Fired for ‘Diverging’ on Climate: Progressive Professor’s fellowship ‘terminated’ after WSJ OpEd calling global warming ‘unproved science’

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Dr. Caleb Rossiter was “terminated” via email as an “Associate Fellow” from the progressive group Institute for Policy Studies(IPS), following his May 4th, 2014 Wall Street Journal OpEd titled “Sacrificing Africa for Climate Change,” in which he called man-made global warming an “unproved science.” Rossiter also championed the expansion of carbon based energy in Africa.  Dr.  Rossiter is an adjunct professor at American University. Rossiter holds a PhD in policy analysis and a masters degree in mathematics.

In an exclusive interview with Climate Depot, Dr. Rossiter explained: “If people ever say that fears of censorship for ‘climate change’ views are overblown, have them take a look at this: Just two days after I published a piece in the Wall Street Journal calling for Africa to be allowed the ‘all of the above’ energy strategy we have in the U.S., the Institute for Policy Studies terminated my 23-year relationship with them…because my analysis and theirs ‘diverge.’”

“I have tried to get [IPS] to discuss and explain their rejection of my analysis,’ Rossiter told Climate Depot. “When I countered a claim of ‘rapidly accelerating’ temperature change with the [UN] IPCC’s own data’, showing the nearly 20-year temperature pause— the best response I ever got was ‘Caleb, I don’t have time for this.’”

[Climate Depot Note: Intimidation of skeptical scientists has been well documented. Climate scientist Dr. Lennart Bengtsson — who converted from warmist to skeptic – resigns from skeptical group after ‘enormous group pressure’ from warmists – Now ‘worried about my health and safety’ – ‘Colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship’]

Image of Caleb S. Rossiter

Caleb Rossiter

Climate Depot has obtained a copy of a May 7, 2014 email that John Cavanagh, the director of IPS since 1998, sent to Rossiter with the subject “Ending IPS Associate Fellowship.”

“Dear Caleb, We would like to inform you that we are terminating your position as an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies,” Cavanagh wrote in the opening sentence of the email.

“Unfortunately, we now feel that your views on key issues, including climate science, climate justice, and many aspects of U.S. policy to Africa, diverge so significantly from ours that a productive working relationship is untenable. The other project directors of IPS feel the same,” Cavanagh explained.

“We thank you for that work and wish you the best in your future endeavors,” Cavanagh and his IPS associate Emira Woods added. [Full Text of IPS email is reproduced further below.]

Rosstier’s May 4, 2014 Wall Street Journal OpEd pulled no punches. Rossiter, who holds a masters in mathematics, wrote: “I started to suspect that the climate-change data were dubious a decade ago while teaching statistics. Computer models used by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to determine the cause of the six-tenths of one degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperature from 1980 to 2000 could not statistically separate fossil-fueled and natural trends.”

His Wall Street Journal OpEd continued: “The left wants to stop industrialization—even if the hypothesis of catastrophic, man-made global warming is false.” He added: “Western policies seem more interested in carbon-dioxide levels than in life expectancy.”

“Each American accounts for 20 times the emissions of each African. We are not rationing our electricity. Why should Africa, which needs electricity for the sort of income-producing enterprises and infrastructure that help improve life expectancy? The average in Africa is 59 years—in America it’s 79,” he explained.

“How terrible to think that so many people in the West would rather block such success stories in the name of unproved science,” he concluded his WSJ OpEd.

Rossiter’s and IPS seemed a natural fit, given Rossiter’s long history as an anti-war activist.  IPS describes itself as “a community of public scholars and organizers linking peace, justice, and the environment in the U.S. and globally. We work with social movements to promote true democracy and challenge concentrated wealth, corporate influence, and military power.

But Rosstier’s credentials as a long-time progressive could not trump his growing climate skepticism or his unabashed promotion of carbon based fuels for Africa.

Rossiter’s website describes himself as “a progressive activist who has spent four decades fighting against and writing about the U.S. foreign policy of supporting repressive governments in the formerly colonized countries.”

“I’ve spent my life on the foreign-policy left. I opposed the Vietnam War, U.S. intervention in Central America in the 1980s and our invasion of Iraq. I have headed a group trying to block U.S. arms and training for “friendly” dictators, and I have written books about how U.S. policy in the developing world is neocolonial,” Rossiter wrote in the Wall Street Journal on May 4.

Rossiter’s Wall Street Journal OpEd continued: “The left wants to stop industrialization—even if the hypothesis of catastrophic, man-made global warming is false. John Feffer, my colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote in the Dec. 8, 2009, Huffington Post that ‘even if the mercury weren’t rising’ we should bring ‘the developing world into the postindustrial age in a sustainable manner.’ He sees the ‘climate crisis [as] precisely the giant lever with which we can, following Archimedes, move the world in a greener, more equitable direction.”

“Then, as now, the computer models simply built in the assumption that fossil fuels are the culprit when temperatures rise, even though a similar warming took place from 1900 to 1940, before fossil fuels could have caused it. The IPCC also claims that the warming, whatever its cause, has slightly increased the length of droughts, the frequency of floods, the intensity of storms, and the rising of sea levels, projecting that these impacts will accelerate disastrously. Yet even the IPCC acknowledges that the average global temperature today remains unchanged since 2000, and did not rise one degree as the models predicted.

[ … ]

“But it is as an Africanist, rather than a statistician, that I object most strongly to ‘climate justice.’ Where is the justice for Africans when universities divest from energy companies and thus weaken their ability to explore for resources in Africa? Where is the justice when the U.S. discourages World Bank funding for electricity-generation projects in Africa that involve fossil fuels, and when the European Union places a ‘global warming’ tax on cargo flights importing perishable African goods?”

Full reprint of “termination” email from Institute for Policy Studies:

—–Forwarded Message—–
From: John Cavanagh
Sent: May 7, 2014 9:51 PM
To: Caleb Rossiter
Cc: Emira Woods, Joy Zarembka
Subject: Ending IPS Associate Fellowship

Dear Caleb,

We would like to inform you that we are terminating your position as an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. As you know, Associate Fellows at IPS are sponsored by an IPS project director or by the director. In your case, both of us sponsored your Fellowship. Unfortunately, we now feel that your views on key issues, including climate science, climate justice, and many aspects of U.S. policy to Africa, diverge so significantly from ours that a productive working relationship is untenable. The other project directors of IPS feel the same.

I (John) have worked with you on and off for two decades and I admire the project you did on Demilitarization and Democracy through IPS. I also admire the work you did on Capitol Hill with Rep. Delahunt. Both of us have worked with you in other capacities over the years with strong mutual respect. We thank you for that work and wish you the best in your future endeavors.

If you would like to meet with us in person, we are available. John will be in Berlin from Thursday afternoon through Monday evening, but could meet after that. Emira is here over the next week if you’d like to meet sooner.

Best regards,

John and Emira

End full reprint of IPS termination email.

Climate Depot’s Coverage of Rossiter’s WSJ article:

Caleb Rossiter: Sacrificing Africa for Climate Change: ‘Western policies seem more interested in carbon-dioxide levels than in life expectancy’ – The left wants to stop industrialization—even if the hypothesis of catastrophic, man-made global warming is false. John Feffer, my colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote in the Dec. 8, 2009, Huffington Post that “even if the mercury weren’t rising” we should bring “the developing world into the postindustrial age in a sustainable manner.” He sees the “climate crisis [as] precisely the giant lever with which we can, following Archimedes, move the world in a greener, more equitable direction.”

Dr. Rossiter’s full WSJ OpEd, reprinted with permission of Dr. Rossiter. 

Sacrificing Africa for Climate Change

Western Policies Seem More Interested in Carbon-dioxide Levels than in Life Expectancy

Caleb S. Rossiter

May 5, 2014, Wall Street Journal Editorial Page

Every year environmental groups celebrate a night when institutions in developed countries (including my own university) turn off their lights as a protest against fossil fuels. They say their goal is to get America and Europe to look from space like Africa: dark, because of minimal energy use.

But that is the opposite of what’s desired by Africans I know. They want Africa at night to look like the developed world, with lights in every little village and with healthy people, living longer lives, sitting by those lights. Real years added to real lives should trump the minimal impact that African carbon emissions could have on a theoretical catastrophe.

