And, a peer-reviewed study this year found that the present day carbon dioxide level of 400 ppm was exceeded — without any human influence — 12,750 years ago when CO2 may have reached up to 425 ppm.]

Climate Claim:

“The levels of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii hit 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in 2013. The worldwide average reached 395.3 ppm, a 2.8 ppm increase from 2012, NOAA reports. (Parts per million denotes the volume of a gas in the air; in this case, for every 1 million air molecules, 400 are carbon dioxide.)”

Dr. Easterbrook comment:

“The CO2 composition of the atmosphere changed by only 0.004% since the onset of recent global warming (1978-2000).”

Climate Claim:

“The major greenhouse gases all reached new record high values in 2013,” said Jessica Blunden, a climate scientist with ERT, Inc., and a NOAA contractor who helped write the report.

Dr. Easterbrook comment:

“So what? If you double nothing (0.004%), you still have nothing!”

Climate Claim:

“Rising sea levels. Sea level continued rising: Boosted by warm Pacific Ocean temperatures (which causes water to expand) and melting ice sheets, sea level rose 0.15 inches (3.8 millimeters), on par with the long-term trend of 0.13 inches (3.2 mm) per year over the past 20 years.”

Dr. Easterbrook:

“NOT TRUE–rates of sea level rise have declined slightly and are about 1.7 mmyr. Sea level has been rising at a relatively constant rate of only ~7 inches per century–that’s 3 1/2 inches in the next 50 years.

Related Links: New paper finds global sea level rise has decelerated 31% since 2002 along with the ‘pause’ of global warming – Published in Nature Climate Change

Latest NOAA mean sea level trend data through 2013 confirms lack of sea level rise acceleration

New paper finds sea level rise has decelerated 44% since 2004 to only 7 inches per century – Published in Global and Planetary Change

Global sea level rise from tide gauges (1.6 mm/year) is half of that claimed from satellites (3.2 mm/year). Which is right? – ‘There is no acceleration of the increase’ – [Climate Depot Note: According to tide gauges, Sea Level is rising LESS than the thickness of one nickel (1.95 mm thick) per year or about the thickness of one penny (1.52 mm thick) a year. According to satellite info it is rising slightly more than two pennies a year (3.04 mm)]

New study finds sea levels rising only 7 in. per century – with no acceleration

Climate Claim:

“The climate is changing more rapidly in today’s world than at any time in modern civilization,”

Dr. Easterbrook comment:

NOT TRUE–Except for the Little Ice Age, all of the past 10,000 years has been 2.5 to 5.5 F warmer than today including much more intense periods of warming. It was warmer and climate changed more rapidly than in recent years during the Medieval Warm Period, as well as during half a dozen other warm periods.

Related Links:  New Paper: Roman & Medieval Warm Periods Were Warmer Than Previously Thought – ‘A paper published in Nature Climate Change finds prior temperature reconstructions from tree-rings ‘may underestimate pre-instrumental [pre-1850] temperatures including warmth during Medieval and Roman times.’ Many reconstructions show temperatures during the Medieval and Roman periods were warmer than the present, and this study suggests they were even warmer than previously thought’

‘More than 700 scientists from 400 institutions in 40 countries have contributed peer-reviewed papers providing evidence that the Medieval Warm Period was real, global, & warmer than the present’

Climate Claim:

“Most parts of the planet experienced above-average annual temperatures in 2013, NOAA officials said. Australia experienced its warmest year on record, while Argentina had its second warmest and New Zealand its third warmest.”

Dr. Easterbrook comment:

“But only by massive tampering with temp records.”

Related Links: Global Temperature Standstill Lengthens: No global warming for 17 years 10 months – Since Sept. 1996 (214 months)

Climate Claim:

“There was a new high-temperature record set at the South Pole, of minus 53 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 47 degrees Celsius).”

Dr. Easterbrook comment:

– 53 degrees F? “That must have caused a lot of ‘melting’!”

Climate Claim:

“Antarctic sea ice hit another record high: On October 1, Antarctic sea ice covered 7.56 million square miles (19.5 million square kilometers). This beats the old record set in 2012 by 0.7 percent. However, even though the Antarctic sea ice is growing, the continent’s land-based glaciers continued to melt and shrink.”

Dr. Easterbrook comment:

“NOT TRUE–total Antarctic ice is increasing.  There is NO melting of the East Antarctic ice sheet which contains more than 90% of Antarctic ice.”

Related links: Earth’s All Time Record High Temp Set in 1913 — Earth’s All Time Record Low Set in 2010 & 2nd All Time Record Low Set in 2013 — ‘What would warmists say if the dates were reversed?’

New paper finds East Antarctic ice sheet will have negative contribution to sea levels over next 200 years – Published The Cryosphere – Paper ‘studies one of the largest ice shelves in East Antarctica and predicts increased accumulation of ice on the surface of the ice shelf will have a net contribution of decreasing sea levels over the 21st and 22nd centuries. 

Oops. New Study finds West Antarctic Ice Sheet outlet glacier being melted by magma – not CO2 global warming after all – Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Climate alarmists make major blunder in reporting Antarctica ice loss results: ‘Total ice loss from latest study is ‘consistent’ with, not ‘double’ prior study measurements’

Climate Claim:

“Arctic sea ice low: The Arctic sea ice extent was the sixth lowest since satellite observations began in 1979. The sea ice extent is declining by about 14 percent per decade.”

Dr. Easterbrook comment:

“Not this past year–it is rebounding.”

Climate Claim:

“Arctic heat, Temperatures over land are rising faster in the Arctic than in other regions of the planet. Fairbanks, Alaska, had a record 36 days with temperatures at 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celsius) or warmer. However, Greenland had a cooler than average summer.”

Dr. Easterbrook comment:

“NOT TRUE–the 1920s and 1930s were warmer in the Arctic than now. This can be claimed only by tampering with past records.”

Climate Claim:

“Melting permafrost: For the second year in a row, record high temperatures were measured in permafrost on the North Slope of Alaska and in the Brooks Range.”

