Environment Archives - Page 82 of 86

Why man-made global warming is not a “crisis”

February 24, 2014/in Environment, Must Read, News, Policy, Science/by Richard C. Savage, Ph.D.

Terrestrial globe on top of an induction stove, demonstrating that man-made global warming is a proven fact. Try it yourself!

I’m a meteorologist and this is a short explanation of the effect of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. There is a lot of alarmist rhetoric about a “crisis” due to human industry – human industry that has brought us out of the Dark Ages, doubled our life expectancy, and made the world greener. What’s not to like about that? Oh, yeah … the claim that we’re going to roast the planet.

Adding CO2 to our atmosphere is no more likely to harm humanity, or Nature, than adding more insulation in the roof of your house will set the place on fire. Understanding this requires some recall of High School physics.

The Earth, warmed by the Sun, emits infrared radiation, at wavelengths between about 9 and 14 micrometers (millionths of a meter). Everything on our Earth, including us, emits some amount of infrared radiation. The numbers I’ve quoted come from Wien’s Displacement Law – yes, you can find it easily on the web – that relates the peak wavelength of emission to the temperature of the emitter.

Normal Earth surface temperatures range between 310 K (Kelvin), or a little less than body temperature, and 210 K, or the air temperature outside a transcontinental aircraft. Brrrrrrr.

Let’s think of Earth’s emitted radiant energy in the form of photons, little discrete energy units, headed upward – some straight up, some off to an angle, and each at a wavelength determined by the temperature of the object it came from. Most of these photons (about 85%) will be absorbed by a molecule of greenhouse gas, either water vapor (H2O) or CO2. That means some of the electrons circling the atoms in these molecules will briefly rise to a higher energy state – an “orbit” farther from the nucleus. We say the atom has been “excited.”

This is where the “global warming” alarmists get excited too, making claims about “trapping” heat in the atmosphere. Ah, no! Atoms don’t remain in an “excited” state, any more than you do (as when the bank tells you the checking account is overdrawn). In a couple of nanoseconds (billionths of a second), the greenhouse gas molecule dumps the energy imparted to it in the form of a new (infrared) photon.

The original photons, from the Earth, were headed upward; which way do the new photons go?

Anyway they want – half up, half down. The ones that go up continue to space, and the Earth has cooled itself. The ones that go down return some – less than half – of the energy lost. That returned energy, that didn’t get away, is the “greenhouse effect” (GHE). No heat has been “trapped.”

In our atmosphere/Earth system, the GHE gives back about 33 degrees C, or 59 degrees F. About 30 C (54 F) of that is due to GHE from H2O, and about 3 C (5 F) is GHE from CO2. Note that no new energy has been added to the system; the Earth released (say) 100 photons, and got back less than 50.

The “greenhouse effect” doesn’t warm the Earth; it just slows the cooling, like the insulation in the roof. The insulation won’t burn the house down; it won’t even warm the house by itself.

That should be a relief; in addition, there are other reasons GHE from CO2 is not dangerous.

The alarmist story gives the impression all photons are alike, to a CO2 molecule. Not true; CO2 molecules have “favorite” wavelengths of photons. Physicists measure absorption “lines” and “bands”, specific wavelengths that a particular molecule responds to. The one and only CO2 absorption line in Earth’s emission spectrum is around 14.78 micrometers. Ouch; according to the Wien Displacement Law, that’s a photon that comes from an object at a temperature around -77 C, about the temperature at South Pole on a bad day. CO2 just doesn’t absorb – or return – many photons, because there aren’t many photons emitted from cold surfaces. It doesn’t “see” the warm photons at all, because they’re the wrong wavelength. Only about 5% of Earth’s emitted energy is “visible” to CO2; only half of that can be returned.

Another weakness in the “global warming crisis” argument is the Law of Diminishing Returns, a.k.a. Logarithmic Response. Remember, the energy returned to Earth by atmospheric absorbing gases comes entirely from molecules that have been lucky enough to catch an Earth-emitted photon in the first place. How much more “greenhouse” energy would we get if we add one more molecule of CO2 than is needed to absorb all the upwelling photons?

Answer: Zero.

That last CO2 molecule is out of luck; all the upwelling photons are absorbed by the CO2 that’s already in place. It’s the end of the GHE. Until then, every added molecule of a greenhouse gas has only half the effect of the previous molecule, with which it competes. The GHE looks like the logarithmic curve (base 2) on the right. We are long past the “knee” of the CO2 GHE curve, and on the flat part. After all, volcanoes and decomposing vegetation have been adding CO2 to the atmosphere for eons. At the end of this article are some references to the vanishing effect of CO2.

Since 1997, we’ve increased the CO2 content of the atmosphere by about 10%.

It’s presently 400 molecules per million, or 0.04% of the atmosphere. (Water vapor, on a nice Summer Florida day, is about 40,000 molecules per million, or 4%.) Astoundingly, in spite of all that added CO2, there has been no warming of the atmosphere in the last 17 years. NOAA, NASA, the UK Meteorological Service, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) all agree. The CO2 we add today, and tomorrow, and next year, and in your grandchild’s lifetime will have the same, undetectable, effect.

Let me summarize this article with two points:

The lack of any warming for 17 years – and counting – might be due to diminished solar output. Or it might be due to more clouds in the atmosphere, due to more cosmic rays, or it might be due to the 60 year cycle of the Pacific Ocean (the Pacific Decadal Oscillation), which has gone into its cold phase, as it did in the mid-1940’s. But none of these potential reasons are included in the scores of climate models for which the Federal government has paid billions of our tax dollars. In the politicians’
models, only CO2 is admitted to control the climate. So the politicians have no justification to claim they have “settled science” on their side. Don’t let them turn off the heat and the lights for no reason – or just to control our lives.

And, whatever controls the climate – we don’t know – the simple physics you’ve just read tells us added CO2 is not “catastrophic.” You can’t produce catastrophic warming from the logarithmic added insulation of a minor constituent that merely slows the loss of 5% of Earth’s emitted radiation.

The Saturated Greenhouse Effect

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is an edited version of a photo taken by Quod Scripsi Scripsi, which is described as a, “Terrestrial globe on top of an induction stove, demonstrating that man-made global warming is a proven fact: Do it yourself!” This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

The World’s Volcanic Past and Future

February 21, 2014/in Commentary, Environment, News, Policy, Politics/by Alan Caruba

While Americans coped with massive snowfalls in the South, Midwest and Northeast, a dramatic volcanic eruption occurred on February 13th in Indonesia when Mount Kelud in the province of East Java erupted so loudly it could be heard 120 miles away.

It is one of 130 volcanos in the world’s fourth most populous nation, located on the “ring of fire” volcanic belt around the shores of the Pacific Ocean. About 200,000 people were affected and more than 76,000 had to be evacuated according to Indonesia’s National Disaster Mitigation Agency. The effect was dramatic, shutting down an airport in Indonesia’s second largest city, Surabaya, a major industrial center, along with those in five other cities as well as a major oil refinery that provides more than a third of Indonesia’s total output of refined products.

Earlier this month, the eruption of Mount Sinabung in the north of the island of Sumatra was credited with the death of eleven people. It had been spewing lava and ash for months and forced thousands to flee the area.

There are about 1,500 active volcanoes worldwide with the majority on the Pacific “ring of fire.” Some fifty of these erupt every year, An estimated 500 million people worldwide live near active volcanoes.

While environmentalists are forever blathering about carbon dioxide (C02) emissions from cars, plants that produce electricity, and all forms of manufacturing, volcanoes produce from 145 million to 255 million short tons of CO2 every year.

Large, explosive eruptions, in addition to CO2, put large amounts of water vapor, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen chloride, hydrogen fluoride, and ash, pulverized rock and pumice, into the stratosphere to heights of 10 to 20 miles above the Earth’s surface. Sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid condense rapidly in the stratosphere to form fine sulfate aerosols that reflect the Sun’s radiation, cooling the Earth’s lower atmosphere or troposphere while also absorbing heat radiated from the Earth. In the past century, several eruptions during the past century cooled the Earth by up to half a degree Fahrenheit for periods of one to three years.

I cite this to drive home the fundamental scientific fact that, as opposed to all the nonsense about human control or effect on the Earth’s temperatures, volcanoes by comparison render the human component infinitesimal.

Moreover, CO2 plays virtually no role in the Earth’s overall temperature. Shutting down coal-fired electrical plants and preventing the construction of new ones has no basis in science. The outcry against CO2 ignores the fact that all life on Earth depends on it to provide the “food” that all vegetation requires. More Co2, not less, is good for the Earth.

What Americans need to worry about is the eruption of a super volcano with a large caldera such as the Yellowstone Caldera in Yellowstone National Park and the Valles Caldera in New Mexico. Both have been dormant for thousands of years.

The Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years compared to its human component that only began to create what we call modern civilization for about five thousand years. Its volcanos, potential earthquakes, floods, blizzards, and other natural hazards pose some serious threats. Massive eruptions such as those about 250 million years ago are believed to have been the cause of the “Great Dying” that is estimated to have killed 90% of the species existing at the time.