I’ve spent my life on the foreign-policy left. I opposed the Vietnam War, U.S. intervention in Central America in the 1980s and our invasion of Iraq. I have headed a group trying to block U.S. arms and training for “friendly” dictators, and I have written books about how U.S. policy in the developing world is neocolonial.

But I oppose my allies’ well-meaning campaign for “climate justice.” More than 230 organizations, including Africa Action and Oxfam, want industrialized countries to pay “reparations” to African governments for droughts, rising sea levels and other alleged results of what Ugandan strongman Yoweri Museveni calls “climate aggression.” And I oppose the campaign even more for trying to deny to Africans the reliable electricity–and thus the economic development and extended years of life–that fossil fuels can bring.

The left wants to stop industrialization–even if the hypothesis of catastrophic, man-made global warming is false. John Feffer, my colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote in the Dec. 8, 2009, Huffington Post that “even if the mercury weren’t rising” we should bring “the developing world into the postindustrial age in a sustainable manner.” He sees the “climate crisis [as] precisely the giant lever with which we can, following Archimedes, move the world in a greener, more equitable direction.”

I started to suspect that the climate-change data were dubious a decade ago while teaching statistics. Computer models used by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to determine the cause of the six-tenths of one degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperature from 1980 to 2000 could not statistically separate fossil-fueled and natural trends.

Then, as now, the computer models simply built in the assumption that fossil fuels are the culprit when temperatures rise, even though a similar warming took place from 1900 to 1940, before fossil fuels could have caused it. The IPCC also claims that the warming, whatever its cause, has slightly increased the length of droughts, the frequency of floods, the intensity of storms, and the rising of sea levels, projecting that these impacts will accelerate disastrously. Yet even the IPCC acknowledges that the average global temperature today remains unchanged since 2000, and did not rise one degree as the models predicted.

But it is as an Africanist, rather than a statistician, that I object most strongly to “climate justice.” Where is the justice for Africans when universities divest from energy companies and thus weaken their ability to explore for resources in Africa? Where is the justice when the U.S. discourages World Bank funding for electricity-generation projects in Africa that involve fossil fuels, and when the European Union places a “global warming” tax on cargo flights importing perishable African goods? Even if the wildest claims about the current impact of fossil fuels on the environment and the models predicting the future impact all prove true and accurate, Africa should be exempted from global restraints as it seeks to modernize.

With 15% of the world’s people, Africa produces less than 5% of carbon-dioxide emissions. With 4% of global population, America produces 25% of these emissions. In other words, each American accounts for 20 times the emissions of each African. We are not rationing our electricity. Why should Africa, which needs electricity for the sort of income-producing enterprises and infrastructure that help improve life expectancy? The average in Africa is 59 years–in America it’s 79. Increased access to electricity was crucial in China’s growth, which raised life expectancy to 75 today from 59 in 1968.

According to the World Bank, 24% of Africans have access to electricity and the typical business loses power for 56 days each year. Faced with unreliable power, businesses turn to diesel generators, which are three times as expensive as the electricity grid. Diesel also produces black soot, a respiratory health hazard. By comparison, bringing more-reliable electricity to more Africans would power the cleaning of water in villages, where much of the population still lives, and replace wood and dung fires as the source of heat and lighting in shacks and huts, removing major sources of disease and death. In the cities, reliable electricity would encourage businesses to invest and reinvest rather than send their profits abroad.

Mindful of the benefits, the Obama administration’s Power Africa proposal and the World Bank are trying to double African access to electricity. But they have been hamstrung by the opposition of their political base to fossil fuels–even though off-grid and renewable power from the sun, tides and wind is still too unreliable, too hard to transmit, and way too expensive for Africa to build and maintain as its primary source of power.

In 2010 the left tried to block a World Bank loan for a new coal-fired plant in South Africa. Fortunately, the loan was approved (with the U.S. abstaining). The drive to provide electricity for the poor has been perhaps the greatest achievement of South Africa’s post-apartheid governments.

Standing on the mountainside at night in Cape Town, overlooking the “Coloured” township of Mitchell’s Plain and the African township of Khayelitsha, you can now see a twinkling blanket of bulbs. How terrible to think that so many people in the West would rather block such success stories in the name of unproved science.

Rossiter directs the American Exceptionalism Media Project. He is an adjunct professor at American University and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Climate Depot’s Related Links:

Coverage of Dr. Rossiter & IPS: ‘It’s climate apostasy again’: ‘Institute for Policy Studies terminates skeptic who cares about Africans more than climate modelers’

‘There are many issues swirling round here – the good intentions of the “progressives” and the evil that flows from it, their startling ability to turn a blind eye to the suffering of Africans, their inability to deal with dissent, their closed minds. What a depressing scene with which to start the day.’

Irony Alert! Coal-Fired Train Featured on White House Christmas Ornament

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The Obama White House may think coal isn’t good enough to power our economy, but it must think it’s good enough to add some Christmas cheer.

While the Obama administration gave coal producers and electricity generators an early lump of coal after EPA released proposed carbon regulations, a coal-fired train is the star of the 2014 White House Christmas ornament.

2014 White House Christmas Ornament Features a Coal-Fired Train

 As the White House Historical Association explains, the ornament is the first to be composed of two pieces [emphasis mine]:

The locomotive is a detailed miniature replica of one of several steam-powered locomotives that pulled the Presidential Special; it is attached to the coal car that held its fuel. The other miniature car is the Superb, the president’s private heavyweight Pullman car. The last car on the Special, the Superb was outfitted with a public address system. President Harding made appearances and delivered speeches at stops across the country from a platform at the back of the car.

President Warren Harding’s transcontinental speaking and sightseeing tour inspired the design.

The ornament reminds us that just as it powered the trains that tied America together into an economic powerhouse, coal still plays a critical role in fueling America’s economy. According to the Energy Information Agency, more electricity is produced by coal (37%) than any other energy source. It’s the backbone of affordable, reliable electricity.
Electricity generation by energy source.

Source: Energy Information Administration

The United States possesses coal reserves that can last for nearly three centuries. The attacks on this abundant energy source by regulators will mean lost jobs, slower economic growth, higher electricity costs, and a less reliable electrical grid.

President Obama said in 2008 while campaigning, “If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them.” However, trinkets depicting coal apparently are acceptable.

The ornament is a lovely decoration sure to add character to anyone’s Christmas tree, even of those whose jobs will be lost because of federal regulations pushing coal use out of the economy.

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

As Obama EPA Regulations begin, more Scientists Reverse Belief in Global Warming

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Climate Depot statement: “As President Obama is stepping up his “historic” effort to attempt to legislate weather and climate through EPA regulations, scientists from around the world continue to reassess the scientific claims of man-made global warming and are reversing themselves or are becoming more skeptical.” (The latest scientist is below. More scientists in the “related links” section.)

Prominent Scientist Dr. Daniel Botkin, who has studied climate change for 45 years, told the Committee in Q&A: 

‘I have been concerned about global warming since 1968 and in the 1980s, it looked like the weight of evidence lent towards human induced climate change, to a significant extant, and since then it’s moved against it.’

Later in the hearing, Botkin elaborated: ‘I was concerned that there was a human induced climate warning and I gave talks and TV interviews that said that, but since the middle of the 1990s, there is evidence that is running against that.

For example the temperature change is not tracking carbon dioxide very well. Then there is the information from the long term antarctic ice core and some from recent paper in the arctic,  that suggest that carbon dioxide does not lead temperature change,  it may actually lag it significantly or may not lead it at all, and if that is the case that is still an open but important scientific evidence.

So there are several lines of evidence that are suggesting that it (AGW) is a weaker case today, not a stronger case.’

Full Committee Hearing – Examining the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Process
2318 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515 | May 29, 2014 11:00am
Examining the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Process
WRITTEN TESTIMONY TO THE HOUSE SUBCOMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY.
MAY 29, 2014

Dr. Daniel Botkin, Professor Emeritus, Department of  Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara (Full Bio here)

Selected Excerpts: (Full Testimony here)

Since 1968 I have published research on theoretical global warming, its potential ecological effects, and the implications for people and biodiversity. I have spent my career trying to help conserve our environment and its great diversity of species. In doing so I have always attempted to maintain an objective, intellectually honest, scientific approach in the best tradition of scientific endeavor. I have, accordingly, been dismayed and disappointed in recent years that this subject has been converted into a political and ideological debate.

