West Virginia: ClimateDepot’s Marc Morano loses effort to stop brainwashing of children on Climate Change

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student supporters of climate debate

Supporters of allowing climate debate in West VA schools.

This column has audio from a January 14, 2015 Board of Education meeting in Charleston, West Virginia. The meeting was being held to discuss providing balance to the district’s K-12 climate science curriculum.

According to JunkScience.com, “Unfortunately, warmists won this skirmish as the Board of Education voted to remove balance from the K-12 climate science curriculum.”

What has happened to the free-flow of ideas in our public school classrooms? Are school boards more interested in political correctness than they are about science?

Click here for more background on this failed effort.

Submitted Written Testimony of Marc Morano, Publisher of Climate Depot & former staff of U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee Presented to West Virginia Board of Education Meeting Charleston West VA on January 14, 2015 – West Virginia’s changes to the National Next Generation Science Standards

Charleston West VA, – January 14, 2014 – Morano: I want to thank the school board for hosting this public hearing on the changes to the climate curriculum in West Virginia schools. (Media coverage of Climate Depot here, here, here, here & here.)

These changes are accurate, factual and should not be controversial. I will proceed point by point on each revision. (National Journal Features Climate Depot’s Morano warning of ‘indoctrination’ in testimony to W.VA Board Of Education Meeting – Board Votes To Reconsider Standards That ‘Cast Doubt’ On ‘Climate Change’)

First, I am here to applaud the West Virginia (skeptical) changes to the curriculum. Even if you are not a global warming skeptic, these changes are basically fostering an open debate and they are against indoctrination. We must not tell kids there is no debate and no dissent is allowed. So even if you believe the UN and Al Gore, these changes made by the West Virginia board are accurate and scientifically valid. The proposed (climate skeptical) changes by this board were perfectly reasonable.

With regards to the alleged ‘97% consensus’ – a lead UN author Dr. Richard Tol testified to the U.S. Congress that the 97% figure was “pulled out of thin air.”That is a nonsense figure meant to intimidate when we have thousands of scientists out there openly dissenting – including Nobel Prize winners like Dr. Ivar Giaever, who actually endorsed President Obama, but he is a major global warming skeptic now. Every day more and more scientists are speaking out…scientists who used to believe that are changing their view.

The science on virtually A-Z at this point is failing and in many instances the claims are moving in the opposite direction. The global warming movement is suffering the scientific death of a thousand cuts.

We are going on 18 plus years with no global warming according to satellite data. You may hear about 2014 being the ‘hottest year’, but it is based surface data and hundredths of a degree difference between years.

There were three basic changes that West Virginia made to the curriculum,

1) Changing it to read ‘rise AND Fall of temperatures. That is perfectly valid revision made by West Virginia. We have actually had a rise in temperatures since the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850, but temperatures fell from 1940-through the 1970s then we increased from the late 1970s to late 1990s. Now we are in a standstill. Temperature go up and down. Studies show the Earth has probably dropped seen a temperature drop the Medieval Warm Period.

2) In terms of the West Virginia changes adding the language to the curriculum about the accuracy of climate models, A study in Nature. (See: Study in journal Nature Climate Change: 114 out of 117 climate model predictions from 1990′s wildly overestimated global warming)

So the West Virginia revisions on models questioning their accuracy are valid.

3) In terms of natural factors the revisions were accurate as well. All three of West Virginia’s revisions should be embraced even by those who agree with the UN and Al Gore. Even if you are not a global warming skeptic, the proposed changes by this board were perfectly reasonable and scientifically valid.

There is nothing controversial here except the idea that we should allow open debate and not tell kids that they have to think a certain way. The original standards teach no debate. I urge you to keep the revisions, let science win out here in the end and do not suppress dissent.

Obama Wants to Close Off Energy-Rich Stretch of Alaska to Development

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Pultizer Prize-winning author Daniel Yergin, wrote in the New York Times that global energy markets are at an inflection point. The role of the world’s “swing producer” has swung to the United States:

By leaving oil prices to the market, Saudi Arabia and the emirates also passed the responsibility as de facto swing producer to a country that hardly expected it — the United States. This approach is expected to continue with the accession of the new Saudi king, Salman, following the death on Friday of King Abdullah. And it means that changes in American production will now, along with that of Persian Gulf producers, also have a major influence on global oil prices.

Even though hydraulic fracturing had led this shale boom, conventional oil production is still important.