When I read and hear about people speaking about how humans are causing major species declines or industry threatening the climate, I am reminded of how Nature, the action or inaction of the Sun, volcanoes and other natural events dwarf anything that is attributed to human activity.

Thanks to the environmentalists, we are crippling and denying the ability of this nation to construct the pipelines, expand our industrial base, and provide the housing needed for an expanding population.

Look around you. Pretend you’re a dinosaur Then remember they dominated the Earth for thousands of years until Nature eliminated them.

Florida based rocket scientist is America’s best Climate Prediction Expert

February 21, 2014/in Energy, Environment, Featured, Must Read, News, Policy, Regulation, Science/by Dr. Rich Swier

Who Is America’s Best Climate Prediction Expert? It’s a fair enough question, given all our government and the mainstream media have been telling us about the threats we all face from climate change (a.k.a. man-made global warming).

With twenty five years and tens of billions of dollars spent by the US government alone on understanding what the causes and effects of climate change are, surely someone has risen to the top in terms of making accurate climate change predictions, right?

The answer is likely a surprise to most. I have an idea who this person is.

According to any number of internet searches, there is one person who may well rank number one in this question of who the best American climate prediction expert is. He has risked it all in publishing his predictions on line, with the science to back it up for all to see, and critique. In doing so, this lone researcher has been subjected to the ‘slings and arrows’ of the established scientific community and those who have invested so much capital, political power and personal prestige at making sure manmade global warming and its experts come out on top.

Despite being heavily criticized for years, this person has amassed an impressive list of major climate predictions that as of today makes him one of the best if not the best climate expert in the Americas. However he is not as you may surmise, on the list of the thousands of researchers the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN-IPCC) has been using for its many climate reports. He is not a solar physicist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and definitely does not work for NASA’s Goddard center where much of the US media gets its manmade climate info. He is not on the staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) or any of its several centers that deal extensively with climate change research. He is not a PhD professor at some prestigious university and also is not working for the Department of Defense or any national science agency.

In fact, this maverick among climate researchers is a single individual with a courageous band of other scientists from around the world who have, with little funding to speak of have been operating out of a small office with no special interests assisting from either side of the climate debate. Yet this team, led by this one person have routinely beat the best US government science agencies and the United Nations (UN) for the past six years in telling us what the Earth’s climate is doing and what it will do in the future.

John L. Casey, President of the Space and Science Research Corporation

Mr. Casey has had a distinguished career in any case. A former White House space policy adviser consultant to NASA Headquarters and a space shuttle engineer with a major aerospace contractor, he is no stranger to tackling and solving tough problems. For example, after the space shuttle Challenger accident in January 1986, NASA brought him in to chair an internal investigation into the breakdown in quality and space flight safety systems that were at the heart of the tragedy.

Many years later in 2007, while doing some solar physics research he stumbled on a curious pattern among sunspots that would prove to be the most important problem he had ever confronted – what causes climate change and what is the planet’s next climate era going to be like? A few months later after completing his research, he made several a startling announcements to the world. In April and May of 2007 he said:

1. Global warming was about to end, within three years!

2. The Sun was going to begin a “solar hibernation” beginning with the next solar cycle #24 (which began in 2008). This hibernation would result in a record reduction in the energy output of the Sun.

3. The Earth’s atmosphere and oceans were about to begin a long term drop in temperatures lasting for decades.

4. A new cold climate era was beginning that posed a serious threat to all with the potential to bring global crop damage and loss of life through starvation, cold weather fatalities, and social upheaval on a historic scale.

He proposed that a new climate theory which he called the “Relational Cycle Theory” or simply the “RC Theory” should replace the greenhouse gas theory of manmade climate change and asserted that the Sun and not mankind was the primary cause of climate change.

His announcement and predictions at that time were received with hostility reminiscent of that Galileo received by the Catholic Church when he said the Sun was at the center of the solar system instead of the Church’s opinion that the Earth was. Once more, by saying the Sun was at the center (of climate change) and not the Earth (not mankind), he immediately was attacked by all sides of the global warming debate including conservatives and liberals. He was slandered and demeaned by members of the established scientific community, some of whom were reaping windfall research grants to study man’s emissions of CO2. So called ‘authorities’ at prominent internet science blog sites were equally as unkind. The most prominent science periodicals and many in the media as well as the government did even worse – they ignored him!

Even Casey admits his timing was bad for his predictions by saying, “My announcements and predictions could not have come at a worse time. Both presidential party candidates were saying manmade global warming was real and they were going to fix it. Al Gore and the UN were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work in alerting the world to the effects of man’s industrial emissions on the climate. Many former friends stopped returning may calls or emails. My message was one that no one wanted to hear.”

Now six years later much has changed. Scientists outside the US and not tied to US politics or US government research funding began to take notice of his work. In June of 2011 when he published his internationally acclaimed climate science book, “Cold Sun,” it included some of the strongest endorsements yet seen from other scientists for a climate book. Other scientists have called his work “…simply a great work!” or “…adds a brilliant page to the history of science…,” or “…this is an Earth-shattering book!”

Here we are in early 2013 and his diligence in getting his word out about what is really happening with the climate for all to read has led to Mr. Casey becoming the most often quoted and referenced on the web on the subject of climate change to a cold era. He still sees a few lingering critics repeat personal attacks and derogatory remarks from 2008 but no one has countered any of his science. They can’t!

Other scientists have joined his team and are actively cooperating with him in their own countries by trying to alert their countrymen to the dangers of the coming cold climate. His prominent and vocal stance on the next climate change has made it easier for others to now come forward to make similar predictions. Past researchers who made such forecasts many years before Casey are now seeing a resurrection from the dusty science journals where their research was buried and are once again seeing the light of day.

Because of his success in climate prediction, other scientists from around the world in earthquake research have now asked him to help in the great humanitarian cause of saving thousands of lives yearly by finally predicting the world’s largest quakes well in advance. As of December 2012, this new group has already had some success!

He is now frequently called on to do interviews and speak to large groups of interested citizens on his RC Theory, his book “Cold Sun,” and most importantly how to prepare for the coming difficult cold climate.

In March of this year Mr. Casey stepped up the gain on describing what is happening with the Earth’s climate by publishing the Global Climate Status Report (GCSR) ©. This heavily researched and data filled resource he and his supporting scientists have published, is intended for all individuals and leaders who want to have a different perspective on climate change from the one they have been receiving from the government and the media. As Casey puts it, “Too long now our people and our leaders have been given only one side, the wrong side, of the climate change story. With the regular publication of the GCSR, anyone can now have a single source for the true status of the Earth’s climate rather than the heavily politicized version we have been force fed for twenty five years now.”

But what about the accuracy of his predictions?

Why should he be on our list of candidates for America’s best climate researcher? This one is easy. All his predictions, as disruptive and controversial as they were in 2007, have now either come to pass or are about to! This remarkable record according to internet searches is without peer. Casey acknowledges this by commenting, “No other climate researcher that I can find has such a public record for similar major climate predictions. There is nothing predicted by the UN-IPCC, NASA or NOAA from 2007-2008 that comes even close to what I was forecasting. In fact they all said that global temperatures could only go up for the foreseeable future and yet as I correctly predicted, they have been dropping.”

But, there is something else.

Among his major predictions he made a very specific one of a detailed scientific nature that goes far beyond simple chance that some may ascribe to it. In early 2007, he contacted NASA’s top solar physicist to discuss what Casey believed was a significant error by NASA in predicting the behavior of the Sun during the next 11-year solar cycle (cycle #24). Casey said at the time that NASA was, “way off” in its calculations for the peak year and level of activity for the next solar cycle. NASA was at the time saying cycle #24 was going to be of record high level of activity and as measured by sunspot count would be at least 145 average sunspot count, likely much higher, and peaking in 2011. Casey, on the other hand, said his math showed the peak would be in 2012 and would be no more than 74 sunspots at peak. In other words Casey told NASA they were more than 100 % in error! The NASA opinion in a joint conference with NOAA scientists went the same. They all said cycle #24 was going to be one of the most energetic ever.

This month, NASA, after making downward adjustments with NOAA every year since 2007, have now issued their latest forecast for cycle #24. Guess what? Now in the peak period for cycle#24, NASA says the peak will be this year, in 2013 with an average of 70 sunspots plus or minus 18 with a likely final cycle average of 69 sunspots! It looks like Casey has done it again – he has beat the US government best scientists on predicting the very complicated nature of the Sun’s behavior to an astounding level of accuracy! And he did it with a shoe string budget by himself, compared to these science agencies who had thousands of researchers, state of the art advanced computers and billions of dollars at their disposal.

According to one of Casey’s now growing number of supporters in a recent email, a Mr. RV said “In 2007 you said the (cycle#24) peak would be in 2012 and the sunspot count would not be greater than 74, half of what NASA was saying…Your prediction turned out to be SPOT ON! Congratulations on your prediction. That was nothing short of awesome.”