Related Links: 

Climate Depot Note: Dr. Botkin joins many other scientists who recently publicly dissented from man-made climate fears.The global warming movement continues to lose scientists, many formerly with the UN IPCC.

Another Prominent Scientist Dissents: Environmental physicist Dr. Jean-Louis Pinault: ‘This is a very uneven debate, skeptics cannot enforce their arguments in scientific journals that are subject to censorship’ – Declares AGW has produced an ‘economic and political media frenzy unprecedented in the history of science’

Another Dissenter: Geoscientst & former UN Consultant Dr. David Kear declares warming fears ‘based on unfounded unscientific beliefs’ – An ‘innocent gas, CO2, has been demonized and criminalized’

Another Prominent Scientist Dissents! Fmr. NASA Scientist Dr. Les Woodcock ‘Laughs’ at Global Warming – ‘Global warming is nonsense’ Top Prof. Declares

Flashback: UN IPCC Lead Author Dr. Richard Tol admits no global warming for 17 years – Rips bias in IPCC – UN’s ‘inbuilt alarmism made me step down’ – ‘By the time the report was finished, however, it hadn’t warmed for 17 years’

Green Guru James Lovelock on Climate Change: ‘I don’t think anybody really knows what’s happening. They just guess’ – Lovelock Reverses Himself on Global Warming

More Than 1000 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims – Challenge UN IPCC & Gore

Top Swedish Climate Scientist Says Warming Not Noticeable: ‘The warming we have had last a 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all’ – Award-Winning Dr. Lennart Bengtsson, formerly of UN IPCC: ‘We Are Creating Great Anxiety Without It Being Justified’

‘High Priestess of Global Warming’ No More! Former Warmist Climate Scientist Judith Curry Admits To Being ‘Duped Into Supporting IPCC’ – ‘If the IPCC is dogma, then count me in as a heretic’

German Meteorologist reverses belief in man-made global warming: Now calls idea that CO2 Can Regulate Climate ‘Sheer Absurdity’ — ‘Ten years ago I simply parroted what the IPCC told us’

UN Scientists Who Have Turned on the UN IPCC & Man-Made Climate Fears — A Climate Depot Flashback Report – Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” – UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.

‘Some of the most formidable opponents of climate hysteria include politically liberal physics Nobel laureate, Ivar Giaever; Freeman Dyson; father of the Gaia Hypothesis, James Lovelock — ‘Left-center chemist, Fritz Vahrenholt, one of the fathers of the German environmental movement’

Flashback: Left-wing Env. Scientist Bails Out Of Global Warming Movement: Declares it a ‘corrupt social phenomenon…strictly an imaginary problem of the 1st World middleclass’

Global Temperature Update: No global warming at all for 17 years 9 months

Congressional hearing links:

UN IPCC Lead Author Dr. Richard Tol Rips IPCC at Congressional Hearing: ‘The IPCC leadership has in the past been very adept at putting troublesome authors in positions where they cannot harm the cause. That practice must end’

UN IPCC Lead Author Dr. Richard Tol Rips 97% consensus claim: ‘The 97% is essentially pulled from thin air, it is not based on any credible research whatsoever’ – IPCC Lead Author Trashes 97% Consensus claims: UN IPCC Lead Author & University of Sussex economist Dr. Richard Tol: ‘Science is, of course, never settled.’
Tol: ‘The 97% estimate is bandied about by basically everybody.  I had a close look at what this study really did. as far as I can see, The estimate just crumbles when you touch it. None of the statements in the papers are supported by the data that’s in the paper. The 97% is essentially pulled from thin air, it is not based on any credible research whatsoever.

Flashback: UN IPCC Lead Author Dr. Richard Tol admits no global warming for 17 years – Rips bias in IPCC – UN’s ‘inbuilt alarmism made me step down’ – ‘By the time the report was finished, however, it hadn’t warmed for 17 years’

UN IPCC Lead Author Dr. Richard Tol: ‘One of the startling facts about climate change is that there are very few facts about climate change. Climate change is mainly something of the future so we are really talking about model projections’

Congressional hearing: Scientists say UN IPCC puts politics before science, needs reform – IPCC Lead Author Tol: ‘Competent people are excluded because their views do not match those of their government’

UN Lead Author Michael Oppenheimer Admits to Congress Climate Science Not ‘Settled’: ‘The question of exactly how warm the Earth will become as a result (of rising CO2), that’s not’ settled

Study: Canadian Oil Sands Aren’t Increasing U.S. Carbon Emissions

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A mining truck carries oil sands in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. Photographer: Jimmy Jeong/Bloomberg.

Keystone XL opponents say they’re fighting the project because they fear the carbon emissions that would be produced by developing Canada’s oil sands, but a new report undercuts that argument by finding that the oil sands development has resulted in only a fractional increase in them.

Bill McKibben, head of 350.org and the main face behind the anti-pipeline campaign declared in 2011 that Canada’s oil sands are “the earth’s second-largest pool of carbon, and hence the second-largest potential source of global warming gases after the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.”

However, a report by IHS finds that increased development of Canadian oil sands have not had an impact on U.S. carbon emissions. Canada’s National Post reports:

The report, based in part on a focus group meeting held last October in Washington, D.C., with Alberta’s Department of Energy and major oil sands producers, found that between 2005 and 2012, the carbon intensity of the average crude oil consumed in the U.S. “did not materially change,” decreasing by about 0.6%.

That is despite a 75% increase in U.S. imports of oil sands and other Canadian heavy crudes over the same period — to about 2.1 million barrels a day from 1.2 million barrels.

At the same time, U.S. imports of Mexican and Venezuelan heavy crude fell, while production of U.S. tight oil from North Dakota’s Bakken and the Eagle Ford shale in Texas climbed to 1.8 million barrels a day, up from virtually zero in 2005. That helped displace imports of similar crudes from Africa and elsewhere with relatively higher carbon footprints, the report says. U.S. imports from Nigeria fell 64% over the period, it said.

“A lot has changed since 2005,” said Kevin Birn, a director of IHS Energy and leader of the consultancy’s oil sands dialogue in Calgary.

“We’ve had heavy crudes push out heavy crudes that happen to be within the same GHG intensity range, and the same thing’s happened on the light oil side.”

Since we’re on the topic of the Keystone XL pipeline and greenhouse gas emissions, I’ll remind you that the State Department’s economic analysis of the pipeline found that alternative methods of moving oil sands crude—no serious observer thinks they won’t be developed–would result in higher greenhouse gas emissions than from the Keystone XL pipeline.

Remember these facts the next time pipeline protesters get arrested in the name of reducing carbon emissions.

Personal Liberty Digest Poll Results: Marco Rubio — Is Global Warming Fake?

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The total number of people who voted in this poll: 18,134
1) Do you think climate change (global warming) is real or a hoax?
 9%  voted:  Real. Climate change is real as is seen in the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet and in extreme changes in temperature and weather patterns.
 88%  voted:  Hoax. Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the green energy industry, there has been no real scientific proof.
 3%  voted:  I don’t know.
2) Do you believe human-caused greenhouse gases are to blame for extreme weather?
 4%  voted:  Yes, unregulated greenhouse gases caused by humans are causing global warming that is setting off an environmental chain reaction resulting in more extreme weather.
 95%  voted:  No, the climate is and has been historically cooling and warming throughout centuries and humans are not to blame.
 1%  voted:  I don’t know.
3) Do you, like Rubio, believe that global warming regulation and laws will do nothing but destroy the U.S. economy?
 95%  voted:  Yes, global warming laws will make everything more expensive as restrictions will change the way goods can be produced.
 4%  voted:  No, regulations and laws are absolutely necessary as we won’t have an economy if the environment is destroyed.
 1%  voted:  I don’t know.
4) Do you believe the United States should be the leader in solving the world’s climate issues?
 11%  voted:  Yes, the U.S. is the most powerful nation in the world and needs to lead by example.
 85%  voted:  No, the U.S. needs to look out for its own economy and interests.
 4%  voted:  I don’t know.
5) With which political party do you most closely align philosophically?
 2%  voted:  Democrat
 33%  voted:  Republican
 8%  voted:  Libertarian
 34%  voted:  Tea Party
 21%  voted:  Independent
 3%  voted:  Other

Thank you for your participation.