Dr. Easterbrook comment:

“A weather condition brought about by recent shift in the jet stream that produced record-breaking cold in the US.”

Related Links: Alaska Dispatch Dec. 2012: ‘In the first decade since 2000, the 49th state (Alaska) cooled 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit’

New paper finds 4 Alaskan glaciers are about the same size as during the Medieval Warm Period

Alaskan Villages Have Been Sinking Into Permafrost For 70 Years

Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry: Arctic surface temperature anomalies in the 1930’s were as large as the recent temperature anomalies.’

Arctic ‘sea ice extent has varied naturally over the decades with some Russian data suggesting similar or even greater ice loss in some local areas in the 1930s’ – Analysis of Arctic ice: ‘Russian data shows that the [Arctic] ice was just as thin in 1940 as it is now. Models did not predict the record amount of Antarctic sea ice’  

Arctic Study Countered: ‘Studies have found that Arctic temperatures have fluctuated, and are now around the same level as they were in the mid-1930s’ – ‘Scientist Igor Polyakov of the International Arctic Research Center at the U. of Alaska, Fairbanks tracked Arctic temp records from latter part of 19th century until current decade, and found that 1930s marked the warmest time during that period’

Climate Claim:

“Extreme weather: Deadly Super Typhoon Haiyan had the highest wind speed ever recorded for a tropical cyclone, with one-minute sustained winds reaching 196 mph (315 km/h). Flooding in central Europe caused billions of dollars in damage and killed 24 people.

Dr. Easterbrook comment:

“This is weather, not climate!”

Related Links: UN Climate Summit Rejects Its Own Science – Links Typhoon Haiyan to Global Warming – UN Summit Degenerates Into Unscientific Claims to Advance Political Agenda – Climate Depot Special Report

Meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue demolishes claims that Typhoon Haiyan was ‘strongest storm ever’ – ‘Fact: Haiyan is 58th Super Typhoon since 1950 to reach central pressure of 900 mb or lower from historical records’ — Maue: ’50 of 58 Super Typhoons with pressure of 900 mb or lower occurred from 1950-1987 — only 8 in past 25 years’

Strongest storm ever? ‘Haiyan ranks at number 7 among the strongest storms ever to have hit the Philippines’

Extreme Weather: “It is misleading and just plain incorrect to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally,” Professor Roger Pielke Jr. said in his testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Hurricanes: ‘Hurricanes have not increased in frequency, intensity or normalized damage in the U.S. since 1900.

Tornadoes: Tornadoes and tropical cyclones have also not become more intense or frequent since 1950 and 1970, respectfully.

Floods & Droughts: U.S. floods have not increased in frequency or intensity since 1950, according to Professor Roger Pielke Jr., and droughts have become shorter, less frequent, and smaller over the last century. Globally, floods have changed very little in the last 60 years.

Climate Claim:

“The ocean surface continues to warm.”

Four independent data-sets show that for surface ocean temperatures, last year was among the 10 warmest years on record. The North Pacific set a new record.

Climatologist Dr. Tim Ball comment:

“The data prior to the satellite data is extremely questionable. For example, there is the difference in results by water temperatures taken by dipping, leather, wooden and metal buckets. Even the first couple of years of the satellite data was problematic as they got results that were some times 6°C warmer than ocean “ground-truthing” results.  As I recall the major problem was in estimating the effect of particulates in the atmosphere. There was also an issue with the effects of measuring the surface molecular layer from which molecules are constantly escaping in the evaporative cooling process. Then there is question of how much SST data is available through cloud cover?

So, at best we can consider satellite data from 1970. As Don Easterbrook and others note, hardly a significant length in temperatures that can cycle over hundreds and even thousands of years, caused by either solar input changes or circulations within the oceans. Somebody once said economists are trying to predict the tide by measuring one wave. Climate scientists are much worse. Despite all this it is the headline from NOOA’s Karl that will dominate the news and remain in the public mind.”

Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer comments:

“2014 is not quite as warm as the last time we were ramping into El Nino conditions (2009):

Satellite microwave SST anomalies (global) since mid-2002, updated through mid-July 2014.

Satellite microwave SST anomalies (global) since mid-2002, updated through mid-July 2014.

The Nemesis of Agenda21

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Watching left-wing organizations lose their wits denouncing conservatives is always fun and particularly if you know one of their targets. In my case, that would be Tom DeWeese, the founder and president of the American Policy Center; the most expert and outspoken opponent of Agenda21 in the nation.

In the early 1990s I sent him a commentary and he published it in The DeWeese Report, a publication of the Center, and thereafter I served as the Center’s communications director for a while. These days I am on its board of advisors.

AA - Agenda21 - One World OrderHe is a patriot and he lives his love for America by devoting himself to educating people to the dangers of the United Nations Agenda 21 with its emphasis on “sustainable development” and a range of issues involving ill-conceived environmental policies and programs, the importance of private property rights, the threat of federal computer banks to individual privacy rights, as well as issues such as federal education policies in our nation’s schools.

At the heart of Agenda21 is “sustainable development” which is justified by the global warming hoax that is based on reductions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other so-called greenhouse gases. The Earth’s temperature and climate is determined by the sun. The gases of its atmosphere are in flux as oceans absorb and release CO2, and clouds come and go in a constant dynamic of change. What mankind does has virtually no impact on the weather short-term or the climate long-term.

“Sustainable Development”, Tom wrote in “How Global Policy Becomes Local”, “is truly stunning in its magnitude to transform the world into feudal-like governance by make nature the central organizing principle for our economy and society. It is a scheme fueled by unsound science and discredited economics that can only lead modern society down the road to a new Dark Age.”

“It is systematically implemented through the creation of non-elected visioning boards and planning commissions. There is no place in the Sustainable world for individual thought, private property or free enterprise. It is the exact opposite of the free society envisioned by this nation’s founders.”

I told you he was a patriot, didn’t I? Because only patriots feel that passionately about individual freedom, property rights, free enterprise, and all those concepts that make Leftists break out in a cold sweat.