This makes the Obama administration’s request to close off a big portion of Alaska’s energy reserves to development especially disappointing:

President Barack Obama is proposing to designate the vast majority of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a wilderness area, including its potentially oil-rich coastal plain, drawing an angry response from top state elected officials who see it as a land grab by the federal government.

“They’ve decided that today was the day that they were going to declare war on Alaska. Well, we are ready to engage,” said U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and chair of the Senate energy committee.

The designation would set aside an additional nearly 12.3 million acres as wilderness, including the coastal plain near Alaska’s northeast corner, giving it the highest degree of federal protection available to public lands. More than 7 million acres of the refuge currently are managed as wilderness.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the area has over 10 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

The wilderness designation will require Congressional approval—not likely with this Congress. However, the Washington Post reports that the Interior Department will take action to limit energy development there [H/t Noah Rothman]:

While Congress would have to approve any new wilderness designation, Interior will immediately begin managing the iconic area under the highest level of protection the federal government can offer.

President Obama, who has not been to ANWR and ironically filmed his announcement on the fuel-guzzling Air Force One said, we must ensure “that this amazing wonder is preserved for future generations.”

In contrast Jonah Goldberg, someone who has visited ANWR, had a different description of the area where oil development would take place:

The oil is on the coastal plain at the very top of ANWR on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. And that ain’t beautiful. Believe me. Winter on the coastal plain lasts for nine months. Total darkness reigns for 58 straight days. The temperatures drop to 70 degrees below zero without wind chill. This is the time of year when the oil companies would do almost all of their work; when nary a caribou nor any other creature would be dumb enough to venture out on to the frozen tundra for long. Regardless, ANWR’s summer is no picnic either. The coastal plain is covered in a thick brick of ice for much of the year. When it melts, it creates, well, puddles. Lots and lots of puddles – and mud. This provides the lebensraum that mosquitoes and other flying critters need to stretch their wings.

But back to the President. In last week’s State of the Union Address he took credit for the oil and natural gas boom, but the facts tell a different story. Under his watch, oil and natural gas development has decreased on federal lands while increased on private and state lands. In fact, his administration has put up barriers to energy development. The ANWR proposal is the latest.

The administration is expected to release a draft of its offshore lease plan. That may include allowing energy development off the Atlantic coast. Such a decision will be welcome for its economic and job growth and bipartisan support, but it will further confirm how incoherent the President’s energy policy is.

The Blizzard That Wasn’t

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Dateline: January 27, 2015 – 3 to 4 AM, New York City and Tri-State area.

There was no climate change where I live in a suburb of Newark, N.J. if by “climate change” you meant a dramatic blizzard with high winds and several feet of snow. It’s winter and you get the occasional, rare blizzard every few years, but more often you get snowstorms. That’s not “change” by any definition.

Cartoon - Climate Change Predictions

For a larger view click on the image.

Listening to WABC radio follow events with callers from around the Tri-State area calling in with far more accurate reports than the meteorologists was an education in the way those trained in meteorology and the rest of us have been conditioned to believe that something is happening to planet Earth that, quite simply, is not happening.

The meteorologists spent their time trying to figure out the difference between a European computer model and one generated here in the U.S. The former predicted far worse conditions. The latter fell victim, along with the rest of us, to the mindset that the conditions the computers were interpreting did not reflect what was actually happening.

At this early morning hour, it is clear that Long Island, parts of Connecticut, and generally along the coastlines, there has been a heavier snowfall. A few miles inland however it is a far different story. Callers who had been out in the midst of the storm described light, powdery snow and perhaps two to four inches at most.

Why, they asked, did the Governors of New York and New Jersey, along with the Mayor of New York City close down the metropolitan area? They speculated on the millions of lost income for everyone involved in a storm that was not posing a significant traffic or other problems, but who had seen businesses, schools, bus lines, and other public facilities shut down. When a significantly incorrect weather prediction does that, it demonstrates how important it is to correctly interpret the data being provided by the satellites—the best source.

When, earlier in January, NOAA and NASA reported that 2014 had been “the warmest year” it should have raised far more questions and media coverage given the sheer absurdity of such a report. Remember, though, these are two federal government agencies we expect to get it right. They didn’t just get it wrong, skeptical scientists were quick to note how they had deliberately distorted the data on which they based the claim.

That is the heart of the issue surrounding the endless claims of “global warming” or “climate change.” The planet has not been warming for 19 years at this point because the sun has been in a perfectly natural cycle of low radiation.

Centuries ago, it was noticed that when there are few sunspots, magnetic storms, the Earth got colder. Thus, “climate change” is not an unusual event, but rather a reflection of the well-known cycles of warmth or cold that the planet has passed through for billions of years.