If you haven’t voted click here.

Residents of Sarasota County, FL: Don’t be misled by the claims of self-appointed experts speaking at the UN-sponsored World Environmental Day

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The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) has selected Sarasota County as the North American Host Community for World Environmental Day (WED) 2014.  The June 5th, 2014 WED Sarasota forum will focus on environmental challenges facing coastal communities and “climate change research.”

Among the topics to be addressed at the forum are sea level rise, climate change, developing a “sustainable” business platform for ecotourism in Southwest Florida, and “green” buildings.  Behind each one of these and related themes lies an political agenda that cynically uses trumped-up environmental fears to impose restrictions on homeowners and local businesses and redirects taxpayer money to politically favored “green” projects and products.

Here are a few facts to keep in mind:

  •  Sea Level Rise:  Attendees at the forum can expect to be told that coastal Sarasota is threatened by sea level rise resulting from man-made climate change. In truth, sea levels have been rising globally for millennia, or since the melting of giant ice sheets signaled the end of the last Ice Age.  During that time, sea levels have risen about 400 feet at a fairly constant rate of 7 inches a year.  The rate remained constant even during the Little Ice Age (1400-1850).  Sea level rise shows no association with man-made greenhouse-gas emissions.   See: www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/could-global-warming-slow-sea-level-rise.html
  • Climate Change:  The politically fashionable, but scientifically unproven, notion of human-induced climate change will receive plenty of attention at the WED forum.  Global temperatures have now failed to rise for 17 years despite what alarmists, including those at UNEP, confidently predicted. Severe weather events, including hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires etc, have not been increasing in frequency, but these facts have not kept alarmists, well represented at the WED Sarasota forum, from continuing to spread fear and advocate new restrictions and regulations on energy, transportation, land use, and countless other everyday activities.  See: http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/05/29/scientist-dr-daniel-botkin-tells-congress-why-he-reversed-his-belief-in-global-warming-to-become-a-skeptic-there-are-several-lines-of-evidence-suggesting-that-it-agw-is-a-weaker-case-today-not/
  • Sustainable Business Development:  Presenters at the forum will trumpet the virtues of sustainable business development when it comes to promoting ecotourism in Southwest Florida.  What they won’t tell their audience with any clarity is what they mean by “sustainable.”  Sustainable, it turns out, is the imposition of a top-down regulatory structure, in which appointed government bureaucrats determine what is and is not acceptable development.  See www.cfact.org/2012/02/27/sustainable-development-latest-tool-to-expand-epas-empire/
  • Green Building and Green Economy:  One of the speakers at the forum represents a powerful non-profit organization, the U.S. Green Building Council.  The council is best known for its green building certification system, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).   “Across the United States,” USA Today reported in October 2012, “ the U.S. Green Building Council has helped thousands of developers win tax breaks and grants, charge higher rents, exceed local building restrictions and get expedited permitting by certifying them as ‘green’ under a system that often rewards minor, low-cost steps that have little or no environmental benefit.”  USA Today also reported that the 13,000-member council is “run by architects, builders and building suppliers.  Many specialize in – and profit from – the type of design the council certifies and promotes.  The council collects up to $35,000 in fees for each LEED certification.”  In other words, the council’s members are self-dealers who feather their nests under the guise of protecting the environment. See: www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/10/24/green-building-green-certification/1650517/
  • United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP): Founded in 1972 and headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, UNEP is the UN agency behind the Sarasota WED forum.  In recent decades, UNEP has been at the forefront of those organizations spreading fears about man-made climate change, even though global temperatures have remained flat for 17 years.  UNEP favors the imposition of carbon taxes and the replacement of fossil fuels by unreliable and unaffordable renewable energy, such as taxpayer funded wind and solar.  Do Floridians really want their beaches marred by giant offshore wind farms, which, in addition to being unsightly and inefficient, pose a severe threat to sea birds?  UNEP’s nearly 1,300 full-time bureaucrats are elected by no one and are accountable to no one.  See: www.unep.org/climatechange/

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Teaching Our Children How to Deceive

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There is a grand belief that the education system in the United States, from elementary school to college, is the best that can be and that our children are learning the truth from objective and well informed educators. While many educators are indeed ‘the best’ and worthy of praise (though few get it), the reality is that our system of education in this country is infected with a cancer of progressive thought that not only teaches our children an unbalanced view of the world, but actually teachers them to deceive.

This sad state of affairs has been the product of decades of creeping liberalism and progressive ideology that has taken deep root within the leadership of our education organizations, teachers unions and the current administration in Washington, D.C. The evidence of this affliction is found all around us; in our local and state classrooms and our esteemed, internationally recognized universities. As our children flow through these institutions they cannot but exit with a biased, one-sided understanding of how the world turns and why. This lamentable condition is best evidenced by a study of how we teach climate science.

Every classroom in the state of Florida teaches a version of climate science that derives its scientific basis from text books that in turn have been drafted by information whose source is the myth of man made climate change or in other words the greenhouse gas theory of climate change. This theory was disproved after it was first made famous by Svante Arrhenius in 1896. Yet for political, not scientific reasons, it persists. Future climate scenarios that many teachers have parroted in their lesson plans have come directly or indirectly from twenty years of highly questionable research by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN-IPCC). From a review of its most recent 2007 report which is based on the myth of man’s influence over the Earth’s climate by human CO2 emissions, we can now see that all of their predictions for what our climate should be in 2012 have been wrong. The greenhouse gas theory simply doesn’t work and never has! Yet this report and ones before it have been a primary source of the US education system’s science on the functioning of the Earth’s climate.

In a local Sarasota school, Pine View, this has taken on a disastrous character in teaching our students deception when is comes to the climate. According to an article by Dr. Rich Swier, one science teacher at Pine View not only does not have any formal science education whatsoever, which is indictment enough of the failings of our education system, yet his tool for teaching climate change is to play a DVD of “An Inconvenient Truth” by former VP Al Gore. Not only has this movie and the science behind it been thoroughly discredited, but here we have an excellent example of how we deceive our children through a politically polluted education curriculum. These children will in turn take this false information in their heads for the rest of their lives deceiving many others and later their own children. How tragic!

This is how it starts. If we permit our educators to put invalid and false information in our youngest most impressionable minds, the very nature of our country is changed decades ahead as these future adults cast votes and take up leadership positions or compete for elected office or themselves begin to teach other students.

Regrettably, this sickness within our education system nationally and here in Florida does not stop at the elementary or primary levels but continues through our colleges and universities where progressive teaching is even more entrenched.

My own experience says much about this area of how we teach our children to deceive.

Despite the clear failings of the greenhouse gas theory, it remains the dominant climate theory in Florida’s centers of higher education and in the many “green” science departments of our most prominent and largest institutions. My own credentials in the field of climate science are based on solid research and unlike the UN-IPCC reports, illuminated by proven results. As the father of the “Relational Cycle Theory of Climate Change, or RC Theory for short, I have accrued a track record of correctly made major climate change predictions that exceeds that of the UN, NASA, and NOAA. I have been a White House, Congressional and NASA headquarters adviser  head of a climate science research corporation which includes other recognized researchers, and author of an internationally acclaimed climate science book, “Cold Sun.”

Yet even with these credits I have been denied the opportunity to speak to students at three Florida universities or colleges.

In one case, the University of South Florida, I was at first invited in to speak, participated in setting up a schedule to speak to several classes along with a book signing and then unceremoniously told everything was called off for a reason which was nebulous at best. Apparently after they learned what I was going to talk about and that I was not a tenured PhD at another university, I was deemed not credible.

Though I have asked officials at the University of Central Florida, and Valencia Community College, two of the nation’s largest of their type, if they would like me to speak on the climate, the answer up front without much consideration was “No thanks.” I am convinced that if I were an expert on the greenhouse gas theory and had a copy of Inconvenient Truth to play for the students and willing to spout the politically correct, though scientifically incorrect version of climate change, they would have been begging for me to come on campus. The responses to my offers within the liberal education system here in Florida have been clear. Our best institutions of higher learning only want the deception of man made climate change to be taught and nothing else. It is after all the only kind of university climate research the leadership in Washington is willing to fund.