But what about the peak in 2013 as NASA now predicts. Casey said the peak of activity would be in 2012. Actually he got that call right also, Casey elaborates with, “ Most except a few solar physicists are not even aware that the typical 11-year solar cycle has a double peak, the first being the primary followed a year or two later by a lesser secondary peak. We then average the two as the cycle winds down and we are certain both peaks have passed. If we look at a chart of sunspots for cycle #24 we did in fact have the primary peak in 2012 as I predicted.”

When it comes to picking America’s best climate prediction expert there are also some intangibles I think we should consider. The first that comes to mind is how tough a challenge was it for the researcher to make his predictions? Were they easy to make scientifically, or were they controversial and likely to bring the researcher much criticism? It takes a lot of endurance to last out a solar cycle and maintain one’s opinion in face of incredible public, media, scientific, and political opposition.

Second is purpose. Casey from the outset has said his goal and that of his company, SSRC is to do what they could to alert the people to the next climate change so they can be prepared for what he calls a “life altering event.” He never expected to get rich as many “warmists” have by pushing manmade climate change. He has on the contrary, spent all he had keeping his research going and the lights on in his little office. As to purpose, Casey reflects on a quote from his book “Cold Sun,” by George Elliott, by saying, “I think Elliott was right with his question, ‘What do we live for if not to make life less difficult for each other?’ ”

Is there any doubt. Casey gets my vote. He is not only America’s best climate prediction expert, but he is also among America’s best, period!

References: NASA’s latest Solar Cycle prediction

PAPER: 20-year hiatus in rising temperatures has climate scientists ‘puzzled’…

REPORT: 500 stranded on drifting ice floes…

PAPER: It’s the cold, not global warming, we should be worried about…

Obama’s War on America: Killing Coal to Kill U.S. Electrical Power

February 19, 2014/in Economy, Energy, Environment, News, Policy/by Alan Caruba

President Obama, supported by the Environmental Protection Agency, is seeking to deprive America of the use of its enormous reserves of coal in coal-fired plants that produce the electricity on which the economy and all life in America depends.

This isn’t just a “war on coal”, it is a war on America and one free market think tank, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) has been joined by six major unions to ensure that the EPA’s proposed energy proposal, Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rule does not become a regulation that they call “nothing less than industrial sabotage by regulatory means.”

The EPA’s current regulations have resulted in the shutdown over more than 150 coal-fired plants over the course of Obama’s first term and his second represents a threat to everyone living in America. We are living through one of the harshest winters in recent years and the 17-year-old cooling cycle which the entire Earth is experiencing promises to last decades.

Commenting on the proposed carbon pollution standards for new power plants, Bonner R.Cohen, PhD, a CFACT Senior Policy Analyst laid out the reasons why MATS has no basis whatever in science.

Any regulation seeking to limit the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere deliberately and deceptively ignores facts that anyone can understand. Bonner spelled out the basic scientific facts, but it is essential to keep in mind that CO2 is essential to all life on Earth, providing the “food” that all vegetation depends.

“Current concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are 400 parts per million (ppm). Human activities in all their forms account for 4% of that total. The United States is responsible for 3% of that 4%, all the rest of the CO2 in the atmosphere (96% of the total) comes from purely natural causes, such as volcanoes, undersea venting, animal fluctuation, etc.,” said Cohen.

“The total U.S. contribution to atmospheric CO2 is one tenth of 1% or 00.1%. This 0.01% includes the CO2 that is emitted every time one of the approximately 315 million Americans opens his or her mouth to speak, cry, or engage in any verbal activity.” There are seven billion people on Earth contributing CO2 just by exhaling.

“The contribution of coal-fired plants to the U.S., much less global CO2 emissions, is so miniscule that it cannot be measured with any degree of accuracy. And the contribution of those entities targeted by the EPA to the Earth’s climate also cannot be measured. Thus the EPA has absolutely no way of saying how its proposed regulations will affect the climate.”

Data from the US Energy Information Administration website. For a larger view click on the image.

The EPA is moving toward imposing these baseless regulations despite the fact that China and India have been building coal-fired plants to provide their nations with the energy to expand and compete in the global marketplace. China’s CO2 emission increased by 167% between 1999 and 2009, while the U.S., the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide, emitted 17% over the same 10-year period.

According to an analysis by Climate Central, from 2005-2009, China added coal-fired electricity capacity that is equivalent to the entire U.S. fleet. From 2010-2013, it added half the coal generation of the entire U.S. again. Powered by cheap and abundant coal, China’s economy has lifted 600 million people out of abject poverty and into the middle class over the last two decades.

Carbon dioxide, however, is vital for all life Earth despite decades of lies about it by environmentalists falsely claiming it warms the Earth. It is the food that all vegetation requires in the same way all animal life requires oxygen.

“For EPA to impose carbon-pollution standards that by design will make the introduction of new coal-fired power plants all but impossible is to adapt a policy that by design will drive up the cost of electricity by limiting America’s sources of power,” said Cohen. “The EPA is engaging in a complete fabrication, one that will put an end to an industry that supplies the U.S. with 37% of its electricity.” When Obama took office in 2009, coal-fired plants were providing nearly 50% of U.S. electrical energy.

This is a criminal act against all Americans and one based on the totally false claims about “global warming”, now called “climate change.” The President, during the recent State of the Union speech lied when he said that science was “settled.”

CFACT is not alone in opposing the Obama administration’s attack on the provision of energy. Six unions are petitioning the Senate to hold hearings on the EPA coal plant rules. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and five other unions have sent a letter to top senators on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The United Mine Workers, Boilermakers and Utility Workers said that the proposed rules would result in the closing of 56 gigawatts of coal-fired generation and the loss of approximately 250,000 jobs. These unions have been pushing back against the Obama administration for years at this point.

In 2011 the Congressional Research Service reported that America’s reserves of coal are unsurpassed, accounting for more than 28% of the world’s coal. It estimated that U.S. recoverable coal reserves were approximately 262 billion tons—not including massive, cut difficult to access Alaskan reserves.

The U.S. consumes around 1.2 billion tons of coal a year and our coal reserves add up to centuries of coal use which the White House and the EPA is seeking to deny to all Americans.

If the White House and the EPA is permitted to implement the MATS regulation the economy will dramatically decline. Life in America will resemble that of third world nations. It is entirely based on lies.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of “press-stone-coal” and taken by Benutzer: Stahlkocher. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

Obama Wants to Waste a Billion on “Climate Change”

February 18, 2014/in Commentary, Environment, News, Policy, Politics, Science, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Alan Caruba

Barack Obama will be remembered for many things during his two terms in office, but high on the list, right after lying to everyone about everything, will be his determination to waste billions of taxpayer dollars on every Green scheme from solar and wind energy to electric cars, and now on “climate change.”

He is calling for a billion-dollar climate change fund in his forthcoming budget, due out next month. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the fund “would be spent on researching the projected effects of climate change and helping Americans prepare for them, including with new technology and infrastructure, according to the White House.

We don’t need any research and we don’t need any new technology. The National Weather Service has hugely expensive computers that enable it to predict what the weather will be anywhere in the U.S. with some measure of accuracy for up to three or four days. After that, it gets fuzzy. What will the weather be next week? Well, maybe a bit warmer or a bit colder.

As for the effects of weather events, we have centuries of knowledge regarding this. We know what happens after a blizzard or a hurricane, a drought or a flood.

When a huge storm like Sandy hit the East Coast, we had FEMA that was supposed to come in and help the victims. The federal government also came up with a couple of million for the States most affected, but it is still a problem that local first responders and utilities have to address most directly.

Obama was out in California to show his concern for the drought-stricken farmers and the administration is speeding delivery of $100 million of aid to livestock farmers, $15 million for areas hit hardest, and $60 million for California food banks to help the poor. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) pointed out that the drought has been “exacerbated by federal and state regulations” including an environmental rule that placed “the well-being of fish…ahead of the well-being” of communities.

Like Rep. McCarthy, those on the scene point out that the drought is in part the result of the failure to restore the water flow from California’s water-heavy north to farmers in the central and south. House Bill 3964 does that, but only if the Senate will stop holding it up. Rep. McCarthy is joined by Rep. Devin Nunes explaining that California’s system of aqueducts and storage tanks was designed long ago to take advantage of rain and mountain runoff from wet years and store it for use in dry years.

As Investors.com pointed out, “Environmental special interests managed to dismantle the system by diverting water meant for farms to pet projects, such as saving delta smelt, a baitfish. That move forced the flushing of three million acre-feet of water originally slated for the Central Valley into the ocean over the past five years.”

Obama made no mention of that, but it is an example of how, in the name of climate change billions are wasted or lost, such as when the outcry over Spotted Owls caused a vast portion of the Northwest’s timber industry was decimated by the false claim that they were “endangered.”

All this traces back to the founding of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 by two United Nations organizations, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Program. The IPCC was given a formal blessing by the UN General Assembly through Resolution 43/53.

And what has the IPCC done? It has championed the utterly false claim that carbon dioxide (CO2) is responsible for warming the Earth and that all the industries and other human activities that create CO2 emissions had to reduce them in order to save the Earth. In 2007 the IPCC and Al Gore would share a Nobel Peace Prize. As an organization and as an individual these two have proved to be the among the greatest liars on planet Earth.