At this writing it is too early in the morning hours to know what the rest of the East Coast looks like, but the indications are that, as one moves westward the “blizzard” has been far less than the one predicted and will likely be downgraded to a standard winter snowstorm.

That’s the good news. The bad news was the over-reaction of meteorologists and politicians. No doubt they wanted to be “safe than sorry” but they inadvertently taught us all a lesson about the way environmental organizations and a government led by a President telling us that “climate change” is the most dangerous challenge facing us have been deliberately lying about the true meteorological record in order to drag us all back to a time in which we burned wood for heat and rode horses for transportation.

The Greens don’t like humans much and that is why they have been lying about “man-made” climate change when the climate has nothing to do with human activities.

Listen to the skeptics, often maliciously called “deniers”, when they tell you the truth about the meteorological science that has been deliberately distorted since the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988. It has been lying to us ever since.

Depending on where you live in the area in which the snow fell and the winds blew, trust your eyes. Trust your commonsense. Be more skeptical because the blizzard that wasn’t is not a lesson you want to forget anytime soon.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

RELATED ARTICLES: 

Climategate, the sequel: How we are STILL being tricked with flawed data on global warming – Telegraph

Foreign Firm Funding U.S. Green Groups Tied to State-Owned Russian Oil Company

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image of the North East U.S. blizzard of 2015 is courtesy of the Inquisitor.

Obama Has Two More Years Left to Destroy the U.S. Economy

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As 2015 began the Journal Editorial Report on Fox News was devoted to having its reporters, some of the best there are, speculate on what 2015 holds in terms of who might run for president and what the economy might be. The key word here is “speculate” because even experts know that it is unanticipated events that determine the future and the future is often all about unanticipated events.

How different would the world have been if John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated? One can reasonably assume there would not have been the long war in Vietnam because he wanted no part of the conflict there. Few would have predicted that an unknown Governor from Arkansas would emerge to become President as Bill Clinton did. Who would believe we are talking about his wife running for President? That is so bizarre it is mind-boggling.

Most certainly, few would have predicted that an unknown first term Senator from Illinois, Barack Hussein Obama, would push aside Hillary Clinton to become the first black American to be nominated for President and to win in 2008. Despite the takeover of the nation’s healthcare system with a series of boldfaced lies, he still won a second term.

Obama now has two more years in which to try to destroy the U.S. economy; particularly its manufacturing and energy sectors. The extent to which he is putting in place the means to do that still remains largely unreported or under-reported in terms of the threat it represents.

Obama Says Planet is WarmingThe vehicle for the nation’s destruction is the greatest hoax of the modern era, the claim that global warming must be avoided by reducing “greenhouse gas” emissions.

A President who lied to Americans about the Affordable Care Act, telling them they could keep their insurance plans, their doctors, and not have to pay more is surely not going to tell Americans that the planet is now into its 19th year of a cooling cycle with no warming in sight.

To raise the ante of the planetary threat hoax, he has added “climate change” when one would assume even the simple-minded would know humans have nothing to do with the Earth’s climate, nor the ability to initiate or stop any change.

In 2015, the White House is launching a vast propaganda campaign through the many elements of the federal government to reach into the nation’s schools with the climate lies and through other agencies to spread them.

In particular, Obama has been striving to utilize the Environmental Protection Agency to subvert existing environmental laws and, indeed, the Constitution unless Congress or the courts stop an attack that will greatly weaken the business, industrial and energy sectors. It will fundamentally put our lives at risk when there is not enough electricity to power homes and workplaces in various areas of the nation. At the very least, the cost of electricity will, in the President’s own words, “skyrocket.”

Why doesn’t anyone in Congress or the rest of the population wonder why White House policies are closing coal-fired plants that provided fifty percent of our electricity when Obama took office and now have been reduced to forty percent? Did you know that more than 1,200 new coal-fired plants are planned in other nations with two-thirds of them to be built in India and China? We live in a nation that has such huge reserves of coal we export it.

The EPA attack on these plants is so illegal and unethical that one of the nation’s leading liberal attorneys, Laurence H. Tribe, who began teaching about environmental law 45 years ago, went on record to declare the EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan is unconstitutional.

The plan is a regulatory proposal to reduce carbon emissions from the nation’s electric power plants. Tribe pointed out that a two-decade old Supreme Court precedent forbids the federal government from taking action to commandeer the powers of state governments by leaving them no choice but to implement it.