Among the left-wing groups that do not like Tom is the Southern Poverty Law Center and it devotes a lot of time denouncing him. On their website, the SPLC reveals its own agenda and why Tom is the enemy. “For 20 years now, Tom DeWeese has been on a jihad against global plans for sustainable development.” The key word here is “global” as in U.N., not U.S.

Imagine my surprise as I read the SPLC post that said, “Serving on the board of DeWeese’s American Policy Center (is) Alan Caruba” and noting that I blog for the Tea Party Nation. I contribute to their blog section, but I do not blog for the group. It should come as no surprise that the SPLC identifies Tea Party Nation as “a hate group.” It’s a pretty good description of the SPLC!

“DeWeese’s outfit,” says the SPLC denunciation, “is only one of several obsessed with what has become one of the main conspiracy theories of the antigovernment ‘Patriot’ movement.” What’s amusing is the backhanded way SPLC acknowledged his success. “The effect of the fear-mongering fairy tale offered up by DeWeese and other conspiracy theorists have been almost unbelievable. Not only have some counties passed resolutions opposing Agenda21” including the Republican National Committee” in 2012.

DeWeese offers advice to those who visit the APC site on how to stop Agenda21.

If “fear-mongering” includes pointing out that the Earth has been in a cooling cycle for the last seventeen years and that wind and solar power is an illusion costing far more than the value of the electricity it produces, then the SPLC has plenty to worry about.

America is fortunate to have patriots like Tom DeWeese who take its Constitution and its values so seriously that they devote their lives to protecting them.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

RELATED ARTICLE: Pew poll suggests U.S. leads the world in climate change denial

Meteorologists and “climate scientists” — Who are you going to trust?

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We’ve all seen polls of professions that enjoy high credibility with the public – nurses, medical doctors, pharmacists and engineers top the list. At the bottom are car salesmen, Congressmen, advertising people, and stockbrokers. I used to believe that scientists had high credibility. Unfortunately, the group that call themselves “climate scientists” are destroying that credibility, for all scientists. They’re doing it so quickly I can hardly keep up.

There are three examples of reasons for skepticism:

  1. The expensive computer climate models that have cost – literally – billions of dollars to develop have proven to be worthless. They’ve forecast continuous warming for decades, starting in the late 1970’s. But there has been no measurable global warming for the last 17 years, and the count continues, while carbon dioxide (CO2) continues to increase. The physics incorporated in these models is, ipse facto, invalid. That’s the Scientific Method; every hypothesis is tested against an experiment. The hypothesis said global temperature would increase, due to increasing atmospheric CO2. Nope! The “science” in “climate science” doesn’t work. But a recent article in last week’s Wall Street Journal (Confessions of a Computer Modeler, 8 July) also demonstrates that computer models can easily be manipulated to produce any answer wanted. Robert Caprara wrote computerized environmental models for the Environmental Protection Agency. His advice: be skeptical, especially if you’re hearing only one side of the argument. You want “warming”? Twiddle this parameter.
  2. Now another perversion of science – as in “climate science” – has come along, in the form of fraudulent “peer review.” The Wall Street Journal (14 July) and other publications report that SAGE Publishers is retracting 60 articles from the Journal of Vibration and Control after an investigation revealed a “peer review and citation ring.” “It was discovered that the author had created various aliases on SAGE Track, providing different email addresses to set up more than one account. Consequently, SAGE scrutinized further the coauthors of and reviewers selected for Peter Chen’s papers, [and] these names appear to form part of a peer review ring.” In November 2009, just before the Copenhagen IPCC Meeting, there was a major disclosure of emails to and from Hadley Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University, called “ClimateGate.” In it, in a July 8, 2004 email, one scientist assured another that the hypothesis they shared would prevail “even if we have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is!” Perversion of the peer review process has been a problem in “climate science” for a long time.
  3. That’s bad enough, and now a new problem has come to light. Multiple authors now claim that NOAA, and especially NASA, have been changing observations of temperature over many years – warming temperatures from recent years, and cooling temperatures from years before the 1980’s back to the 1940’s.
Illtempadjusts

U.S. Historical Climate Network data. For a larger view click on the graph.

Here’s an example from a leading claimant, Steven Goddard:

“NCDC is doing some impressive adjusting in President Obama’s home state, turning a measured cooling trend into a fake warming trend – by adjusting the data upwards at a spectacular three degrees per century.”

NCDC is the National Climatic Data Center; the data shown is from the US Historical Climate Network. Numerous other authors, after some initial questioning of Goddard’s methods, now agree that the “adjustments” being made are excessive, one sided, and cumulatively in the direction of an apparent “global warming.”

Let’s understand that adjustments to the raw data – the on-the-spot observation of temperature, mostly highly automated – are necessary. That’s because, over many years, our weather observing network has become surrounded by cities and major airports. A study conducted by Anthony Watts and a group of volunteers found that 90% of NOAA weather stations don’t meet NOAA standards for an observing site. You can read Watts’ report on the weather stations they investigated at. Perhaps the worst is the site now located in the parking lot of the University of Phoenix. The standard requires the observing site to be on a natural grass surface, several yards away from buildings or any source of heat. We have observing sites located next to a brick building, next to the outflow from the building air conditioner. At airports, we have observing sites out by the runway, where they get a blast of jet exhaust every few minutes. Those are the gross problems, but the whole phenomenon goes by the moniker of “urban heat island (UHI).” Concrete, asphalt, and brick buildings store heat during the day, and release it during the night; multi-story building air conditioners, cars, buses, pump heat into the urban air.

Remember, we’re trying to rely on data, with a precision of a few tenths of a degree, from this Historical Climate Network to make major policy decisions that will affect – and perhaps seriously damage – our economy for years to come. In addition, the USA, as a major financial supporter of the Third World, controls access to fossil fuel electricity generation in large parts of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa. Such distortion of scientific fact dooms millions of poor African people to continuing poverty, hardship, and a shorter life span. Serious stuff.