In the many presentations I have given throughout the state of Florida on the subject of climate change, the audiences have been enthusiastic in their approval. They are the parents and grandparents of the very same students that the Florida education system abuses with a corrupted version of climate science rather than teach what is really happening with the climate. They continue to deceive our children by telling them the Earth is getting warmer, when the truth is that global warming ended years ago. They are taught that sea levels will continue to rise and will swamp our coastal cities by 2100 when all the facts say the rate of sea level rise is rapidly dropping and we will soon see nothing but declining ocean levels as the world’s oceans continue their next natural cycle of cooling. They are unabashed in saying than man controls the climate by industrial CO2 emissions when the true amount of man’s CO2 contribution is insignificant compared to the amount of naturally produced CO2, over which we have zero control. The so-called experts in climate science in Florida’s education system tell their students that the Sun is overheating and threatening us with destructive solar flares when the truth is that the Sun has entered a rare state of “hibernation” or its own version of cooling, from which if history repeats, will bring to the planet decades of record cold climate. We routinely have our young children being told that polar bears are endangered by man’s greenhouse gas emissions – an utter falsehood! By official estimates polar bears have almost tripled in number since the 60’s, and especially in the 80’s and 90’s during the period of what we have called man made global warming!

This grand deception on what we teach our children about the climate is probably repeated in other subject areas. It all comes from an education system that long ago left the world of reality for the true goal of progressive indoctrination that unfortunately ends up teaching our children how to deceive themselves, those around them, and some day deceive their own children.

Predicting the Weather? The Climate? You’re Kidding, Right?

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With some of the most sophisticated computers and satellites at its disposal, the U.S. Weather Service cannot tell you with any certainty what the weather will be in your area two weeks from now. It’s not that they don’t give forecasts beyond that a good try, but when you have to work with computers that cannot determine cloud formation and cover, significant factors, you have to just make your best guess.

Since the 1980s, following a decade in which an ice age was being predicted, the global warming charlatans operating out of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change began to generate predictions of an eminent and threatening period of warming for the Earth and, of course, former Vice President Al Gore became the Predictor-in-Chief for that while also becoming a multi-millionaire doing so.

Then, about seventeen years ago, the Earth began to cool, entering a perfectly natural weather cycle that put an end to the global warming hoax. So the IPCC and the rest of the environmental crowd began to talk about “climate change” instead.

They continued to blame carbon dioxide (CO2)—which they call “carbon pollution”—and the Environmental Protection Agency keeps flogging this lie because it is the basis for its criminal agenda to destroy the economy with hundreds of thousands of regulations over every inch of land and every drop of water in the nation. This week it embarks on its effort to shut down every coal-fired plant in America that provides electricity.

Writing recently in his “blogosphere” at IceCap.us, Joe D’Aleo, a widely respected climatologist, pointed out that “First of all, carbon pollution is ‘soot’ which we don’t have a problem with—the EPA’s own data shows in fact it is well below EPA standards, declining 50% since 1999”

“CO2 which is conflated with soot is a harmless (actually beneficial) gas and every breathe (that) every human emits (contains) 100 times as much CO2 as is in the ambient air. CO2 is critical for plant life and we are at the low end of the scale of CO2 for the earth’s history, just above the survival level needed for plants which require it for photosynthesis—around 280 parts per million.”

So, who are you going to believe? A leading climatologist or a former community organizer, Barack Obama?

It appears that Obama has decided to tell a lot of lies about the climate for the remainder of his second term in office. Having failed to resuscitate the nation’s economy and unable to have any effect on global events as his administration’s scandals mount, Obama has seized upon the IPCC’s lies about the climate to divert our attention from our real problems. They have become the basis for official U.S. policy and behavior.

As the hurricane season from June through November begins, Obama can be found predicting a rise in these storms in the months ahead, but as June arrived, it marked 3,142 days since the U.S. last was hit by a major hurricane. This “drought” of hurricanes is truly unprecedented, dating back to 1900!

Be assured that Obama will be supported by reports from U.S. agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Hurricane Center whose budgets depend on his support. What they won’t tell you is that, thirty years ago, Dr. William Gray, a distinguished meteorologist at Colorado State University found and documented the relationship between the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), commonly just called El Nino that suppresses hurricane activity.

Forecasters are anticipating a strong El Nino this year. It is a phenomenon determined by the ocean and atmosphere in and over the tropical Pacific Ocean. How powerful is it? Its effects are felt around the world, including the Atlantic Ocean where most of the hurricanes that hit the U.S. occur. Its counterpart, La Nina, a cool phase enhances hurricane activity, but that is not going to happen in the months ahead because El Ninos usually last at least 27 months.

If the U.S. Weather Service cannot predict the weather two weeks to a month from now, any predictions regarding the climate—measured in centuries—should be viewed with a very high degree of doubt. It should be noted, however, that the interglacial period between ice ages is about 11,000 to 11,500 years and the current period is reaching its end.

A President using the weather to scare Americans should be viewed with considerable cynicism. Note that Obama keeps referring to the last big storm to hit the East Coast, Sandy, but it was a tropical storm, not a hurricane

The National Center for Public Policy Research has set forth the “Top Ten Reasons Washington Should Not Impose New Global Warming Laws or Regulations.”

There will be dramatic weather events in the months ahead because there are always such events, droughts, storms, tornadoes, floods, forest fires, et cetera. This is how Mother Earth operates and always has.

It comes down to this. If your weatherman tells you it is going to rain tomorrow or in a day or two, bring an umbrella with you. Beyond that, just enjoy the summer.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

What would Jesus do about Global Warming?

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The road to Hell, as we all know, is paved with good intentions. The latest example is the people, many of them religious leaders, who are going to help the poor. How? They’re going to save them from global warming.

For a specific case, consider the current campaign to convince Florida Governor Rick Scott – a previously documented skeptic during the 2010 campaign – to create a plan for dealing with climate change. The campaign is led by Rev. Mitch Hescox, leader of the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN). There’s a petition there to be delivered to Gov. Scott.

Archbishop Thomas G Wenski

Most Reverend Thomas G. Wenski, Miami, FL.

Within my own faith, there’s the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which just released a letter to Gina McCarthy, EPA Administrator, praising the new standards on carbon dioxide emissions to be released on June 2. It’s signed by Most Reverend Thomas G. Wenski, Archbishop of Miami, who is Chairman of the  Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development. The opening paragraph goes as follows:

“I write on behalf of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to address the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to develop standards to reduce carbon pollution from existing power plants and thereby mitigate climate change. The USCCB recognizes the importance  of finding means to reduce carbon pollution. These standards should protect the health and welfare of all people, especially children, the elderly, as well as poor and vulnerable communities, from harmful pollution emitted from power plants and from the impacts of climate change.”

All the dangerous Shibboleths are here – “carbon pollution”, “climate change”, “poor and vulnerable”. It goes on to say:

“As bishops and people of faith, we do not speak as experts on carbon pollution or on the technical remedies to address climate change.”

This is the archtypical Liberal good-intentions approach to public policy. One would think the Catholic bishops, having been double-crossed by Obama on healthcare and the contraception mandate, would be a little cautious in believing his extravagant claims about the havoc being wreaked on us by “severe weather.” Nope.

Or, while admitting a total lack of expertise on this scientific topic, they abjure any responsibility to learn more. Just for the record – in case this comes to Archbishop Wenski’s notice – there has been no increase in severe weather worldwide or in the US, and there’s been no global warming for 16+ years. There have been several US House Science and Technology Committee hearings on this topic; there was one just a few days ago. The four scientists who spoke all agreed the “science is unsettled” and we are unable to forecast the climate. (We can’t even forecast the weather beyond a week.)

In the very different world of faith-based ignorance, the Vatican this month hosted a conference on Sustainability. Apparently Pope Francis plans to release an Encyclical Letter on climate change to the Church in the next year. Expect the message to be:

Climate change has the greatest effect on the poor; As Christians, we have an obligation to help the poor; We can help the poor by stopping climate change.

The first two items are correct. Think of Hurricane Katrina, people who had money and/or automobiles flew or drove out of New Orleans before Katrina hit. The most terrible example was in Bangladesh in 1972, where hundreds of thousands (no, I’m NOT exaggerating) drowned in the 20 foot storm surge from a tropical cyclone.