“The brute fact,” said Tribe “is that the Obama administration failed to get climate legislation through Congress. Yet the EPA is acting as though it has the legislative authority anyway to re-engineer the nation’s electric generating system and power grid. It does not.”

As 2014 came to a close, the Obama administration either proposed or imposed more than 1,200 new regulations on the American people.

Alex Newman, writing in the New American, calculated they will add “even more to the already crushing $2 trillion per year cost burden of the federal regulatory machine.” Not surprisingly, “most of the new regulatory schemes involve energy and the environment—139 during a mere two-week period in December, to be precise.”

“In all,” Newman reported, “the Obama administration foisted more than 75,000 pages of regulations on the United States in 2014, costing over $200 billion, on the low end, if new proposed rules are taken into account.” Just one, the EPA’s “coal ash” regulation, “is expected to cost as much as $20 billion, estimates suggest.”

Then add to that the EPA’s “ozone rule” that is estimated to cost “as much as $270 billion per year and put millions of American jobs at risk under the guise of further regulating emissions of the natural gas.” Released the day before Thanksgiving, “Experts also pointed out that the EPA’s own 2007 studies showed no adverse health effects from exposure to even high levels of ozone.”

These are just two examples of the regulatory strangulation of the nation’s economy and energy infrastructure.

This is Obama’s agenda for the remaining two years of his second and thankfully last term in office. Whether you know anything about the science of the climate or have ever even read the Constitution, the sheer disaster of ObamaCare should have told you by now that everything Obama has put in motion has had the single objective of destroying the nation’s economy in every possible way.

The voters have put Republicans in charge of both houses of Congress and their primary responsibility will be to reverse and repeal the damage of Obama’s first six years. The courts will play a role, but this is a job for our elected representatives.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

Friends of the Earth are the Enemies of Mankind

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It’s such a benign sounding name, Friends of the Earth. This multi-million dollar international organization is a network of environmental organizations in 74 countries. If its agenda was adopted and enacted much of mankind would lose access to the energy sources that define and enhance modernity or the beneficial chemicals that protect food crops from insect predators and weeds.

I am on FOE’s mailing list and the most recent email informed me and the thousands of others who received it that “the oil lobby and the Republican leadership in Congress are plotting a full frontal assault on our environmental protections…” I bet you didn’t know that the Republican Party was an enemy of the environment. That’s curious because it was a Republican, Richard M. Nixon, who created the Environmental Protection Agency with an executive order!

FOE was upset by the $1.01 trillion bill to fund the U.S. government for the coming year through to September. “What’s more, in a surprise giveaway to the super-rich, the bill raised the maximum contribution limit from individuals to political parties—opening the door for billionaires like the Koch Brothers to purchase even more seats in government.”

The sheer hypocrisy of FOE defies the imagination. No mention was made of the secretive “billionaires club” that was revealed in August in a report by Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. It was titled “The Chain of Environmental Command: How as Club of Billionaires and Their Foundations Control the Environmental Movement and Obama’s EPA.” Didn’t read about it in the mainstream press? That’s because it was hushed up.

You may, however, have heard of San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer who in February pledged to spend up to $100 million, half his own money and half from other billionaire donors, to get candidates who promised to pass anti-global warming legislation elected in the midterm elections. Steyer has been a leading opponent of the Keystone XL pipeline, but for sheer hypocrisy, Steyer made his fortune by investing in fossil fuel companies!

As far as FOE is concerned, only conservative billionaires are evil.

“At Friends of the Earth, we’re working to protect people and the planet from Big Oil and its profits.” Translation: We don’t want oil companies to provide the source of energy that fuels our cars, trucks, and other devices that improve our lives. We don’t like profits because they are the result of capitalism.”

FOE (1)For good measure, FOE tells its supporters the “future would be great for companies like Dow, Syngenta, and Monsanto — but terrible for bees, butterflies, and people like us. Take away pesticides and all you have left are the pest insects that spread disease and harm food crops.

According to Wikipedia, “Originally based largely in North America and Europe, its membership is now heavily weighted toward groups in the developing world.” It’s the developing world that has been the focus of the United Nations greatest hoax, global warming, now called climate change, as a means to transfer money from wealthy nations to those less well governed, often because there is a despot or larcenous group in charge.

It is little wonder that FOE is upset by the decision of millions of American voters to elect candidates who want to rein in the excesses of the Environmental Protection Agency and take steps to improve the economy. Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is denounced as “a climate denier with close ties to the coal industry.” He has made it clear that getting the Keystone XL pipeline approved by Congress will be a priority.