Dr. Craig D. Idso, PhD, is the founder and chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. He is an advisor to The Heartland Institute and, with Dr. Robert M. Carter and Dr. S. Fred Singer, authored the 2011 study, “Climate Change Reconsidered”, for the entertainingly named NIPCC—Not the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Published by The Heartland Institute, a free market think tank that has led the effort to expose the IPCC since 2009, sponsoring eight international conferences, the report was updated in 2013 and a new update is due in March.

Writing in The Hill on January 30, Dr. Idso said “the President’s concerns for the planet are based upon flawed and speculative science; and his policy prescription is a recipe for failure” noting that “literally thousands of scientific studies have produced findings that run counter to his view of future climate.”

“As just one example, and a damning one at that, all of the computer models upon which his vision is based failed to predict the current plateau (the cooling cycle) in global temperature that has continued for the past 16 years. That the Earth has not warmed significantly during this period, despite an 8 percent increase in atmospheric CO2, is a major indictment of the model’s credibility in predicting future climate, as well as the President’s assertion that debate on this topic is ‘settled’.”

“The taxation or regulation of CO2 emissions is an unnecessary and detrimental policy option that should be shunned,” said Dr. Idso. Unfortunately for Americans, that is precisely the policy being driven by Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, along with the Department of the Interior and other elements of the government.

So the trip to California with its promise of more million spent when, in fact, the Green policies of that State have caused the loss of the Central lands that produce a major portion of the nation’s food stocks, reveals how utterly corrupt Obama’s climate-related policies have been since he took office in 2009.

Billions of taxpayer dollars have been squandered by the crony capitalism that is the driving force behind the IPCC’s and U.S. demands for the reduction of CO2 emissions.

There is climate change and it has been going on for 4.5 billion years on planet Earth. It has everything to do with the Sun, the oceans, volcanic activity and other natural factors. It has nothing to do with the planet’s human population.

What is profoundly disturbing is the deliberate political agenda behind the President’s lies and Secretary of State John Kerry’s irrational belief that climate change is the world’s “most fearsome” weapon of mass destruction.

RELATED VIDEO: Charles Krauthammer on Climate Change, “All of this is driven by this ideology, which in and of itself is a matter of almost theology.”

[youtube]http://youtu.be/g6Zswes9TsY[/youtube]

2014: Too Much Snow and Ice

February 14, 2014/in Commentary, Environment, News, Policy/by Alan Caruba

From 1955 until I graduated in 1959, I was a student at the University of Miami. Those were halcyon years for me, enhanced by Florida’s famed bounty of sunshine and warmth. Born and raised in New Jersey, it was a respite from the Garden State’s winters, shoveling snow, and enduring the chill.

The last time I was in Florida was in 2004 to visit my older brother in Boynton Beach and when the wall of heat hit me as I exited the West Palm Beach airport, I knew I would remain in Jersey.

I am no fan of winter. I don’t ski or ice skate. When it’s cold I stay inside where it’s warm. I venture outside once a day to turn over the car engine while picking up a lottery ticket in hopes of winning enough money to live somewhere warm during the winters here.

I don’t know how many blizzards or just big snowstorms I have lived through at this point in my life. In my experience, most people tend to forget them when springtime arrives. Winter, which often seems to have no end, is still only four months, a quarter of the year.

After decades of “global warming” lies from Al Gore, environmental organizations, and government agencies, I knew well that, while the northern hemisphere had begun to warm around 1850 after a long cold cycle and the amount of warmth was sufficient to provide comfort, it was too small for anyone to effectively measure.

One of my favorite quotes is from Dr. Richard Lindzen, a professor of atmospheric science at MIT: “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.”

I am pretty sure that those who lived through earlier blizzards and snowstorms did not consider them as anything other than normal. Some, though, made history. History.com even has a list of major U.S. blizzards. Perhaps the most famed was the Great Blizzard of 1888. It dumped 40 to 50 inches of snow in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. More than 400 people died; the worst toll of a winter storm. A year later in 1889, a blizzard started in Florida and then moved up the coast dumping 20 inches of snow on Washington, D.C. and 34 inches on New Jersey.

The Great Blizzard of 1888 led legislatures in Boston and New York to break ground on the country’s first underground subway systems.

Those of us on the East Coast would wait a century until 1993 for a combination blizzard and cyclone “wreaked havoc from Cuba to Canada” killing 310 people in its wake. In February 2010, snowstorms were raging from northern California to North Carolina, but typically it was the Mid-Atlantic and New England States that were hardest hit.

In January, record freezing temperatures gripped the entire nation. Energy consumption set some new records as well. Icy conditions in storms since then have left some areas without any energy and yet the environmental organizations keep fighting the development of any new sources of coal, oil and natural gas to provide needed energy. The White House has done everything in its power to accommodate this idiocy.

On February 7, The New York Times published an article by Porter Fox, the features editor at Powder Magazine—as in snow powder—and author of “Deep: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow.” Fox may know about skiing, but his knowledge of snow consists of his belief that, all over the world, “snow is melting.” This is straight out of the global warming belief that the small amount of warming since the mid-1880s was a threat to the planet. “The planet is getting hotter.” As Dr. Lindzen points out, a few tenths of a degree is meaningless.

A few years ago, The New York Times shut down its environmental reporting unit, laying off some and reassigning others. Now, apparently, it is content to publish utter nonsense about how all the snow is melting everywhere.

In recent weeks and days there has been heavy snow in Tokyo, Japan, that took some lives. Heavy snow has fallen in Austria and Italy, as well as northern Iran. People around the world are looking out their window and seeing snow.

Blizzards are a seasonal reminder that humans do not control the Earth’s climate. The Sun does that along with the oceans, volcanic activity and other natural factors. They only thing humans can and must do is endure them.

RELATED COLUMN: SNOW IN 49 STATES…

FL: City of Boca Raton Opts-Out of Seven50 Regional Plan!

February 13, 2014/in Environment, Must Read, News, Politics/by Dr. Rich Swier

“This isn’t ‘falling like dominoes’ . . . it is becoming a tidal wave,” notes an email from the American Coalition 4 Property Rights.

AC4PR is having a tough time keeping up with the local jurisdictions fleeing the Seven50 regional plan. Last night, February 11, 2014, the City Council of Boca Raton in Palm Beach County voted 5 to 0 to withdraw from the Seven50 Plan.

Language in Boca Raton’s Resolution No. 21-2014 passed last night:

“The [final Seven50 Prosperity] Plan is extremely abstract in it’s application in the City and it’s application to the City is unclear, and whereas the City can terminate the agreement and continue to cooperate with the partnership and its planning efforts, and whereas in the future when the partnership’s report is more fully formulated the City can reexamine the relationship with the partnership.”

“Be it resolved by the City of Boca Raton, due to the abstract nature of the planning report issued by the partnership among other things, the City’s membership in the partnership is hereby terminated and the City Manager is hereby directed to notify the Executive Director of the partnership of such termination.”

“Kudos go out to Rosetta Bailey of Boca Raton, who has pretty much singlehandedly spearheaded the effort to encourage the City to withdraw from the Seven50 regional plan,” states AC4PR.

Rosetta elevated the issue to the City Council by speaking in multiple Public Comment segments at recent Council meetings. Thanks also go to others who have attended and spoken to the Council supporting withdrawal from Seven50. The fact that numerous other county and municipal jurisdictions have been fleeing the Seven50 Plan may perhaps have also been an influence on Boca Raton officials.

AC4PR notes, “This goes down as another sweet win, following closely on the heels of the City of Stuart in Martin County and the Town of Orchid in Indian River County.”

You may view the video here, of the Boca Raton City Council’s discussion and vote on February 12, 2014.

AC4PR states, “Our job to eradicate Seven50 is not done. But each additional local jurisdiction withdrawing, makes our remaining work easier. With your help – attending and (if you so choose) speaking up at local jurisdiction meetings – we can and will win this fight. Enjoy this win. You all deserve to revel in these successes.”

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of the old City Hall of Boca Raton, FL. It is provided courtesy of Ebyabe.

Exposed: The motive for holding up the Keystone pipeline

February 12, 2014/in Economy, Environment, News, Policy, Politics/by Marshall Frank

Map courtesy of Wikipedia.

There is always more going on behind the scenes that we’re not privileged to know. But that’s normal.

What’s not normal, is the no-brainer issue of the Keystone Pipeline from Canada, which is destined to bring 20,000 more jobs to Americans and greater independence from being tethered to foreign oil. It’s being held up by one man.

Aye, there’s the rub. Having read often on this topic and even more about the background, history and relationships of our current president, it is not surprising to me that his loyalty may well be stronger toward the Saudi King, than to the American people. And, according to the article (linked below) by libertarian, John Myers, President Obama is mysteriously dragging his feet on the pipeline, despite many people in his party, including his own state department, urging him to sign off and let the oil start flowing before Canada tells us to fly a kite, and switches gears to China instead.