Item two is the essence of Chapter 25:40 of Matthew’s Gospel:

“[W]hatever you have done for these, the least of my brethren, you have done for me.”

Pretty fundamental Christianity. So why am I concerned? There are two reasons.

First, anyone who thinks we humans can stop climate change by minimizing or eliminating our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is delusional. Recorded climate has changed throughout history, long before industrial CO2 emissions. But even if one believes CO2 is the climate control knob, China is burning more coal than the rest of the world combined (according to the New York Times), and India is following close behind. American CO2 emissions are dwarfed by Third World countries trying to raise their people out of poverty. The CEO of Peabody Coal notes coal has been the fastest-growing major fuel of the past decade and is set to surpass oil as the world’s largest fuel in coming years.

Consider the irony: pagan India and atheistic China are lifting their poor out of poverty by giving them cheap on-grid electricity. First World Christians advocate helping the poor by denying them cheap on-grid electricity, to reduce emissions.

Second, the poor are best helped by lifting them out of poverty – as China, India, and most countries of Latin America are doing. That’s history; that’s what happened in America, Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, Iceland, Israel – the First World. With resources, especially energy, you can mitigate climate change – but not stop it.

But the World Bank won’t fund construction of coal-fired electricity generating plants in sub-Saharan Africa. Worse yet, the Catholic Climate Covenant and other interfaith environmentalists encourage colleges and universities to divest their endowments of fossil fuel assets. In April, America Magazine, a publication of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), carried an article titled Getting Out of Oil. This was followed by a webinar, Catholic Perspectives on Divestment and Reinvestment, led by Doug Demeo, the author of the AmericaMagazine article, and two Catholic theologians, Dr. Erin Lothes and Dr. Richard Miller. In her presentation, Dr. Lothes asks what “a world beyond fossil fuels would look like?”

I can tell Dr. Lothes what “a world beyond fossil fuels would look like” – it would look like the world of 1000 years ago, when it was being rapidly stripped of trees to burn as fuel. You can find a review of the webinar at the National Catholic Reporter.

Reading the smug assurances of Lothes, Miller, and Demeo makes me want to scream with frustration. What makes these intelligent, well-educated people so scientifically naive? I can only conclude that religious faith predisposes one to uncritical acceptance of authority, especially if it’s religious authority. Demeo, Lothes, Miller and other writers on this topic – saving the poor from global warming – accept the premise of human control of climate without demur. Sometimes a Doubting Thomas is a useful member of the congregation.

Aristotle, a pretty smart man, claimed heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. For more than 2000 years, no one (that we know of) bothered to challenge that claim by experiment. Galileo claimed to have done so, from Pisa’s Leaning Tower. Aristotle’s logic was correct, but his assumptions were faulty. As the historian Daniel Boorstein wrote, “The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance; it’s false knowledge.”

The Scientific Method has several principles; the first is to not accept claims about natural philosophy (as it was originally called) without data, experimental results that can be verified by repetition. “The science is all settled” is an oxymoron, though I don’t include Obama and Gore in the ranks of theologians – or even honest men. The 17-year “pause” in the IPCC’s unanimously-predicted warming demonstrates the hypothesis is flawed.

Where is Galileo when we need him?

Protest Against the United Nations in Sarasota, Florida set for Thursday, June 5th

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Sarasota County is hosting the United Nations for World Environment Day. The Sarasota County website states, “Sarasota County has been selected by the United Nations Environment Programme’s Regional Office for North America (UNEP RONA) as the official North American host community for World Environment Day (WED) 2014, to be held on June 5. More than just a single day of environmentally focused events, the WED celebration launches on Earth Day in April and bridges the globe—and the months—with programs and events that culminate on June 5.”

Sarasota residents are not happy that the United Nations is coming to town. These citizens are comparing the UN presence in Sarasota to the Bureau of Land Management standoff at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada. An email from Sarasota residents Eileen Green, and Mike Bolam state:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Forward this message in the hope you will attend this event and that you also know that there is more being done behind the scenes that can’t be shared now .

The presence of People at government meetings and events where elected servants are in attendance is significant to promoting our stand on an issue . Lately this point has been confirmed in multiple ways and is the most successful… e.g. Bundy ranch, Red River Texas/Oklahoma border .

The protest isn’t as important than the number of People that attend…. that in itself speaks the loudest. Is our Liberty of less value than a golf date, a day at work , a lunch date, a game or exercise appointment? When they don’t see you there the cause isn’t important to them either! Just as at Lexington and Concord when the Liberty bell rings we need to come a running!

Share this with your contacts even those in surrounding counties because we need lots of People to send the foreign powers (UN) packing!

The Republican Sarasota County Commission has over the years used taxpayer funds to buy “environmentally sensitive lands” and place them under government control. The Environmentally Sensitive Lands Protection Program, “[I]s a voter-approved and taxpayer-funded program designed to acquire and protect natural lands. Priority sites within the county are ranked on environmental criteria including connectivity, water quality, habitat rarity, land quality and manageability. Acquired lands are being protected and managed. Most preserves have public access for nature-based recreation.” Approximately 30% of Sarasota County is owned by city, county, school board, state and federal agencies.

Coupled with the comprehensive Sarasota County 2050 Plan, adopted on July 10, 2002, the Sarasota County Commissioners are now in full alignment with the goals and objectives outlined in the 1992 UN Rio Earth Summit. The documents produced at the Rio Earth Summit include: Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, the Statement of Forest Principles, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. The followup mechanisms are: Commission on Sustainable Development; Inter-agency Committee on Sustainable Development; High-level Advisory Board on Sustainable Development.

The UN Earth Summit was and remains based upon the dis-proven scientific theory of man-made global warming.

The Rio Earth Summit’s message:

“[T]hat nothing less than a transformation of our attitudes and behaviour would bring about the necessary changes… Governments recognized the need to redirect international and national plans and policies to ensure that all economic decisions fully took into account any environmental impact. And the message has produced results, making eco-efficiency a guiding principle for business and governments alike.” [Emphasis added]

SARASOTA UNITED NATIONS PROTEST EVENT DETAILS:

June 5th
Be at Mote Marine
Laboratory and Aquarium
1600 Ken Thompson Pkwy, Sarasota , FL 34236
by 10:00 am
To Picket the United Nations 

GET THE UN OUT OF THE USA

Bring Signs!

NO MORE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT!
NO MORE AGENDA 21!
NO MORE COMMON CORE!
NO MORE SOCIALISM!
NO MORE MARXISM!
No more EPA!
NO MORE CARBON FOOT PRINT NONSENSE!
Eileen Green is the organizer  941-379-8796
EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo is courtesy of The Zach Morris Experience. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

America’s Highest Ranked Climate Charlatans: Obama and Kerry

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John Kerry, our Secretary of State, continues to provide reasons to believe he is either too stupid to hold such a high position or too willing to tell lies to keep pace with President Obama.

Their views on “climate change” are so lacking in scientific fact that they are telling people we’re all doomed if we don’t abandon vast traditional U.S. energy resources and continue to throw more billions at “renewable energy” that provides a very costly three percent of the nation’s huge energy needs. Meanwhile, nations in Europe, China, India and elsewhere are abandoning solar and wind, and building coal-fired plants.

At a Boston College commencement speech on May 19, Kerry outdid himself talking about climate change. “If we make the necessary efforts to address this challenge—and supposing I’m wrong or scientists are wrong, 97 percent of them all wrong—supposing they are, what’s the worst that can happen?” The worst is more wasted billions spent on something mankind can do nothing about and the administration’s continued efforts to control every inch of land in the U.S. and all of its waters.

In the May 27 edition of The Wall Street Journal, Joe Bast, the president of the free-market think tank, the Heartland Institute, and Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama, teamed out to write about “The Myth of the Climate Change 97%.” While demolishing this Big Lie, they noted that “Surveys of meteorologists repeatedly find a majority oppose the alleged consensus. Only 39.5% of 1,854 American Meteorological Society members who responded to a survey in 2012 said man-made global warming is dangerous.”

Cartoon - Climate Disruption

Obama’s and Kerry’s problem, along with all the other climate change charlatans, is that is the Earth is now into its 17th year of a natural cooling cycle based on lower radiation from the Sun, itself in a natural cycle. It is the Sun, not mankind that determines the climate of the Earth.