FOE’s email even named the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as “a policy group that helps develop anti-environmental state laws across the country. Right now they’re focused on plans to erode the President’s Clean Power Plan and EPA’s ability to carry out its mission.”

What FOE’s email decrying Big Oil and Republicans doesn’t mention is that, among the elements of the 1,603 pages of the omnibus appropriations bill, is a reduction in the funding of the Environmental Protection Agency which received $60 million less than last year. At $8.1 billion, the EPA is operating on its smallest budget since 1989.

I would like to see the EPA eliminated as a federal agency and that funding go as grants to the individual state environmental protection agencies to address problems closer to those responsible to do so. As it was, the omnibus bill put a variety of limits on EPA “greenhouse gas” programs, some of which verge on the totally idiotic such as permits for gas emissions—methane from cows!

The bill also disallowed President Obama’s promise to give $3 billion to the United Nations Climate Fund, a means to take our money and give it to nations for “environmental” programs that are more likely to end up being something else entirely.

With its anti-energy, anti-capitalism agenda, Friends of the Earth are in fact enemies of mankind. They would happily return the planet to the Dark Ages. That’s why people like me shine a very bright light on them so you will not be duped in the way far too many others are.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of the Mahogany protest, London, 1993. Photo: Friends of the Earth.

Scientists Accuse NASA/NOAA of ‘Misleading’ & ‘Lying’ About ‘Hottest Year’ Claim

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“The Feds are conning the public on 2014 being the “hottest year”. We now know that both NASA and NOAA (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration) knew their ‘hottest year’ claims would not hold up to scientific scrutiny. But both agencies chose instead to loudly push the global warming narrative to a willing and compliant news media.

“The ‘hottest year’ claims had already been exposed as statistically meaningless and a confirmation of the 18 year plus temperature ‘pause’. See: Scientists balk at ‘hottest year’ claims: Ignores Satellites showing 18 Year ‘Pause’ – ‘We are arguing over the significance of hundredths of a degree’ – The ‘Pause’ continues

“The shameless activism shown by our federal scientists — particularly NASA GISS head Gavin Schmidt — may warrant further inspection by the new GOP Congress.” (End Morano statement. – Morano is producer and host of the upcoming climate documentary Climate Hustle. www.ClimateHustle.com)

UK Daily Mail: NASA climate scientists: We said 2014 was the warmest year on record… but we’re only 38% sure we were right – ‘NASA press release failed to mention this’ – Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies claimed its analysis of world temperatures showed ‘2014 was the warmest year on record’ – But it emerged that GISS’s analysis is subject to a margin of error – Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all – The Nasa climate scientists who claimed 2014 set a new record for global warmth last night admitted they were only 38 per cent sure this was true. Yet the Nasa press release failed to mention this, as well as the fact that the alleged ‘record’ amounted to an increase over 2010, the previous ‘warmest year’, of just two-hundredths of a degree – or 0.02C. The margin of error is said by scientists to be approximately 0.1C – several times as much. As a result, GISS’s director Gavin Schmidt has now admitted Nasa thinks the likelihood that 2014 was the warmest year since 1880 is just 38 per cent. However, when asked by this newspaper whether he regretted that the news release did not mention this, he did not respond.

(Background on NASA’s Gavin Schmidt here. – Meet NASA’s New ‘James Hansen’ – Gavin Schmidt – the man who hates debate & loses when he does debate – He has been criticized by prominent scientists for ‘erroneously communicating the reality of the how climate system is actually behaving’)

Email: gavin.a.schmidt@nasa.gov

NASA’s Gavin Schmidt

NOAA, NASA quietly conceded: 2014 was probably not the warmest year on record – Former Harvard Physicist Dr. Lubos Motl: ‘According to NOAA, the probability that a different year than 2014 was the warmest one was 52%. – According to NASA, the probability that a different year than 2014 was the warmest one was 62%.’ It is more likely than not that the warmest year was a different one than 2014. – ‘As the tweet unambiguously proves, NASA’s Gavin Schmidt knew about this fact. That didn’t prevent them from pushing virtually all mainstream media to publish the lie – in the very title – that: NASA: 2014 was the warmest year’

Physicist Dr. Richard Muller’s Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project: ‘It is impossible to conclude from our analysis which of 2014, 2010, or 2005 was actually the warmest year… the Earth’s average temperature for the past decade has changed very little’

Analysis: NASA’s ‘hottest year’ claim ‘ignores the fact that its error bar is 500% larger than claimed record — & ignores that satellite data’ – Nasa ‘ignores the record Antarctic sea ice, ignores the above average global sea ice, ignores the record snow cover’

Analysis: NASA ‘has massively altered (temperature data) over the past decade’

Oops. NOAA (quietly) admits 2014 was ‘more unlikely than likely’ the warmest on record – According to NOAA definitions, global surface temperatures for 2014 were “More Unlikely Than Likely” the highest on record, but they failed to note that on the main page of their State of the Climate report…NOAA has once again shown it is a political entity, not a scientific one. And that’s a damn shame. The public needs openness from NOAA about climate; we do not need to be misled by politically motivated misdirection and misinformation.