Is this stupid, or what?

Then again, while we truly don’t know all of Obama’s associations and motives in his earlier life, we know enough to conclude that he has had a chummy association with a myriad of Islamists and specifically, the Saudis long before he reached public office. It was an icon of the African-American political community and president of of the Manhattan Borough, Percy Sutton, who in 2008 acknowledged that he was indeed approached in the late 1980′s to write a letter of support to help smooth Obama’s entry into Harvard. The person who brokered the deal was Khalid Al- Mansour, a radical Muslim attorney with very close ties to Prince al-Waleed bin Talil of Saudi Arabia. Matter of fact, al-Mansour and the Saudis formed an international law firm; al-Waleed, al-Talal and al-Mansour. Here’s Mr. Sutton’s comments, and related article:

Click here: Saudi billionaire did help Obama into Harvard

Could this be one of the reasons Mr. Obama is so adamant about never releasing his college records? How his education was financed, and by whom? And what passports and birth records did he present then?

Meanwhile, after five years of foot-dragging, the Canadians are becoming very impatient. If we don’t do something soon, they will be redirecting their exports to other countries. Such is what John Baird, Foreign Minister for Canada, basically told the U.S. just one month ago. Check it out:

Click here: INFORUM | Fargo, ND

We are sitting on a virtual gold mine, letting it slip out of our fingers. Not only is this an issue of oil independence and jobs, we’re snubbing our nose at our closest neighbor and greatest ally in the world.

All, because of one man.

Click here: Obama’s Energy Policies: Devotion To Abdullah And Derision Of Alberta : Personal Liberty™

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo of President Obama is courtesy of Systemman.

EPA-Mandate Will Mean Higher Electricity Costs, Says Obama Official

February 12, 2014/in Economy, Energy, Environment, News/by Sean Hackbarth

Carbon capture and sequestration technology (CCS) mandated in a proposed EPA greenhouse gas regulation on new power plants will mean higher electricity costs, a Obama administration official admitted to a House of Representatives subcommittee.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/DNtjOpj3Kys[/youtube]

When asked by how much CCS will add to the cost of electricity generated by coal plants, Department of Energy Deputy Assistant Secretary for Clean Coal Dr. Julio Friedmann told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations that first generation technology will add “something like a 70 to 80 percent increase on the wholesale price of electricity.” The cost increase from more efficient, second generation CCS is expected to onlybe half that amount.

CCS is the cornerstone to EPA’s proposed greenhouse gas regulations for new power plants. The technology is still not commercially viable. As Dan Byers wrote in a post on EPA’s proposed regulation:

The EPA is mandating carbon capture sequestration (CCS), but as an integrated technology, CCS has never been demonstrated on a commercial power plant, and is nowhere near ready for broad deployment. This fact has been argued by the federal government itself….

Not only does the Obama administration acknowledge that the technology isn’t ready, it also admits that it will significantly increase electricity costs.

There is No Global Warming and Will Be None for Decades

February 11, 2014/in Environment, Must Read, News, Science/by Alan Caruba

I recently received an unsigned email about my Sierra Club commentary in which I pointed out that it opposes traditional forms of energy and made a passing reference to Obama’s lie that “climate change”, the new name for global warming, was now “settled science.”

Global warming was never based on real science. It was conjured up using dubious computer models and we were supposed to believe that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could actually predict what the climate would be twenty, fifty, or a hundred years from now.

The writer of the email disagreed with me. “lol you are a f**king idiot. you don’t believe there is global warming going on? you need to let your prejudices go and stop basing your views on what your political stance is…do you research you f**king faggot.”

Now, not everyone who believes in global warming is as rude as this individual and certainly not as ignorant, but his message suggests that those who do not believe in it do so as the result of “a political stance” when, in fact, our views are based on science.

Anyone familiar with my writings knows that a lot of research is involved. In my case, it dates back to the late 1980s when the global warming hoax began to be embraced by politicians like Al Gore who made millions selling worthless “carbon credits” while warning that “Earth has a fever.”

A small army of scientists lined their pockets with government grants to produce data that supported the utterly baseless charge that carbon dioxide was causing the Earth to warm. They castigated other scientists or people like myself as “deniers” while we proffered to call ourselves sceptics. They were joined by most of the media that ignored the real science. And the curriculums in our schools were likewise corrupted with the hoax.

Then, about 17 years ago the Earth began to cool. It had nothing to do with carbon dioxide—which the Environmental Protection Agency deems a “pollutant” despite the fact that all life on Earth would die without it—and everything to do with the SUN.

A few days after the email arrived, two-thirds of the contiguous U.S.A. was covered by snow. As this is being written, Lake Superior is 92% frozen, setting a new record. As of February 5, the entire Great Lakes system was, according to the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, 77% covered with ice.

On February 1st, NOAA and NASA held a joint press conference in which they released data about 2013’s global surface temperature. They made reference to a “pause” in the temperature that began in 1997. Dr. David Whitehouse, science editor for the BBC, noted that “When asked for an explanation for the ‘pause’ by reporters, Dr. Gavin Schmidt of NASA and Dr. Thomas Karl of NOAA spoke of contributions from volcanoes, pollution, a quiet Sun, and natural variability. In other words, they don’t know.”

Both of these government agencies, along with others like the EPA and the Department of the Interior are staffed by people who understand that their employers are deeply committed to the global warming hoax. One should assume that almost anything they have to say about the “pause” is based entirely on politics, not science.

Then, too, despite the many measuring stations from which data is extracted to determine the Earth’s climate, there is a paucity of such stations in COLD places like Siberia. Stations here in the U.S. are often placed in “heat islands” otherwise known as cities. If you put enough of them close to sources of heat, you get thermometer readings that produce, well, heat.

People in the U.S., England, Europe and other areas of the world who do not possess Ph.ds in meteorology, climatology, geology, astronomy, and chemistry have begun to suspect that everything they have been told about global warming is false. Between 1300 and 1850 the northern hemisphere went through a mini-ice age. After that it began to warm up again. So, yes, there was global warming, but it was a natural cycle, not something caused by human beings.

Nature doesn’t care what we do. It is far more powerful than most of us can comprehend.

This brings us back to the Sun which determines, depending on where you are on planet Earth, how warm or cold you feel. The Sun, too, goes through cycles, generally about eleven years long. When it is generating a lot of heat, its surface is filled with sunspots, magnetic storms.

When there are few sunspots, solar radiation diminishes and we get cold. Scientists who study the Sun believe it may encounter another “Maunder minimum”, named after astronomer Edward Maunder, in which the last “Little Ice Age”, between 1645 and 1715, occurred. The Thames in England froze over as did the canals of Holland froze solid.

There is no global warming and scientists like Henrik Svensmark, the director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark’s National Space Institute, believes that “World temperatures may end up a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more.” I agree.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of Psy guy and is used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. The image was a candidate for Picture of the Year 2006.

AGENDA 21 REVEALED: ICLEI, Comprehensive Planning, Smart Growth, Green, Regionalism

February 10, 2014/in Environment, Government Transparency, News, Policy, Politics, Video/by Dr. Rich Swier

Agenda 21 is a non-binding, voluntarily implemented action plan of the United Nations with regard to sustainable development.[1] It is a product of the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. It is an action agenda for the UN, other multilateral organizations, and individual governments around the world that can be executed at local, national, and global levels. The “21” in Agenda 21 refers to the 21st Century. It has been affirmed and modified at subsequent UN conferences.

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During the last decade, opposition to Agenda 21 has increased within the United States at the local, state, and federal levels.[15] In January 2011, Commissioner Richard Rothschild of Carroll County, Maryland became the first elected official in the United States to successfully remove a U.S. jurisdiction from the ICLEI and Agenda 21.[16][unreliable source?] The Republican National Committee has adopted a resolution opposing Agenda 21, and the Republican Party platform stated that “We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty.”

Those who follow Glenn Beck might be aware that Tuesday marks the release of his latest book, “Agenda 21,” the suspenseful and perhaps sobering tale of a futuristic America in which a UN-led program spawned an authoritarian state where individuals are stripped of all personal rights and freedoms.

Oddly, Beck’s novel is not simply a work of fiction, but based on an actual program created by the United Nations by the very same name — “Agenda 21″ — which, according to the UN’s own website, is a “comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations system, governments and major groups, in every area in which human impacts on the environment.” “agenda 21” conspiracy “glenn beck” research un “united nations” fact plan agenda depopulation earth green Sustainability freedom liberty environment environmental “new world order” international global fema drill u.s. “united states” usa america europe illuminati elite mafia planning world earth media 2013 2014 future banking bank society finance wealth “third world” fear invasion action corporate guilty education “middle class” developer dollar usd suburbs forces camp camping prepare food storage 829speedy bush constitution independence one world government homeland security civil unrest emergency military base alex jones glenn beck blaze infowars gerald celente farrakhan lindsey williams david icke

In so many words, the United Nations seeks to co-opt, via individual governments, and eventually, a “one-world government,” privately held land under the auspices of ensuring its “sustainability.” Worse still, the UN’s Agenda 21 has even laid out plans for “depopulation” or rather, “population control.” If it sounds like something out of George Orwell’s 1984, that is because Agenda 21′s tenets are eerily in line with the demented alternate reality Orwell himself had imagined while scribing the pages of his famed novel.