The Petition Project in which 31,073 U.S. scientists, over 9,000 of whom have a Ph.D. in a scientific field, participated says “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will in the foreseeable future cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”

“The purpose of the Petition Project is to demonstrate that the claim of ‘settled science’ and an overwhelming ‘consensus’ in favor of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climatological damage is wrong. No such consensus or settled science exists.”

In his State of the Union speech, Obama said “climate change is a fact.” Well, yes, if you keep in mind that climate change is measured in centuries, not decades or years. Claiming that every hurricane or tornado is evidence of climate change ignores this. His claim that climate change is “settled science” is just one more lie.

The Obama administration recently released a Climate Assessment report that was nothing more than a repeat of the lies the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been telling since 1983. They have all been based on computer models rigged to produce a global warming outcome. This process continues in several U.S. government agencies.

Following the last mini-ice age that lasted from 1300 to 1850, the Earth quite naturally warmed, most of which occurred prior to 1945. Meanwhile, the ice sheets of both the Arctic and Antarctica have been growing, particularly at the South Pole. The rise of oceans is measured in mere centimeters, posing no threat to polar bears or the island of Manhattan.

To Kerry’s question, “What’s the worst that can happen?” a recent Wall Street Journal opinion said that answer is “we spend trillions of dollars trying to solve a problem that we can’t do anything to stop: that we misallocate scarce resources in a way that slows economic growth; that slower growth leads to less economic opportunity for Boston College grads and especially the world’s poor; and that America and the world become much less wealthy and technologically advanced than we would otherwise. All of which would make the world less able to cope with the costs of climate change if Mr. Kerry is right.”

Mr. Kerry isn’t right and that makes him and President Obama a national and a global problem.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

U.S. Military: “Going Green” is Putting our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines at Risk

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There has been a push by the Obama administration’s Department of Defense to “go green”.  But what if this effort puts our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines at risk on the battlefield?

The Environmental Protection Agency has been pushing to outlaw lead bullets.

W9193_TAR-3992final

Lead free bullets.

Fox News reporter  wrote in his column “End of the line for the lead bullet?“:

The bid to ban lead bullets, seen by some as harmful to the environment, started slowly more than a decade ago. But with two dozen states, including California, banning bullets made of the soft, heavy metal, the lead bullet’s epitaph was already being written when the federal government finished it off.

First, the military announced plans to phase out lead bullets by 2018.”

Then the federal Environmental Protection Agency, citing emissions, ordered the shutdown of the Doe Run company’s lead smelter in Herculaneum, Mo., by year’s end.

Whether by state or federal regulation, or by market forces, lead bullets will be all but phased out within a few years in favor of so-called green bullets, experts say. [Emphasis added]

Major John L. Plaster, US Army (Ret.) in a column titled “It Has To Be Green” writes, “Spanning a decade-and-a-half, and costing taxpayers about $100 million, the process of adopting the lead-free 5.56×45 mm NATO M855A1 ball cartridge was hardly transparent. At times, lethality, accuracy and battlefield performance seemed to take a backseat to environmental factors.” [Emphasis added]

Going green also impacts the military budget dramatically.

Brian Slattery and Michaela Dodge in their article “Biofuel Blunder: Navy Should Prioritize Fleet Modernization over Political Initiatives” write, “For the past several years, the President and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus have directed the U.S. Navy to dedicate increasingly precious budgetary resources to establish a “green fleet”—i.e., to replace conventional diesel fuel for ships with biofuels harvested from organic material. Supporters claim that instability in the fossil fuel market justifies paying more for unproven technologies, but this initiative will in effect cause fiscal instability in an already unstable Department of Defense budget.”

Slattery and Dodge list multiple reasons that biofuel is not the answer including:

  • Diesel Will Be Plentiful. The American petroleum sector is currently undergoing a booming revival, and new sources of fuel such as shale will decrease demand for diesel elsewhere in the U.S. economy. This will help secure sources of diesel to be readily available to the U.S. military.
  • No Established International Infrastructure. That could cause considerable challenges given the Navy’s global reach. It might be difficult or even impossible to refuel a “green” ship in foreign waters, because a foreign biofuel infrastructure capable of meeting the Navy’s needs is almost non-existent. Even if the U.S. builds its own supply chain for the Navy, it would still have to rely on diesel if refueling in foreign ports.
  • Increased Corrosion. Studies have shown that biofuels are more corrosive than regular diesel and can therefore increase maintenance costs within the Navy’s fleet. This would only worsen the current fleet’s dire situation, since inspection failures are already occurring at an alarming rate within the fleet. Increasing average age of U.S. fleet; delayed, deferred, and underfunded modernization; and use of fuels with potentially harmful consequences is a recipe for a fleet readiness crisis.
  • Increased Expenses. Biofuels are disproportionately more expensive than conventional fuels. A gallon of biofuel costs $26, whereas the Department of Defense purchases diesel at about $3.60 per gallon. Many argue that this rate will decrease over time as biofuel production increases, but in the interim, the Navy’s readiness would be further damaged by wasting precious resources on biofuels that are seven times more expensive than the Navy’s conventional fuels—not including the increased maintenance costs.
  • An Already Unstable Funding Environment. Even in a fiscally robust environment, biofuels are not a wise allocation of the Pentagon’s funds. The U.S. military is currently facing serious funding reductions due to sequestration, which was mandated by the Budget Control Act of 2011. Under these cuts, the Navy will be unable to sustain its current shipbuilding rate, which has already been below the necessary level for a number of years.

Mother Jones’  lists 14 Weird Ways the US Military Is Becoming a Clean, Green Fighting Machine: Here are a few of Weinstein’s weird examples:

DARPA

Project Aquaman: The “Materials With Novel Transport Properties” (MANTRA) program seeks to create a 75-gallon-an-hour water desalination plant small enough to fit into a “man-portable backpack system…allowing decentralized water sustainment for increased troop agility and mobility.”
DARPA or Derpa? Pretty realistic, so long as you’re not fighting in a desert. Er…

ARMY

Waste? Not! At New York’s Ft. Drum, one of the Army’s largest bases, animal and plant waste could soon light up the parade grounds, and that’s no crap.

AIR FORCE

Big Brother in Your Tank: 30,000 vehicles are being outfitted with gas cap rings that track fuel consumption and identify needed maintenance, saving more than a million man-hours needed to check odometers. (Wait, what?!)

NAVY

Thar She Blows: The Navy boasts the world’s largest diesel/wind hybrid power plant…in Gitmo. It’s part of a broader initiative to green the prison base, including bicycle MPs and solar-powered floodlights.

MARINES

Green Grunts: In Afghanistan, Marine bases use “ground renewable expeditionary energy systems” (GREENS), foldable solar panels. On patrol, solar “blankets” power communications gear, cutting 20 pounds of batteries per pack.

Ehren Gosssens from Bloomberg in his article “The Army Goes Green, but Not to Save the Earth” reports, “The Army has spent $10 million to equip Special Forces units with SunDial’s [solar panel] systems. It’s part of a $4 billion green campaign the Army launched in 2009, with plans to spend billions more over the next three decades. The mission isn’t about saving the environment. It’s about saving money and lives.”

But are any of these initiatives about saving lives or pushing a more expensive and costly “green agenda” on our military? The cost of this greening is being felt in the reduction in our military forces.

Going green is negatively impacting our military capabilities and mission readiness.

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

The Slow, Sure Death of “Climate Change” Lies

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Even though President Obama continues to lie about “climate change” and employs the many elements of the federal government to repeat those lies, this huge hoax is dying.

Obama is on record saying that climate change “once considered an issue for the distant future, has moved firmly into the present” and is “affecting Americans right now.” Climate change as studied by climatologists is measured in terms of centuries whereas the weather is what is happening today. It has been happening before and since the rise of civilization. Obama’s claim that “climate-related changes are outside of recent experience” and “have become more frequent and/or intense” is a lie from start to finish.

The White House recently released its latest “National Climate Assessment.” It is 841 pages of outlandish claims that reflect the lies generated by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. When you consider that the federal government spends an estimated $2.6 billion annually in grants for climate research, about the only beneficiaries are those “scientists” employed to further the hoax.

The UN’s IPCC was created in 1983 and has issued a series of reports whose sole intention has been to frighten people around the world with claims of global warming that are scientifically baseless.