NOAA concedes ‘Hottest Year’ claim ‘is within…the uncertainty of the dataset’ – ‘The new record high by 0.04 deg C is within the +/-0.09 deg C uncertainty of the dataset.’

Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer: ‘Why You are Being Misled on Global Temperatures’ – ‘I am embarrassed by the scientific community’s behavior on the subject’– ‘In what universe does a temperature change that is too small for anyone to feel over a 50 year period become globally significant?’ – ‘Where we don’t know if the global average temperature is 58 or 59 or 60 deg. F, but we are sure that if it increases by 1 or 2 deg. F, that would be a catastrophe?’

Warmist_Year_Evah_scr

Cartoon Via WattsUPWithThat.com

Physicist Dr. Richard Muller’s Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project: ‘It is impossible to conclude from our analysis which of 2014, 2010, or 2005 was actually the warmest year… the Earth’s average temperature for the past decade has changed very little’ – Another analysis, from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, drawn from ten times as many measuring stations as GISS, concluded that if 2014 was a record year, it was by an even tinier amount.’

WMO in 2006 Demolishes NOAA/NASA Claims Of ‘Hottest Year’ – Global average temperature in 2006 is ‘statistically indistinguishable’ – WMO Flashback 2006: ‘All temperature values have uncertainties, which arise mainly from gaps in data coverage. The size of the uncertainties is such that the global average temperature for 2006 is statistically indistinguishable from, and could be anywhere between, the first and the eighth warmest year on record.’

UK’s Lord Christopher Monckton: ‘Was 2014 the warmest year on record? No, it wasn’t’ – ‘ According to the RSS satellite data, there has been no global warming – at all – for 18 years 3 months, notwithstanding ever-more-rapid increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration.’ – ‘Those who have repeatedly tampered with the terrestrial temperature record and have relied chiefly on the tampered results for their assertion that 2014 was “the warmest year on record”.  – ‘Their strategy is now clear: Cut worldwide CO2 emissions even though this is plainly unnecessary, and then – when temperature fails to rise as predicted – assert that the absence of global warming that would not have happened in any event is attributable to emissions cuts. On this daft basis, the world’s governments make policy at taxpayers’ expense.’

Monckton jan 2014

UK Met Office Say Surface Temperatures Should Agree With Satellites — ‘Except when they’re not!!’ – ‘In 2013, the Met Office had this to say about global temperature datasets: “Changes in temperature observed in surface data records are corroborated by records of temperatures in the troposphere recorded by satellites” Well, except when they’re not!!

‘NOAA used a specific ENSO index to claim that El Niño conditions did not exist in 2014, when at least one other index says El Niño conditions existed’ – ‘NOAA used a specific ENSO index to claim that El Niño conditions did not exist in 2014, when at least one other index says El Niño conditions existed.’

‘Earth is heading into its third year of above average sea ice cover, as government scientists, politicians and the press continue to insist that the poles are melting’ – ‘Why would NASA trust their own satellites, when they have a piss poor network of surface stations which doesn’t cover much of the planet, and they insist needs to be massively adjusted?’

‘Earth is heading into its third year of above average sea ice cover, as government scientists, politicians and the press continue to insist that the poles are melting’

Analysis: NASA’s ‘hottest year’ claim ‘ignores the fact that its error bar is 500% larger than claimed record — & ignores that satellite data’ – Nasa ‘ignores the record Antarctic sea ice, ignores the above average global sea ice, ignores the record snow cover’

Analysis: NASA ‘has massively altered (temperature data) over the past decade’– ‘NASA GISS has nearly doubled reported 1880 to 2000 warming since their 2003 version. They have altered the data so much, they had to stretch the scale at both ends to fit their alterations on to the graph. This is not “reliable” data.’

Scientist calls warmist claim ‘preposterous’: Rips claim that there is only a ’1-in-27 Million Chance That Earth’s Record Hot Streak Is Natural’ – ‘It is a mark, and an important one, of how political climate “science” has become that statistics like this are quoted and accepted…So why do they quote these numbers Because they want to scare you into believing, without evidence, their alternate model, apocalyptic man-made global warming is true.’