So, it’s time to seriously rip those liars at NOAA and NCDC, right? Well, maybe not. NOAA is a Federal bureaucracy, and is subject to some amount of political pressure. I’d like to give NOAA some credit for trying to overcome the handicaps they have to deal with; the Urban Heat Island distortion of the data is serious. They have made a commendable effort to overcome it; it’s called the Climate Reference Network (USCRN). NOAA has completed a triply-redundant, pristine, state-of-the-art climate network nationwide that doesn’t require the adjustments and corrections that confuse older measurements. Here’s the network – you can read documentation and results here.

crn_map

For a larger view click on the map.

There are 114 locations in the continental U.S., with 10 more in Alaska and Hawaii (see map on the right). As you see, there are five in or on the borders of Florida; all are completely automated, in pristine locations, but close enough to existing stations to be easily compared. Credit to NOAA; this is as good as it gets, and this network has been in operation for 10 years now. So, you ask, what does the data show? Glad you asked!

uscrn_avg_temp_jan2004-april2014

For a larger view click on the chart.

I’ve deliberately left off any trend line. The chart on the left is the U.S. temperature anomaly (the difference from average) over the last ten years, January 2005 to April 2014, plotted by NOAA. Sometimes the US average temperature is 4 C above normal (even around February 2012). Sometimes average U.S. temperature is below normal (such as around February 2010). See a trend? Neither do I. It’s weather. Kudos to NOAA for creating such a highly accurate network and to NCDC for putting the data out there. Hmmm, I wonder if Barack knows? It puts the lie to his assertions about climate change.

Medium-range forecast:

Earlier this year, it was expected an El Nino was developing in the Pacific Ocean. In such a situation, the tropical Western Pacific warms, the warming moves east, the storm track into the US drops south, the Santa Monica Pier gets wiped out, California and Arizona and New Mexico and west Texas and Florida get rain.

That forecast was wrong. The El Nino seems to be failing. Unfortunately, the failure of that warm, wet regime makes the long-range forecast worse.

WINTER1415

For a larger view click on the image.

The conditions – mostly oceanic temperatures – that brought the U.S. the “polar vortex” last year are still in place. The Midwest is having a taste of polar vortex this week; Chicago is enjoying the coolth, and there will be remarks about the cool weather at the All-Star baseball game this evening in Minneapolis. It won’t be so enjoyable next December-January-February. Like to see a picture? This chart (right) is from the Icecap.us website, but the proprietor, Joe D’Aleo, is a principal in Weatherbell.com.

You’re seeing a preview of the information he sells to major companies. Doesn’t look good for Florida oranges.

Think I’ll tell Cousin Gwen in Columbus to hunker down. Meanwhile, Obama’s EPA is shutting down coal-fired electricity generating plants in….yes, you guessed it….Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky. Those coal plants were essential in meeting crunch-time electricity needs last Winter. Expect some Barack Blackouts in January.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Pew poll suggests U.S. leads the world in climate change denial
EPA Goes Overboard on Greenhouse Gas Overreach, Supreme Court Rules

Local Opposition Springs Up Against Federal Water Rule

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Federal regulators have stirred up a hornets nest with their proposed expansion of federal power over bodies of water.

The proposed “Waters of the U.S.” (WOTUS) rule would expand EPA’s and the Army Corps’ of Engineers authority over bodies of water beyond the scope of the Clean Water Act (CWA). It would give federal officials more control over how farmers, ranchers, manufacturers, home builders, and local governments can use their property and subject it to new layers of costly reviews and permitting.

This threat has motivated resistance. For example, Nebraska farmers have organized in opposition:

In a show of solidarity, seven Nebraskan farm and ranch groups on Tuesday announced a coalition dubbed Common Sense Nebraska formed to fight the rule, which they called a power grab by the EPA.

“What the EPA is proposing would be very disruptive to farming and ranching,” Nebraska Farm Bureau Federation President Steve Nelson said. “What this proposal does goes well beyond what is necessary to control water quality, and it really begins to be a land control issue. It would affect every possible thing farmers and ranchers could do on the land.”

Nelson said the rule would erode local control and lead to federal regulation of everything from building fences to crop rotation to application of fertilizer and pesticides.

“We’re making a strong effort here to help people understand the best we can what the rule says and encouraging everyone to get involved here and comment on the rule,” he said.

An Arkansas county government is also resistant to the water rule:

The Baxter County Quorum Court passed a resolution Tuesday night expressing opposition to the Environmental Protection Agency and Corps of Engineers proposed rule to clarify, or according to others expand, the definition of navigable waters in the Clean Water Act.

The EPA has said that the proposed rule does not protect any new types of waters that have not historically been covered under the Clean Water Act.

“What we’re reacting to is some of the summations they’ve come up with,” Pendergrass said. “Some of the definitions are not clear.”

According to the EPA, the purpose of the rule is to provide clarity as to what “navigable waters” are.

“It’s a play on words, it’s the legal jargon that they use, and it allows them to interpret it as to what navigable waters is under the Clean Water Act,” Pendergrass said.

Pendergrass said he has not spoken to the EPA. He said that the resolution is what voices his concern and he intends to ensure federal delegation understand his position. He said he thinks several counties are releasing similar resolutions and that it’s a statewide effort.

“Because our economy is based upon the waters we have in Baxter County and surrounding areas, we’re as sensitive to environmental damage to our water as anybody,” Pendergrass said.

Opposition like this has put EPA on the defensive. It’s arguing that the proposed rule is “not a sea change” and will not force farmers to apply for federal permits to work their land. In a blog post, Nancy Stoner, EPA’s Acting Assistant Administrator for Water, writes:

The proposed Waters of the U.S. rule does not regulate new types of ditches, does not regulate activities on land, and does not apply to groundwater. The proposal does not change the permitting exemption for stock ponds, does not require permits for normal farming activities like moving cattle, and does not regulate puddles.

Instead, the proposed rule “will bring clarity and consistency to the process, cutting red tape and saving money.”

However, EPA’s ambiguous language appears to leave the door wide open for a massive expansion of its regulatory authority. In her blog post, Stoner writes that the Clean Water Act [emphasis mine]

didn’t just defend the mighty Mississippi or our Great Lakes; it also protected the smaller streams and wetlands that weave together a vast, interconnected system. It recognized that healthy families and farms downstream depend on healthy headwaters upstream.