The Heartland Institute, a non-profit market-based think tank, responded by creating the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) and by sponsoring a series of international conferences. The 9th conference will be July 7-9 in Las Vegas. That effort began in 2003 in cooperation with the Science & Environmental Project led by Dr. S. Fred Singer and was joined by the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.

I am an advisor to the Institute, having written about environmental and energy issues for several decades at this point.

AA - Heartland Cover

Click on the image to view and download a free copy of the report.

Calling on thousands of scientists around the world, in 2013 the NIPCC published the first of a three-volume response to the IPCC’s fifth assessment. This year, it has published a volume of Climate Change Reconsidered devoted to biological impacts, a 1,062 page opus. The NIPCC is an international panel of scientists and scholars with no government affiliation or sponsorship, and it receives no corporate funding.

Writing in the Financial Post in October 2013, Lawrence Solomon, the executive director of Energy Probe, a Toronto-based environmental group, noted that “solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years.” The Earth’s climate is primarily a reflection of solar radiation or the lack of it. From 1300 to 1850, the Earth was subject to a mini-ice age. While the global warming hoax began in the late 1980s, Solomon noted that, in the 1960s and 1970s, the scientific consensus was that the Earth “was entering a period of global cooling. The media in those years was filled with stories about a pending new ice age.

It was only the intervention of the UN’s IPCC that changed the “consensus” to one of global warming. A cooling cycle that began around fourteen years ago could lead to another mini-ice age or the planet could be on the cusp of a full-fledged one. On average, the interglacial periods of the Earth have lasted about 11,500 years and we are at the end of such a period.

Climate Change Reconsidered II devoted to biological impact features scientific studies that conclude:

  • “Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant.” Considering that all vegetation on Earth depends on it, it is not surprising that another conclusion was that the ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content is causing a great greening of the Earth.
  • As a result, “there is little or no risk of increasing food insecurity due to global warming or rising atmospheric CO2 levels and that terrestrial ecosystems have thrived throughout the world as a result of warming temperatures and rising levels of atmospheric CO2. Multiple lines of evidence indicate animal species are adapting, and in some cases, evolving, to cope with climate change of the modern era.”
  • In addition, “rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels to no pose a significant threat to aquatic life and that a modest warming of the planet will result in a net reduction of human mortality from temperate-related events.”

The irony of the latest NIPCC report, of course, is that it responds to the claims of global warming and carbon dioxide’s role at a time when the Earth is cooling. It makes one wish that all the talk about “greenhouse gases” is true enough to help us escape from the present cooling.

One thing we do know for sure is that the Greens talk of climate change has lost its grip on the public imagination and attention. As the cooling cycle continues, people around the world will be far more focused on increased evidence of massive ice sheets at both poles, on frozen lakes and rivers, on shortened growing seasons, and on the desperate need for more fossil fuels to warm our homes and workplaces.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Hollywood celebrities caught accepting money from “Middle Eastern oil interests” to make anti-fracking film

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project veritas logoJames O’Keefe Premieres “Expose: Hollywood’s War on US Energy” at Cannes Film Festival. Hollywood celebrities are caught on hidden camera accepting money from “Middle Eastern oil interests”

HotAir.com’s Ed Morrissey writes, “For those who remember the controversy surrounding the financing of the anti-fracking Matt Damon film Promised Land, this new undercover video from James O’Keefe and Project Veritas will simply confirm suspicions. O’Keefe set himself up as an ersatz Middle Eastern oil baron in order to test the Hollywood environmental waters to see how welcome his supposed money would be in attacking American energy independence. The big names in this effort, Ed Begley Jr and Mariel Hemingway, will get the most notice but are in essence collateral damage. The real targets for this probe are Josh and Rebecca Tickell, award-winning producers who are all too keen to take Middle Eastern money to attack American natural-gas exploration…”

In a blockbuster new video, Project Veritas has exposed the truth about the dark funding behind Hollywood’s anti-fracking messaging machine. New York Times Bestselling Author and Project Veritas founder and president James O’Keefe debuted the latest investigation at a “premiere” in Cannes, France on Wednesday.

In the investigation, an undercover journalist from Project Veritas posed as a member of a Middle Eastern oil dynasty and offered $9 million in funding to American filmmakers to fund an anti-fracking movie.

okeefe at cannes film festival

James O’Keefe at Cannes Film Festival.

In video from a meeting with Ed Begley Jr., Mariel Hemingway and Josh Tickell, a Project Veritas investigator disguised as “Muhammed” offered $9 million for an anti-fracking film. “Muhammad” clearly states: “If Washington DC continues fracking, America will be energy efficient, and then they won’t need my oil anymore.”

In the same conversation, Begley and Hemingway accept the funding and agree to hide the source of funds for the anti-fracking movie. Hemingway agreeing that those who will know the source of the funding are “only at this table.”

Ed Begley Jr. is an outspoken environmental activist and current Governor on the board of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science (the organization that brings us the OSCARS every year.)

Mariel Hemingway is a Golden Globe- and Oscar-nominated actress.

Josh Tickell is a Sundance Film Festival Winner and the director of environmental message movies “Fuel”, “The Big Fix” and “PUMP”.

Team Begley even submitted a video of Oscar-nominated actor Mark Ruffalo offering his unwavering support for the fictitious anti-fracking film project.

The meeting came about after a series of discussions with Josh and Rebecca Tickell. A Project Veritas journalist posed as an ad executive seeking to broker a deal for his client (“Muhammed”) to fund an American-made anti-fracking film.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/KOX5ehfFF7I[/youtube]

In a phone call to Tickell, the ad executive states: “My client’s interest is to end American energy independence; your interest is to end fracking. And you guys understand that?”

Tickell’s response: “Correct. Yes, super clear.”

Tickell makes it clear on the tape that revealing the source of funding for an activist film can undermine its credibility. Tickell notes that the movie “Promised Land” undermined its own message because it was labeled as being funded by Image Nation Abu Dhabi. His advice: “So rather than putting that [the source of funding] up front, don’t mention that.”

In a follow-up call with Josh and Rebecca Tickell, Rebecca Tickell assures our investigator: “We would never tell about where the funding is coming from. That would be really awkward for us.”

Josh Tickell: “We’re confident that we can keep this zip locked, you know tight, air-tight forever. If we don’t protect who is kind of funding this thing, if we have to disclose that or that becomes a necessary part of it, the whole enterprise will not work.”

Project Veritas founder and president James O’Keefe stated Wednesday:

“This latest investigation shows the dark side of Hollywood’s environmental movement. Hollywood is willing to take and conceal money from Middle Eastern oil interests in order to advance their cause of destroying American energy independence.”

The raw video can be found at http://Youtube.com/VeritasVisuals

Project Veritas is non-partisan and does not advocate for political candidates or parties. The purpose of Project Veritas’ investigations is to expose waste, fraud, dishonesty and self-dealing.

Stay up to date on who responds by following us on Facebook athttp://Facebook.com/ProjectVeritas and on Twitter @Project_Veritas.

Support Project Veritas’ investigations at http://ProjectVeritas.com/donate

EPIC FAIL — Obama’s climate report card

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A team of independent scientists fact checked President Obama’s new national climate assessment report and issued it a failing grade.

They wrote that the President’s report is “a masterpiece of marketing that shows for the first time the full capabilities of the Obama Administration to spin a scientific topic as they see fit, without regard to the underlying facts.”

You can read the scientists’ full rebuttal here, and of course Marc Morano is following developments as they break over at Climate Depot.

The President’s report is riddled with scientific errors and exaggerations.

Contrary to Obama’s report:

  • Temperature has failed to rise as computer models predict
  • There has been no warming for 17 years
  • Sea levels have not meaningfully risen
  • There is nothing extreme about today’s weather
  • Climate is cyclical and largely driven by nature
climate chart cfact

For a larger view click on the chart.

The scientists bottom line conclusion is that the National Climate Assessment “is so grossly flawed it should play no role in U.S. Energy Policy Analyses and CO2 regulatory processes. As this rebuttal makes clear, the NCA provides no scientific basis whatsoever for regulating CO2 emissions.”

Every day the facts become clearer and the case for catastrophic man-made global warming becomes weaker.

Count on CFACT to report the facts the media won’t.

Read the rebuttal

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