Why Satellite Records Cannot Be Ignored – ‘Between 1979 and 2012, the satellite and surface data followed each other closely’ – ‘Until the difference between satellite and surface datasets can be fully explained, it is no more than political rhetoric to claim that 2014 was the warmest year on record.’

Flashback 2005: NASA’s James Hansen: No Agreement On What Is ‘Surface Air Temperature’ …Few Observed Data Filled In With ‘Guesses’ – Hansen: ‘To measure SAT (Surface Air Temperature) we have to agree on what it is and, as far as I know, no such standard has been suggested or generally adopted.’

Q. If Surface Air Temperatures cannot be measured, how are SAT maps created?

Hansen: ‘We may start out the model with the few observed data that are available and fill in the rest with guesses (also called extrapolations)’

RELATED ARTICLES:

Scientists balk at ‘hottest year’ claims: Ignores Satellites showing 18 Year ‘Pause’ – ‘We are arguing over the significance of hundredths of a degree’ – The ‘Pause’ continues

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano: ‘Claiming 2014 is the ‘hottest year’ on record based on hundredths of a degree temperature difference is a fancy way of saying the global warming ‘pause’ is continuing.’

Astrophysicist Dr. Dr David Whitehouse: ‘The NASA press release is highly misleading…talk of a record is scientifically and statistically meaningless.’

Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer: ‘Why 2014 Won’t Be the Warmest Year on Record’ (based on surface data)– ‘We are arguing over the significance of hundredths of a degree’

Climatologist Dr. Pat Michaels debunks 2014 ‘hottest year’ claim: ‘Is 58.46° then distinguishable from 58.45°? In a word, ‘NO.’

No Record Temperatures According To Satellites

Physicist Dr. Lubos Motl: ‘Please laugh out loud when someone will be telling you that it was the warmest year’

Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.: ‘We have found a significant warm bias. Thus, the reported global average surface temperature anomaly is also too warm.’

Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry: ‘With 2014 essentially tied with 2005 and 2010 for hottest year, this implies that there has been essentially no trend in warming over the past decade.’

NASA Keeps Telling “Warmest” Lies

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On January 16 The New York Times reported the lies NASA keeps telling about global warming with an article titled “2014 Breaks Heat Record, Challenging Global Warming Skeptics.” We have reached the point where neither a famed government agency nor a famed daily newspaper can be believed simply because both are lying to advance the greatest hoax of the modern era.

Cartoon - Polar VortexRemember that 2014 started off with something called a “polar vortex” to describe the incredibly cold weather being experienced and remember, too, that we were being told that it was evidence of global warming! That’s how stupid the “Warmists” who keep saying such things think we are.

The Earth is in the 19th year of a natural cooling cycle based on the reduced radiation of the Sun which is in its own natural cycle. It hasn’t been getting warmer and most people who give it any thought at all know the truth of that.

Enough people have concluded this that, according to a recent CNN poll, more than half, 57%, say that global warming is not a global threat. In addition, the poll revealed that only 50% of Americans believe the alleged global warming is not caused by man-made emissions, while 23% believe it is the result of natural changes, and 26% believe global warming is not a proven fact.

That’s progress. No youngster under the age of 19 has ever experienced a single day of global warming. No computer model that ever predicted it has been accurate. Neither the Pope nor the President, nor any other world leader who repeats the global warming claim is correct.

The latest claim came from NASA and, as I continue to remind readers, it is a government agency whose budget depends on parroting the lies the President keeps telling about global warming.

Astrophysicist, Dr. David Whitehouse, said “The NASA press release is highly misleading…talk of a record is scientifically and statistically meaningless.” He was joined by climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer who said “We are arguing over the significance of hundredths of a degree.”

Do you believe that a hundredth of a degree makes a difference? Well, it does if you are a government agency desperately trying to keep the global warming hoax alive. Climatologist Dr. Pat Michaels asked “Is 58.46 degrees distinguishable from 58.45 degrees? In a word, NO.”

Marc Morano, the editor of CFACT’s ClimateDepot.com, said, “There are dueling global data-sets—surface temperature records and satellite records—and they disagree. The satellites show an 18 year-plus global warming standstill and the satellite was set up to be ‘more accurate’ than the surface records.” As for the NASA claim, Morano dismissed it as “simply a political statement not based on temperature gauges.” Morano, a former member of the staff of the U.S. Senate Environmental & Public Works Committee, is working on an upcoming documentary “Climate Hustle.”