WOTUS critics fear that EPA will use this interconnectedness argument to claim authority over ditches and fields that occasionally have standing water, as Sandy Bauers of the Philadelphia Inquirer reports:

The fields on Mark Scheetz’s 22-acre family farm in West Rockhill Township, Bucks County, have ditches, which prevent soil erosion during heavy rains. Ninety percent of the time, they’re dry. But what if the EPA came in and said he couldn’t farm within 150 feet? He’d still have to maintain land he couldn’t use and pay taxes on it.

“The real concern here is that farmers won’t find out which wet spot, which pond, which gully, which ditch is considered to be a water of the U.S. until the EPA or an environmental group brings a legal action against the farmer,” said John Bell, government affairs counsel for the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau. “Farmers deserve a lot more clarity than that.”

A broad coalition of agricultural, construction, manufacturing, housing, real estate, mining, and energy, groups have united to oppose this expansion of federal regulatory power. Now we see that local opposition has sprouted. They all agree that EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers should “Ditch the Rule.”

Follow Sean Hackbarth on Twitter at @seanhackbarth and the U.S. Chamber at @uschamber.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is by photographer: Sam Beebe/Flickr. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Delusional Stalinist “Science”

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It seems appropriate to think about freedom as one aspect of Science – perhaps the most important aspect. After all, the first scientific society, the Royal Society, has as its motto: ”Nullius in Verba.” It’s part of a longer quotation from the poet Horace, saying a person need not be bound by the opinion of his/her master. A member of the Royal Society was free to disagree with the King. The Royal who gave them that charter and his patronage is the under-appreciated Charles II.

Sad to see that the present Crown Prince is the terribly misinformed son of Elizabeth II, Charles, Duke of Wales, who persists in trying to convince the government of his delusions about man-made global warming. Like our own “Constitutional Scholar in the White House” (to quote his press flack), Charles doesn’t seem to understand Britain’s (unwritten) constitution. The Royal Family is a patriotic symbol, a unifying, apolitical embodiment of Britannia, of heritage, of patriotism, of duty. Charles, in a widely reported story in the British Press, has been trying to impose ever more renewable power generation on the population, already grumbling over the cost of electricity.

lysenko

Trofim Lysenko

The so-far classic example of political interference with scientific freedom is the Soviet Union under Stalin and Khrushchev, from 1927 till 1962. Their favored “scientist” was Trofim Lysenko, a minimally educated agronomist whose denial of Mendelian genetics turned Russia and Ukraine from the Breadbasket of Europe to an importer of grain for decades. Millions of Russians went hungry and thousands died of starvation. In the process, several thousand trained biologists were fired, imprisoned, or executed. Nikolai Vavilov was disgracefully dismissed from the presidency of the Agriculture Academy in 1938 and died in prison in 1940. Before the Bolsheviks, in the early 1900’s, two Russian biologists had received Nobel prizes; Russia was not a scientific backwater during  freedom.

Darwin had hypothesized that “… in the struggle for existence, …, favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species….” It’s important to realize that Darwin had no identified mechanism by which such a variation was transmitted to offspring; Gregor Mendel’s experiments with pea plants remained unknown for decades, and Darwin’s hypothesis was widely rejected. Genes, deduced from Mendel’s data, made Darwin’s evolution mechanism feasible. The American John Hunt Morgan (Nobel laureate) identified genes in 1933 as units of chromosomes.

Marxism-Leninism, however, rejected any ideal laws that exist independently of matter; genes, God and “absolute ideas” do not exist. The ideal Soviet Man could be formed to be whatever the state wanted; a human is a tabula rasa, to be written by society. Lysenko was clever enough to offer a biological version; under Lysenko’s theory of agriculture, Southern plants could be trained to grow in the North, cows could be trained to give fatter milk, rye could be transformed into wheat and wheat into barley, and hens could lay hybrid eggs after fertilization by several roosters. Mendelian theory was just Bourgeois corruption. This was music to Stalin’s ears and to the commisars that were installed at all levels of science. The damage to Russian science persists to this day; Amazon publishes a book on the subject, and Wikipedia has lots on Lysenko.

Today, in America, we have a similar situation. An arrogant ideologue in the White House, with no scientific training, claims that man-made climate change is the greatest crisis facing humanity (not a claim by the IPCC). Those who disagree are “members of the flat Earth Society.” Before I continue my rant, let’s remember a little perspective: there has been NO global warming for 17+ years, the 100+ climate forecast models of the IPCC have all been wrong in forecasting various degrees of heating, Antarctic Sea Ice is at record levels (2.3 million sq kilometers above average), severe Atlantic hurricanes are rare, tornadoes last Summer were at a record low….there’s more, but the scientific method – comparing hypothesis with experimental data – no longer matters  to Obama, as it didn’t to Stalin. The cruel irony is that American “climate scientists” did this to themselves; Russian scientists at least tried to fight back against Stalin. Let’s hope no Americans freeze this Winter due to Obama’s restrictions on energy.

Peggy Noonan has an amusing weekend column, The Daydream and the Nightmare, accompanied by a sketch of Obama (the daydream) imagining his ugly head on Mt. Rushmore (the nightmare).  Noonan marvels that any president, golfing and traveling constantly, could be so unconcerned about the complete failure of both his domestic and foreign policy endeavors; she draws the conclusion that Obama considers them successful:

“He thinks he is right about his essential policies. He is steering the world toward not relying on America. He is steering America toward greater dependence on and allegiance to government. He is creating a more Federally-controlled, Washington-centric nation that is run and organized by progressives. He thinks he’s done his work, set America on a leftward course, and though his poll numbers    are down now, History will look back on him and see him as heroic… He is Lincoln, scorned in his time… He’s waiting for History to get its act together and see his true size…”

I give Ms. Noonan a B+ for her column; she missed a lot – the appointment of John Podesta, the recent Nat’l Climate Assessment, the “Risky Business” nonsense from his stooges. Obama’s not through yet; he’s not “running out the clock” as she puts it. The final item on his agenda is much on his mind, and he mentions it every week. He’s out to destroy American industry, to “make the cost of electricity skyrocket”, as he promised to his backers early in 2008 in San Francisco. That’s what the new EPA “carbon pollution” regs are all about. Only two and a half more years to get it done. Another aspect of American exceptionalism to kill.