“Sustainable development” is the catch-phrase Beck urged his Monday evening viewers to be leery of.

Where one can live and what land should be designated for would, under fully-realized Agenda 21 plan, be controlled by the United Nations and a future one-world government. Consider the following section from the UN website on Agenda 21′s plan for “promoting sustainable human settlement development.” Emphasis added: The overall human settlement objective is to improve the social, economic and environmental quality of human settlements and the living and working environments of all people, in particular the urban and rural poor. Such improvement should be based on technical cooperation activities, partnerships among the public, private and community sectors and participation in the decision-making process by community groups and special interest groups such as women, indigenous people, the elderly and the disabled. These approaches should form the core principles of national settlement strategies. In developing these strategies, countries will need to set priorities among the eight programme areas in this chapter in accordance with their national plans and objectives, taking fully into account their social and cultural capabilities. Furthermore, countries should make appropriate provision to monitor the impact of their strategies on marginalized and disenfranchised groups, with particular reference to the needs of women.

The Sierra Club Hates Energy

February 6, 2014/in Commentary, Energy, Environment/by Alan Caruba

If I told you that you should hate coal, oil and natural gas, you might think I was crazy and you would be right. Everything we do involves these three energy reserves and the U.S. has so much of them that we could be energy independent of the rest of the world while, at the same time, exporting them.

When you think about energy reserves, think about the hundreds of thousands of jobs they represent. Then think about the huge revenue in leases and taxes they represent to the government that needs to reduce its debt. Ultimately, though, try to imagine a nation that does not utilize petroleum in thousands of ways or fails to tap its enormous coal and natural gas reserves to generate the electricity upon which that everything depends.

I recently received an email from the Sierra Club praising the President’s State of the Union speech in which he claimed that climate change—by which they mean global warming—is real and that the science is “settled.” No, the science entirely refutes it—except if one means that the climate has always been a state of change. The most recent climate change is seventeen years of cooling that has gifted us with record-breaking cold as far south as Florida.

What Sierra Club focused on was Obama’s call for “new sources of energy” other than the traditional ones. He was referring to solar and wind energy. A recent news article on CNSNews noted that “Solar power, which President Barack Obama promoted…accounted for 0.2 percent of the U.S. electricity supply in the first nine months of 2013, according to data published by the U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration.”

According to the EIA, “the United States is producing less electricity now than it did when Obama took office…From 2008 to 2012, U.S. electricity production declined by 1.7 percent.”

Some might take this as a good thing, but “electricity has gotten more expensive since 2008—with the electricity price index at an all-time high.” So we are paying more while getting less.

The Sierra Club, however, criticized Obama saying “As long as his administration keeps throwing lifelines to old sources of energy like oil and gas, we won’t be able to lead the world on clean energy solutions like wind and solar.” They called for an “end to oil and gas fracking on public lands.” What they are not saying is that the Obama administration has virtually put an end to any exploration and extraction of energy sources on public lands. And you can forget about the massive reserves estimated to exist off-shore of our coasts.

In early January, Mark D. Green, the editor of Energy Tomorrow, a project of the American Petroleum Institute, examined the reality of our vast energy sources. Keep in mind that every product we purchase is dependent in some way on oil. “Every day 143 U.S. refineries convert an average of 15 million barrels of crude oil” that provide power for our vast transportation needs and thousands of other uses. Oil is the basis for the creation of plastic. Try to imagine living without anything that does not utilize plastic in some fashion.

As for natural gas, experts predict that lower prices as more is discovered via fracking, will increase industrial output 2.8 percent by 2015 and 3.9 percent by 2025. Policies that would allow the export of U.S. liquefied natural gas would generate between $15.6 billion and $73.6 billion to the Gross Domestic Product and help reduce our deficits and debt.

The Sierra Club doesn’t want to see the U.S. benefit from coal, oil and natural gas. It wants to see the landmass filled with solar farms and thousands of wind turbines that would not produce enough electricity to meet the needs of nation, let alone a major city. Because they are unpredictable, all require the backup of traditional plants.

Nor does the Sierra Club make any mention of the Obama administration’s war on coal that has forced 153 plants to shut down. It’s Environmental Protection Agency has proposed regulations that would require new plants to employ carbon capture and sequestration technology that is not commercially available! Nor is there any reason to capture carbon dioxide, the gas that is the “food” that every single piece of vegetation requires; a gas that plays virtually no role at all in the Earth’s climate.

As this is being written, the State Department just released a report that would clear the way for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada after a five-year delay by the Obama administration. Pipelines are the safest way to transport oil and natural gas. If the U.S. cannot gain access to the oil, it will go to China and other nations.

The prospect of the pipeline was rejected by the Sierra Club. Friends of the Earth announced that it would join with the Rainforest Action Network, the Sierra Club, and other radical Green groups to hold vigils around the nation Monday to protest its possible approval and construction.

The Sierra Club is not only lying to its members, it is lying to all of us when it says “Getting all of the energy we need without using fossil fuels is no longer a question of whether we can—but whether we will.” We can’t, we shouldn’t, and we won’t…but we must wait until Obama is no longer in office and, as early as the 2014 midterm elections, we must rid our nation of his supporters in Congress.

Then we will watch our nation’s economy expand with more jobs and more revenue.

Another Environmental Lie Exposed: Bees are Thriving

February 2, 2014/in Environment, Must Read, News, Policy, Science/by Alan Caruba

I cannot say it strong enough. Do not believe the lies that environmental groups, particularly those that receive millions from liberal foundations and from members who never question the “science” they claim to justify massive scare campaigns.

One such organization is Friends of the Earth (FOE) and its latest claim is that bees are dying all over the world as the result of the use of pesticides in agriculture and by people protecting their gardens. It is a lie.

The attack on the use of pesticides began in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” that claimed that their use posed a threat to human life. She said “Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species — man — acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world.”

The problem with her opinion is that humanity cannot alter nature, but can protect itself against the diseases and other problems. Humanity endures nature in the form of climate that currently is cooling much of the Earth. Were it not for science, we would not have put an end to polio and reduced other diseases such as malaria by killing the mosquitoes that spread it. We would not have learned how to create water purification systems that protect the residents of cities worldwide. We would not have learned how to increase crops that feed millions thanks to genetic modification.

Is humanity at risk? There are seven billion of us, more than any previous time on Earth.

Why do I defend pesticides? Because, since the 1980s, I have served pest control trade associations by providing communications programs, too often ignored by the mainstream press. In the 1980s I worked for a corporation that produced one of the most extraordinary pesticides invented; one that was applied with water! It so alarmed the Environmental Protection Agency, that it insisted that its multi-million dollar registration be repeated and that company decided to cease making it available in the U.S.

What do pesticides do? They protect us against trillions of insect and rodent pests that spread diseases while some represent millions in property damage—termites—every year. In June 2011, the EPA announced it intended to ban the sale of “the most toxic rat and mouse poisons, as well as most loose bait and pellet products” to residential customers. The only result of such a ban would be millions more rats and mice in their homes!

Rachel Carson’s book predicted the massive loss of bird species due to the use of pesticides. It was a bestseller and is still in print. She was wrong, but she triggered the beginning and growth of environmental groups that have used the same bad “science” to unleash all manner of fears on Americans and worldwide. Friends of the Earth is just one of them.

Recently I received a FOE email from Lisa Archer, its food and technology program director, in which she reported a Valentine’s Day project to stop Home Depot and Lowe’s stores from selling pesticides. The project is based on the totally false claim that all the bees are dying from the use of pesticides; in particular neonicotinoid pesticides that are widely used in agriculture.

The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) disputes this while acknowledging that “In the last decade, a massive decline in bee populations was detected. It was given the name of “Bee Colony Collapse Disorder” and “while the problem seems to have abated somewhat after 2010, periodic declines continued, and fears of recurrent major extinctions persisted.” The fears have been fanned by environmental organizations, but the ACSH revealed new research by scientists affiliated with the Department of Agriculture here and in China, reviewed in “The Scientist” that “provides the first evidence that the bee problem in fact, stems from the tobacco ringspot virus (TRSV), not from pesticides.”

[youtube]http://youtu.be/ob_e8gn0nzM[/youtube]

Not from pesticides despite the FOE’s claim that “neonicotinoid pesticides are killing bees” noting that Europe is banning them. Europe is a hotbed of environmental fears and, ironically, is reversing its trend toward solar and wind energy after it has driven up the cost of electricity there and harmed its economic growth.

The ACSH reports that “the bees may pick up the virus from the pollen of plants that they feed upon, and that the virus may be spread to other bees by mites that feed on them. Once it has gained a foothold in a bee, the researchers determined that TRVS can replicate itself in the bee’s body.”

“This process of a virus moving from one species to another is call ‘host shifting’”.