A few things you may not have noticed (or didn’t hear from the Mainstream Media):

Canada has finally gotten tired of waiting and has voted to build a pipeline from Alberta to British Columbia  where an ocean terminal will transfer “dirty oil sands” black gold to Asia. It will be burned there, much less cleanly than here. Goodbye, Keystone XL; goodbye, 22,000 American jobs; goodbye, energy independence.

om www.americanthinker.com]
Coal may have played an integral role in turning the U.S. into the world’s top economic superpower, but President Obama is actively pushing China, India and other emerging economies to ignore the fuel that powered the Industrial Revolution and instead embrace renewable sources favored by those on the political left.

As part of his passionate push on climate change, the president recently implored developing countries to “leapfrog” old energy sources, which are the primary drivers of carbon emissions. So far, however, there’s little evidence those countries intend to listen to Mr. Obama, with China’s coal consumption, for example, skyrocketing and projected to keep growing for the foreseeable future. The country now accounts for nearly 50 percent of all global coal consumption, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Some energy analysts say that expecting the president’s sermon — in which he urges nations to now do as we say, not as we did for more than a century — to dramatically alter the worldwide energy landscape is a glaring example of the “dream world” that Mr. Obama and his backers in the environmental movement call home. [Honest, folks, I don’t make this stuff up. As I said,  he is delusional. But his EPA will hurt America, which is the goal.]

Antarctic sea ice is at all-time record levels, 2.3 million sq kilometers above normal.

Wait, what?! It’s collapsing any day now; we all heard that last month.

[from http://www.livescience.com/40451-volcanic-co2-levels-are-staggering.html]

“In 1992, it was thought that volcanic degassing released something like 100 million tons of CO2 each year. Around the turn of the millennium, this figure was getting closer to 200. The most recent estimate, released this February, comes from a team led by Mike Burton, of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology – and it’s just shy of 600 million tons. It caps a staggering trend: A six-fold increase in just two decades.”

Hmmmm. The US/NASA  just launched a new satellite, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory -2 (OCO-2). It will be very interesting to see where the major sources of carbon dioxide are. Mount Fuji? Kilauea? Will Obama order somebody to shut them down?

Numerous solar physicists, Russian and American, have pointed out that solar activity, measured by sunspots and by geomagnetic field strength measurements, is decreasing, both long term,  over several solar cycles and over the declining current cycle. Several have claimed that terrestrial temperature must soon go down, i.e., Earth cooling lies ahead in the near future. Arm waving as far as I’ve been concerned.

But an Aussie scientist, David Evans, claims to have a statistical model, based on past records of solar activity and Earth temperature. It should be released, as an Excel spreadsheet, in a few weeks. Science is based on the ability to DISPROVE a hypothesis. Evans may turn out to be wrong – like the quacks who claim CO2 controls the climate – but it’s a starting point. BTW, climate history shows that the decline into a glacial age is usually slow, over several hundred years. I’ll let you know if anything seems to verify.

International Climate Skeptics Gather in Las Vegas

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From July 7th to 9th, the Ninth International Conference on Climate Change will convene in Las Vegas in a dramatic demonstration that “global warming” was a huge hoax and the claims that “climate change” is responsible for everything are a continuation of that fraud.

As a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based free market think tank, I attended its first climate change conference held in New York in 2009 to dispute the “science” advancing global warming. I have been writing about the hoax that gained momentum since James Edward Hansen testified before congressional committees in 1988. From 1981 to 2013 Hansen had been the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Along with other government agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA has been producing data that routinely tampers with climate statistics to maintain the hoax that gained an international platform with the creation of the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1998.

In June a Pew Research Center poll announced that 35% of Americans say there is not enough solid evidence to suggest mankind is warming the Earth while another 18% says the world has warmed due to “natural patterns” and not human activity. That’s a total of 53% who disagree with the lies about climate change being told by President Obama and a host of politicians and scientists who have received millions to maintain the hoax. The poll also noted that 40% of Americans still believe that mankind is causing the planet to warm. They likely represent the cohort that has graduated from American schools whose curriculum has taught the Al Gore version of science.

Among the participants in Heartland’s 9th conference are Habibulio Abdussamatov, a Russian astrophysicist; Sonya Boehmer-Christiansen, a research analyst from Great Britain; Fred Goldberg, an associated professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden; Madhav Khandekar, a research analyst from Environment Canada; William Kinimonth who worked with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology for 38 years; and Lord Christopher Monckton, Viscount of Brenchley, a chief policy advisor to the Science and Public Policy Institute. They will be joined by American scientists, longtime skeptics of the hoax, often called “deniers” by those advocating it.

It is doubtful that the U.S. media will give much, if any, news coverage of the conference, but the eight previous conferences have done much to debunk and dispel the deluge of lies about the Earth’s climate.

Leading Heartland has been its president, Joseph Bast, who asks “How can there be a ‘scientific consensus’ on the causes or consequences of climate change when thousands of scientists, economists, and policy experts attend conferences devoted to expressing the opposite theme, that the science is still unsettled and climate change is not a crisis?” In May Bast was joined by research scientist, Roy Spencer, in a Wall Street Journal commentary that debunked the lie that 97% of scientists support climate change, noting that “surveys of meteorologists repeatedly find a majority oppose the alleged consensus.”

Heartland has been a sponsor of the Non-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, a rival to the UN’s IPCC that continues to issue reports filled with claims of climate-related threats to mankind. The Obama administration recently released its National Climate Assessment echoing the IPCC claims, blaming all climate events on humankind. Common sense tells us that that events like Hurricane Arthur are natural and reflect the 4.5 billion year old Earth’s ongoing and ever-changing climate cycles.

Indeed, the Earth has been in a cooling cycle for seventeen years, something the climate change advocates are calling “a pause” in their global warming claims. Unknown to most Americans is that the Earth is at the end of its 11,500 year old interglacial cycle, suggesting that we are all in for a new ice age.

The global warming/climate change hoax is rooted in the claim that “greenhouse gases”, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2) has caused the warming that is not occurring. Ironically, CO2 continues to accelerate in the atmosphere and, rather than a cause for concern, represent very good news for every piece of vegetation from crops to forests as it is as vital to their existence as oxygen is for humans and all other animals. The Earth has had periods when its presence was much higher.

The conference expects to draw several hundred attendees this year, but those who want to follow its panels, lectures, and discussions can do so via the Heartland website that will live-stream them. It can be followed as well via Twitter @HeartlandInst and on Facebook at Facebook.com/Heartland using the hashtag #ICCC9. Heartland will post the sessions on its YouTube page after the conference ends.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to the skeptics who have courageously disputed the global warming/climate change hoax and to The Heartland Institute that has provided a platform for them to gather to continue their efforts to educate a public that has been deluged by a massive deception.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

EDITORS NOTE: Click here for videos for all eight previous International Conferences on Climate Change.

Open letter to CEO of Nextera Energy on Smart Meters

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Mr. James L. Robo
Chairman and Ceo
Nextera Energy, Inc.

Re:   Are Smart Meters Really the Intelligent Choice

Dear Mr. Robo,

Did you read where FPL spent $800,000,000.00 to buy smart meters for 4.5 million customers and is installing them at no charge along with 10,000 intelligent devices to move the information around because they say it will be a huge benefit to their customers? Now I have read over the huge customer benefits touted by FPL as being able to monitor your electric power usage even by the hour but see nothing else! Wow, that is exactly what I’m sure all people have been waiting for the ability to do. There will probably be block parties formed to watch the results and experiment with turning appliances on and off to monitor usage. I wonder how society ever survived without it and perhaps could become as big a fad as the hula hoop.

If that is true I am sure you would agree Mr. Robo that this would be the first time a company acted so benevolently towards its millions of customers and a utility no less. As I mentioned in my previous letter they are so hell bent on being benevolent to the customers they are penalizing the people staring the gift horse in the mouth though the people declining didn’t consume $1.00 of the $800 Million FPL spent.

Did you read the utility is portraying itself as a real environmentally conscious company even using Agenda 21 words like sustainability and renewable?

Did you read where they tout they have the largest wind and solar portfolio in the Country? Now that might rate a pat on the head from President Obama for battling the evil climate change hoax he is bound and determined to push as an agenda so he can soak consumers even more through eliminating evil carbon that we exhale as we breathe. It is the consumer who pays though.

Did you read where smart people are wondering how much more expensive their electricity is since the cost to produce a KW of electricity is several times higher through solar or wind than through fossil fuels? In the brochure lauding the environmental tilt of the company and patting themselves on the back about how environmentally pure they are they fail to mention an important thing; the hundreds of thousands of birds chopped up by the rotor blades and the birds killed by wings singed from the solar heat causing them to crash and die every year. I suppose they don’t want to ruin the message they are putting out and want to portray to the public since some might get upset that even bald eagles are victims of the blades yet the federal government is silent in spite of the fact there are severe penalties for killing bald eagles.

Did you read where having all of these additional portals from wind and solar farms opens up the windows available for hackers to penetrate to shut down our grid (blackout)? Even worse, the information is all of the millions of smart meters the utility installed also are a path for penetrating the system to shut it down!

So Mr, Robo, it appears the utility that is so proud of its environmental approach to providing “sustainable and renewable” energy that decimates hundreds of thousands of birds every year also is making it dramatically easier for hackers to shut down the grid because of the millions and millions of portals they can now use to penetrate the system. Do you think the utility thought of that before they acquired the largest wind and solar portfolio in the country and installed millions of electronic meters that makes us ever more vulnerable to be attacked by hackers? If that happens, what will the utility say I wonder?

Perhaps the people who refused the meters should be thanked by not increasing the number of portals any further instead of being penalized for not making the grid ever more susceptible for hackers. Would you agree those who declined the meters were really the smart people and those who chose the meter made a dumb choice?

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Obama Continues His Attack on U.S. Energy

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The delay of the Keystone XL pipeline is a perfect example of the way President Obama and his administration has engaged in, not just a war on coal, but on all forms of energy the nation has and needs. Even his State Department admits there is no reason to refuse its construction and, as turmoil affects the Middle East, there is an increased need to tap our own oil and welcome Canada’s.

The latest news, however, is that Canada has just approved the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project, a major pipeline to ship Canadian oil—to Asia.

The pure evil of the delay is compounded by the loss of the many jobs the pipeline—that will not require taxpayer funding—represents to help reduce the nation’s obscene rate of unemployment and to generate new revenue for the nation. That’s what oil, coal, and natural gas does.

Less visible has been the out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency that has, since Obama took office on January 20, 2009, issued 2,827 new final regulations totally 24,915,000 words to fill 24,915 pages of the Federal Register. As a CNSnews article reported, “The Obama EPA regulations have 22 times as many words as the entire Harry Potter series which includes seven books with 1,084,170 words.” Every one of the EPA regulations affects some aspect of life in America, crushing economic development in every conceivable way.

The worst part of the EPA regulation orgy is the fact that virtually all of it is based on a hoax. As reported by James Delingpole, a British journalist, “19 million jobs lost plus $4,335 trillion spent equals a global mean temperature of 0.018 degrees Celsius. Yes, horrible but true. These are the costs to the U.S. economy, by 2100, of the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory war on carbon dioxide, whereby all states must reduce emissions from coal-fired electricity generating plants by 30% before 2005 levels.”

Citing a study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Delingpole reported that the new regulations will cost the economy another $51 billion annually, result in the 224,000 more lost jobs every year, and cost every American household $3,400 per year in higher prices for energy, food, and other necessities.”

This is an all-out attack on industry, business, and the use of electricity by all Americans.

There is absolutely no reason, nor need to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2), a gas on which all life on Earth depends because it is to vegetation what oxygen is to all living creatures. It is the “food” on which every blade of grass depends. More CO2 means more crops and healthier forests.