Writing in 2012, Rich Kozlovich, a pest control expert, reported that “it is not true that there has been a mysterious worldwide collapse in honey bee populations. In fact managed bee hives (which contain the bees which do the vast majority of our pollinating) have increased by a remarkable 45 percent over the last five years.”

He also noted that “most staple foods—wheat, rice and corn—do not depend on animal pollination at all. They are wind-pollinated, or self-pollinating.”

These well-established facts mean nothing to FOE or other environmental organizations seeking to demonize pesticides. It means nothing to the EPA that has banned many extraordinarily effective pesticides from use to protect humans and property.

It is the advances of modern science that have protected and extended human life. Banning them just exposes Americans to a range of diseases, some of which kill. Until more Americans understand that the real threat is the EPA and the environmental groups spreading baseless fears, they will continue to be at risk.

If the President Wants to Minimize GHG Emissions, He’ll Approve the Keystone Pipeline

February 1, 2014/in Economy, Environment, Featured, News, Policy, Politics/by Sean Hackbarth

The State Department released its final report on the environmental impacts of the Keystone XL pipeline. It not only pulls the rug out from a key argument of pipeline opponents, but it puts the president in an awkward position.

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First, the report undercuts pipeline opponents’ claims that stopping the construction of Keystone XL would block development of oil sands crude development in Canada:

[A]pproval or denial of any one crude oil transport project, including the proposed Project, is unlikely to significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands or the continued demand for heavy crude oil at refineries in the United States based on expected oil prices, oil-sands supply costs, transport costs, and supply-demand scenarios.

The report states that oil transport by rail is “already occurring in substantial volumes,” and “rail will likely be able to accommodate new production if new pipelines are delayed or not constructed.”

In short, blocking Keystone XL will not stop oil sands crude development in Canada.

Second, the report debunks arguments that a pipeline is the most environmentally dangerous of all scenarios. It looked at alternative scenarios if Keystone XL wasn’t approved—i.e. “No Action/maintaining the status quo–and compared their environmental impacts to the proposed pipeline.

The alternative scenarios all have higher greenhouse gas emissions associated with them than Keystone XL. From the report: “The total annual GHG emissions (direct and indirect) attributed to the No Action scenarios range from 28 to 42 percent greater than for the proposed.”

Impacts of Keystone XL alternatives [table]

If the president is as concerned with minimizing greenhouse gas emissions as he says he is, then he should give the pipeline the go-ahead.

Along with its environmental analysis, the report reaffirms the economic benefits from construction of the pipeline that were stated in the draft EIS:

42,100 new jobs.
$2 billion in earnings.
$3.4 billion added to U.S. GDP.

Tom Donohue, President and CEO of the U.S. Chamber commented on the release of the report:

The State Department has once again found nothing in its environmental analysis that would prevent the Keystone XL pipeline from moving forward. It’s time for the administration to stop playing politics with a project that will create good-paying American jobs, improve our energy security, and strengthen relations with our closest ally, Canada.

Five years of delays, distractions, and foot-dragging is long enough. It’s time to do what’s right for America, our economy and workers, and our relationship with our special neighbor to the north—approve the Keystone XL pipeline.

Now, we’re in the National Interest Determination stage, where eight other federal agencies and the public can weigh in on whether approving the pipeline is in the nation’s national interest.

Based on all that we know now about the jobs that will be created, the economic impacts, and its minimal effects on the environment, it’s clear that approving the Keystone XL pipeline is in America’s best interests.

FOX News Debate: Global Warmists denounced for using “Medieval witchcraft”

January 28, 2014/in Environment, News, Video/by Marc Morano

Watch the Marc Morano and Bill Nye Climate Debate on FOX With Stossel. Nye Cites ‘Hockey Stick’ as Proof – Says Politicians can fix potholes and the climate – Morano denounces as ‘medieval witchcraft’.

Morano vs. Nye on CO2:

NYE: ‘Do we agree that the atmosphere used to have 250 parts per million, now it has over 400 of carbon dioxide.’

MORANO: Absolutely. We’ve had ice ages at between 2,000 and 8,000 parts per million in the geological history of the Earth. We’ve had similar temperatures with 20 times the CO2 levels…The idea that — that the U.S. or developing world should limit their energy choices based on rising CO2 fears is scientifically baseless. And the geologic record bears that out and the current weather bears it out…It comes down to hundreds of factors are influencing our climate here. CO2 is not the tail that wagged the dog…There’s no more weather extremes over the 20th century. You can go from hurricanes or — we’re at a historic low right now…We had the lowest year on record for tornadoes.’

Morano vs. Nye on Development in Poor Nations:

MORANO: ‘How is the white, wealthy Western Europe world, in Europe and the U.S., going to tell people of color, 1.3 billion in the developing world, they can’t have what we have? Who is Bill Nye to tell [the developing word] they can’t have carbon-based energy?’

NYE: ‘We don’t want to have less. We want to do more with less. And this is where the innovations come in.’

Stossel’s ‘Chill Out’ program with John Stossel on Fox Business – First Broadcast January 23, 2014: Bill Nye the Science Guy, who says he is “frantic” about climate change debates skeptic Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com.

Morano and Nye also debated on CNN in 2012. Also see Morano debating on UN TV in November and his debate on CNN in December 2013.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/9_Im9B46TAc[/youtube]

Full Transcript below:

Stossel

January 23, 2014 Thursday

SHOW: STOSSEL 9:00 PM EST

Chill Out

BYLINE: John Stossel

GUESTS: Phil Valentine, Alex Epstein, Marc Morano, Bill Nye, Robert Engelman, Bill Bissett, Mark Nelson

SECTION: NEWS; Financial

LENGTH: 7553 words

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is not just cold, this is a killer.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If this isn’t climate change, then what is it?

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: As an American, I am here to say we need to act.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(APPLAUSE)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN STOSSEL, HOST (voice-over): All dramatic weather is our fault.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, my god.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Terrible tornadoes in Oklahoma. Horrible.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We know that this is because of the burning of fossil fuels.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Carbon could cost us the planet.

STOSSEL: It makes me want to ask Al Gore about that, but where is he?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He’s out at one of his other houses.

STOSSEL: Whether Gore is right about global warming didn’t matter, you already pay for his remedy.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, they’re declaring war, truly, on jobs.

STOSSEL: Who will win this war?

UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: It’s a happy ending.

STOSSEL: We’ll search for that. That’s our show tonight.

(END VIDEO TAPE)

ANNOUNCER: And now, John Stossel.

STOSSEL: I titled this program, “Chill out,” because after I researched the global warming scare that was my conclusion. We ought to just chill out. But our government isn’t chilling out. You now pay billions to try to fix global warming. And this year, “The Hill,” the Washington newspaper that covers Congress, said climate will be the political battle of 2014. Big money is being spent to convince Americans to vote to spend even more to try to stop global warming. In a moment, we’ll hear from Bill Nye, “The Science Guy,” who says he’s frantic about climate change. He’ll debate Marc Morano of climatedepot.com. But first, let me set the terms of debate. People say to me, Stossel, you don’t believe in global warming? But I do. I think it’s a stupid question, because what do you mean when you say global warming? To me, it’s really four questions.

One, is the globe warming? Well, yes. Global temperatures have risen, though not lately so much. Question two, is the warming manmade, is it our fault? Three, is it a crisis?

And four, if it is, can we do anything about it? Bill Nye’s answers to those questions are yes, yes, yes and yes. And for years, he’s told his viewers, beware of…

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL NYE, “THE SCIENCE GUY”: — what we call global warming. Global warming.

The globe is getting too warm. It’s something we’ve got to be careful of. Otherwise, things could get weird.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STOSSEL: Bill Nye joins us now, along with climate change skeptic, Marc Morano. Marc, you first. Why aren’t you scared? Bill and lots of people are.

MARC MORANO, FOUNDER, CLIMATE DEPOT: We’re now able to empirically look at their predictions that they made in the ’80s and start to see them fail. And out of 117 climate models, one analysis showed 114 failed. So when the predictions are failing them, uh, they still claim it’s worse than they thought. But that’s not the case here. So the bottom line is, the burden of proof is on them and they’ve failed to make the case.

STOSSEL: Bill Nye?

NYE: In the year 1750, there were about a billion humans in the world. Now, there are well over seven — seven billion people in the world. It more than doubled in my lifetime. So all these people trying to live the way we live in the developed world is filling the atmosphere with a great deal more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases than existed a couple of centuries ago. It’s the speed at which it is changing that is going to be troublesome for so many, uh, large populations of humans around the world. Now, you may have heard of the hockey stick graph. This is where, uh, we compare the temperature of the world over the last 10,000 years with the temperature now. And so we think of that, uh, as the…

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: — of a hockey stick?

NYE: — shaft of a hockey stick…

STOSSEL: — it’s going to shoot up.

NYE: Well, it is shooting up. It’s not going to, it is shooting up. And so it’s the speed that we’re going to have difficulty dealing with. But economically…

STOSSEL: But the temperature hasn’t increased in the past 15 years. It isn’t shooting up.