The EPA’s regulations would yield“Less than two one-hundredths of a degree Celsius by the year 2100.

Disastrously, even the Supreme Court—the same one that signed off on Obamacare as a tax—has not ruled against the EPA’s false assertions about CO2. In late June, however, it did place limits on the EPA’s effort to limit power plant and factory emissions blamed for a global warming that does not exist. The Earth has been cooling for seventeen years, but the Court ruled that the EPA lacked authority in some cases to force companies to evaluate ways to reduce CO2 emissions.

As Craig Rucker, the Executive Director of the free market think tank, CFACT, points out, “The Court served notice that the Executive Branch cannot unilaterally write its own laws. This is an important principle. However, the United States still remains fated to suffer most of the economic damage EPA’s regulations will cause. True reform will require congressional action.”

Thanks to the lies that have been taught about “global warming”, now called “climate change”, in the nation’s schools to a generation of Americans, and the deluge of lies about the environment that have been repeated in the nation’s media, too many Americans still do not make the connection between the use of the nation’s vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas, and their personal lifestyles and the nation’s economic growth.

The attacks on the energy industries by environmental organizations have been attacks on all Americans who turn on the lights or drive anywhere. Their mantra has been “dirty coal” and “dirty oil” along with lies about the way energy industries contribute billions to the nation’s revenue in taxes.

An example of these attacks have been those directed against “fracking”, the short term for hydraulic fracturing, a technology that has been in use for more than a half century and whose development has generated a boom in natural gas these days. Claims about fracking pollution have no basis in fact.

A new book, “The Fracking Truth—America’s Energy Revolution: The Inside, Untold Story”, by Chris Faulkner is well worth reading for the extraordinary way he explains fracking and the facts he provides about energy in America. It is published by Platform Press.

America has huge reserves of coal, oil and natural gas. “This phenomenon of energy abundance and efficiency,” says Faulkner, “makes it almost a certainty that the cost of powering our nation—already a bargain by international standards—is going to become even less of a burden for our economy for many decades to come.” But not if the EPA and other Obama government agencies such as the Department of the Interior have their way.

One example: “According to the American Petroleum Institute, at least 87% of our federal offshore acreage is off-limits to drilling. API commissioned the consultancy Wood Mackenzie to assess the foregone offshore opportunity in specific terms. The upshot: Increased access to oil and gas reserves underlying federal waters could, by 2025, generate an additional 4 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, add $150 billion to government revenues, and create 530,00 jobs.”

“In fact, since 2007, about 96% of the increase in America’s oil and gas production occurred on private lands in the United States. Meanwhile, oil and gas production on federal lands declined to a ten-year low in fiscal years 2011-2012.”

Who is forcing coal-fired electricity plants to close? The Obama administration. Who is denying access to vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas on federal lands? The Obama administration. Who continues to lie about “climate change” pegged to carbon dioxide emissions? The Obama administration. And this is happening as China and India cannot build new coal-fired plants fast enough and Europe abandons wind and solar energy.

Who is the enemy of energy, current and future, in the United States? Barack Obama.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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SLATE: Climate change could have led to the rise of ISIL

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Let’s see: we know that it couldn’t be that the jihadis think that Islamic texts and teachings justify violence and warfare against unbelievers (and apostates and heretics). And we know it couldn’t be that Sunnis in Iraq were never going to acquiesce to Shi’ite rule, and that ultimately their resentments boiled over into all-out jihad. We know that it couldn’t have anything whatsoever to do with Islam, right? So the problems in Iraq must then be attributable to global warming!

“Hot Zone: Is climate change destabilizing Iraq?,” by Eric Holthaus, Slate, June 25, 2014 (thanks to Elizabeth):

This winter was not a good one for farmers in the Fertile Crescent.

A punishing drought hit most of Syria and northern Iraq during what’s normally the wettest time of the year. In the mountains of eastern Turkey, which form the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, snow and rain were less than half of normal. The region has seen one of the worst droughts in decades.

Drought is becoming a fixture in the parched landscape, due to a drying trend of the Mediterranean and Middle East region fueled by global warming. The last major drought in this region (2006-2010) finished only a few years ago. When taken in combination with other complex drivers, increasing temperatures and drying of agricultural land is widely seen as assisting in the destabilization of Syria under the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Before civil war broke out there, farmers abandoned their desiccated fields and flooded the cities with protests. A series of U.N. reports released earlier this year found that global warming is already destabilizing nation states around the world, and Syria has been no exception.

With the ongoing crisis in Iraq seemingly devolving by the day, it’s not a stretch to think something similar could already be underway just next door.

Could there be a connection between climate change and the emerging conflict in Iraq?

The short answer is a qualified yes, according to Frank Femia of the Center for Climate and Security, a Washington-based policy institute advised by senior retired military and national security leaders. He explained in a phone interview:

It’s far too early, considering this is happening in real time, to figure out what is motivating ISIS and its members. Certainly, the natural resource stresses in the region make things worse. Terrorist organizations can try to control those resources and gain significant influence and power. You can’t say climate change is causing ISIS to do what it’s doing, but it [climate change] certainly has a role to play in the region.

Increasing temperatures may also be playing a role in the recent uptick in violence. A study published last year in the journal Science showed a strong connection between high temperatures and political instability, like civil wars, riots, and ethnic violence, though the cause is not well known. A previous study has linked dehydration with decreased cognitive performance and increased levels of anxiety.

Sure enough, this year has been unusually hot so far in Iraq with the March-April-May season ranking as the warmest on record across much of the country. (Reliable records from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration date back to 1880.) The emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria around the same time may just be an interesting coincidence, but the implications are important enough for us to consider a broader connection….

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Lenar Whitney: Global Warming is a Hoax

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Conservative for Congress Lenar Whitney denounces “Global Warming” as a myth, designed to give more power to the executive branch, while increasing taxes in a progressive’s dream to regulate every aspect of American life ­ from our light bulbs to our thermostat.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/0BzItCPk5j4[/youtube]

 

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