NYE: When you cherry-pick the data for certain surface temperatures, you end up with a — a very small change. It’s hardly noticeable. These people try to introduce the idea that scientific uncertainty, plus or minus a few percent, is equivalent to doubt about the whole thing. This is perfectly analogous to the cigarette industry and cancer, trying to introduce the idea that since you can’t…

(CROSSTALK)

NYE: — prove any one thing, the whole thing is in — is in doubt.

(CROSSTALK)

STOSSEL: As a consumer reporter. Just hang on one second, Marc. I’ll give you a shot. As a consumer reporter, I’ve covered 1,000 scares. Lawn chemicals, cell phone radiation…

MORANO: Sure.

STOSSEL: Pesticide residues, plastic bottles killing people, power lines, Mad Cow Disease was going to kill everybody. And always the example is, yes, there were doubters about cigarettes. I mean that one example doesn’t mean that the global warming scare is correct.

But, Marc, I — I should let you speak.

MORANO: Yes. For him to bring up cigarettes — the global warming scientists are the ones fulfilling a narrative. I mean we have Michael Oppenheimer, one of the lead U.N. scientists, took an endowment from Barbra Streisand. These Hollywood — the climatologists to the stars.

STOSSEL: Well, they’ve got to…

MORANO: He’s also…

STOSSEL: — get money from…

(CROSSTALK)

STOSSEL: — Barbra Streisand wants to give me money, I’ll take it.

MORANO: Right. But it’s so insulting to imply that somehow skeptical scientists are on the pay like tobacco companies. It’s the height of arrogance when you look at the actual data, the global warming scientists, through government grants, foundations, through media empowerment, have the full advantages of government money, foundation money, university money. There’s not even any comparison. And yet, these skeptical scientists, as their numbers have grown, we’ve had scientists like James Lovelock, who — the inventor of the Gaia Earth Theory, who has reversed himself.

STOSSEL: But a lot of climate scientists, serious ones, are genuinely worried.

MORANO: The ones you’ll always point to these ‘genuine’ climate scientists are from the United Nations. And the United Nations, the head of it, Rajendra Pachauri, came out last year or the year before and said their mission is to make the case that CO2 is driving global warming. They put the cart before the horse. And what happened was many U.N. scientists have now turned on it. Lennart Bengtsson, a Swedish scientist, has just come out and said we wouldn’t even have noticed the warming of the 20th century if it weren’t for modern instrumentation. And the idea of the hockey stick that Bill Nye mentioned is absurd. That has been, you know, called, quote, “statistical rubbish,” unquote. And hundreds of scientists in dozens and dozens of studies have shown both the Medieval and the Roman warming period. And these appeared in peer-reviewed journals, were as warm or warmer than current temperatures.

STOSSEL: Bill?

NYE: See if we can agree about this. There used to be a billion people a couple of centuries ago. Now there are seven billion.

STOSSEL: We agree on that.

NYE: There used to be…

STOSSEL: And the air is cleaner and people are living better.

MORANO: Yes.

STOSSEL: And fewer people are starving because of capitalism and industrialization.

NYE: Do we agree that the atmosphere used to have 250 parts per million, now it has over 400 of carbon dioxide.

STOSSEL: Yes. There’s more greenhouse gas out there.

MORANO: Absolutely. We’ve had ice ages at between 2,000 and 8,000 parts per million in the geological history of the Earth. We’ve had similar temperatures with 20 times the CO2 levels.

STOSSEL: Climate does change.

MORANO: Sure.

STOSSEL: And if you look, over time, we have a graph here from just the year 1000 to today, we had the Medieval warm period, we had the Little Ice Age, big changes.

NYE: You’ve really, uh, you’ve really messed with the far right hand side of the graph.

MORANO: That’s the United Nations graph from 1990, pre-hockey stick…

NYE: Yes.

MORANO: — before they reinvented past temperatures.

NYE: Do you agree that it’s never happened this fast?

MORANO: Actually, we’ve had, without benefit of mankind, similar CO2 levels in the recent (geologic) past without mankind’s influence. And I think…

(CROSSTALK)

MORANO: — the speed had nothing to do with it.

NYE: What about the weight?

MORANO: It comes down to hundreds of factors are influencing our climate here. CO2 is not the tail that wagged the dog. Another scientist who has essentially reversed herself is Judith Curry from Georgia Institute of Technology. She now says openly that you cannot control climate by reducing emissions. And that seems to be the entire premise of the United Nations, that somehow, if we tweak emissions through carbon taxes, cap and trade, we can alter weather patterns. You opened up with tornadoes and Barbara Boxer. She actually went down to the Senate floor the day of tornadoes and implied a carbon tax would help prevent future tornado outbreaks. This is Medieval witchcraft.

STOSSEL: It seems like every time there’s a new weather extreme, some people say the cause was manmade global warming.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Tomorrow morning, 90 percent of the country will face below normal temperatures. If this isn’t climate change, then what is it?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We know that this is because of the burning of fossil fuels.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: In one year, we have had the largest tornado ever recorded on Earth. And we have had the fastest hurricane ever recorded on Earth. And they’ve hit within six months of each other.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Terrible tornadoes in Oklahoma, horrible. Carbon could cost us the planet.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STOSSEL: That was Senator Barbara Boxer the day of — the very day of the Oklahoma tornado. So, Bill, global warming is going to cost us the planet, causing these tornadoes?

NYE: Well, you see, the planet will be here — well, the planet will be here, but if we have to…

STOSSEL: We won’t?

NYE: — continually rebuild and displace people.

MORANO: The idea that the United States or developing world should limit their energy choices based on rising CO2 fears is scientifically baseless, as I just mentioned. And the geologic record bears that out and the current weather bears it out. There’s no more weather extremes over the 20th century. You can go from hurricanes or — we’re at a historic low right now…

STOSSEL: The Oklahoma tor — tornado was the biggest ever.

MORANO: And they have better monitoring. We had the lowest year on record for tornadoes. And since the 1950s…

STOSSEL: There were fewer tornadoes.

STOSSEL: I’m struck, researching this, how — how there’s constant media hysteria. And it changes. In 1941, it was reported…

MORANO: Yes.

STOSSEL: — that World War II caused weather extremes. In 1961, “The New York Times” said scientists agree the world’s becoming colder. Scientists worried about a new ice age. Now we worry about warming.

Shouldn’t we be skeptical?

MORANO: Yes, and I’m sure people would say, well — science has advanced so much more. Well, science is always going to advance. The point is, this is the narrative of our day. And Bill keeps going on about overpopulation. The problem is, is that people now recognize one of the biggest problems is under population. As the developing world gets more and more carbon-based energy, India and Africa, and starts developing, the population is going to level off. So the hysteria has been there. You can go back…

NYE: So we disagree about the facts, Mr. Morano.

MORANO: You can’t disagree about facts. You’re…

NYE: The problem…

(LAUGHTER)

NYE: — and the problem is not just that there are more people in India and China, it’s they are using more energy than they ever used to use.

MORANO: And God bless them. They need that.

NYE: They want to live the way we live in the de…

STOSSEL: Why is that a problem?

NYE: They want to live the way we…

STOSSEL: That’s a good thing…

NYE: — live in the developed world.

MORANO: Would you deny them that?

NYE: So…

MORANO: I interviewed Jerry Brown, who said that they couldn’t emulate American lifestyle. Well, who is he — how is the white, wealthy Western Europe world, in Europe and the United States, going to tell people of color, 1.3 billion in the developing world, they can’t have what we have? Who is Bill Nye to tell them they can’t have carbon-based energy, which we…

STOSSEL: Well, let Bill Nye…

MORANO: — took full advantage of.

STOSSEL: — answer that.

NYE: We don’t want to have less. We want to do more with less. And this is where the innovations come in.

MORANO: Sure.

NYE: This is where the emerging technologies come in.

But embracing, uh, technologies that produce extra carbon dioxide, extra greenhouse gases, at this point in human history, is not in our best interests.

STOSSEL: I just want to play one more…

NYE: So…

STOSSEL: — video example to end. This idea that politicians can fix the climate strikes me as arrogance. And I think we heard arrogance six years ago from our president after he defeated Hillary Clinton.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STOSSEL: Bill, isn’t this the conceit of the self-anointed, politicians are going to fix the climate?

NYE: By way of example, is it conceit when politicians claim they’re going to fix potholes in the street?

STOSSEL: No, they can do that.

NYE: It is conceit when politicians say they’re going to time the traffic lights?

STOSSEL: No, they can do that.

MORANO: No, they can do that.

NYE: Is it conceit when politicians — is it conceit when politicians say they’re going to clean up the water in Chesapeake Bay?

STOSSEL: Nope.

NYE: Is that inappropriate?

Those — those things have been done.

STOSSEL: Right.

MORANO: Those are doable.

NYE: This is the same thing on a much, much larger scale.

STOSSEL: Thank you, Bill Nye and Marc Morano.

NYE: Thank you.

STOSSEL: To keep this conversation going on Facebook or Twitter, if you use that hash tag chillout, you can let me and others know what you think.