How does this affect you? The lie that carbon dioxide and methane emissions, dubbed “greenhouse gases”, are causing global warming is the basis for the Obama administration’s attack on the nation’s energy sector and, in particular, the provision of electricity by coal-fired plants. In the past six years many of these plants have been shut down or will be. The result is less electricity and higher prices for electricity. The other result is an attack on the oil and natural gas industry that drill to access these resources. There is not a scintilla of truth to justify what is being done to Americans in the name of global warming.

There is yet another result and that is the loss of jobs in the energy sector and the reduction in revenue to the nation and states it represents. The nation’s economy overall has been in sluggish state which the word “growth” doesn’t even begin to describe. That hurts everyone.

Heartland - Climate NewsMost of us don’t have a lot of time to get up to speed and stay there regarding the facts surrounding global warming or climate change. An excellent source of information is the Environment & Climate News, a monthly publication by The Heartland Institute, a thirty year old non-profit free market think tank that will sponsor its tenth annual International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, D.C. in June.

NASA has been allowed to degrade to the point where the agency that sent men to the Moon no longer has the capacity to even transport them to Mir, the space station built by the Russians. We have gone from the world’s leader in space exploration to an agency that has been turned into a propaganda machine asserting that a hundredth of a degree “proves” that global warming is happening.

The U.S. and the rest of the world are setting records, but they are records for how cold it has become everywhere. There was snow recently in Saudi Arabia from a storm that swept across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan. Does that sound like global warming to you? For an excellent source of information on the cooling of the planet, visit http://iceagenow.info.

You have an obligation to yourself, your family, friends and co-workers to not just know the truth but to denounce entities like NASA, the EPA, and The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, and others that keep repeating the lies about global warming.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

The EPA’s Methane Madness: The EPA thinks cow flatulence is a serious problem

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The Obama administration’s attack on America’s energy sector is insane. They might as well tell us what to eat. Oh, wait, Michelle Obama is doing that. Or that the Islamic State is not Islamic. Oh, wait, Barack Obama said that.

Or that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is about protecting the environment. It used to be decades ago, but not these days.

There was a time when the EPA was devoted to cleaning up the nation’s air and water. It did a very good job and we now all breathe cleaner air and have cleaner water. At some point, though, it went from a science-based government agency to one for which science is whatever they say it is and its agenda is the single minded reduction of all sources of energy, coal, oil and natural gas, by telling huge lies, citing junk science, and generating a torrent of regulation.

Americans have been so blitzed with global warming and climate change propaganda for so long one can understand why many just assume that these pose a hazard even though there hasn’t been any warming for 19 years and climate change is something that has been going on for 4.5 billion years. When the EPA says that it’s protecting everyone’s health, one can understand why that is an assumption many automatically accept.

The problem is that the so-called “science” behind virtually all of the EPA pronouncements and regulations cannot even be accessed by the public that paid for it. The problem is so bad that, in November 2014, Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ) introduced a bill, HR 4012, the Secret Science Reform Act, to address it. It would force the EPA to disclose all scientific and technical information before proposing or finalizing any regulation.

As often as not, those conducting taxpayer funded science studies refuse to release the raw data they obtained and the methods they used to interpret it. Moreover, agency “science” isn’t always about empirical data collection, but as Ron Arnold of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, noted in 2013, it is “a ‘literature search’ with researchers in a library selecting papers and reports by others that merely summarize results and give opinions of the actual scientists. These agency researchers never even see the underlying data, much less collect it in the field.”

The syndicated columnist, Larry Bell, recently noted that “Such misleading and downright deceptive practices openly violate the Information Quality Act, Executive Order 12688, and related Office of Management and Budget guidelines requiring that regulatory agencies provide for full, independent, peer review of all ‘influential scientific information.’” It isn’t that there are laws to protect us from the use of junk science. It’s more like they are not enforced.

These days the EPA is on a tear to regulate mercury and methane. It claims that its mercury air and toxics rule would produce $53 billion to $140 billion in annual health and environmental benefits. That is so absurd it defies the imagination. It is based on the EPA’s estimated benefits from reducing particulates that are—wait for it—already covered by existing regulations!

Regarding the methane reduction crusade the EPA has launched, Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, says “EPA’s methane regulation is redundant, costly, and unnecessary. Energy producers are already reducing methane emissions because methane is a valuable commodity. It would be like issue regulations forcing ice cream makers to spill less ice cream.”

“The Obama administration’s latest attack on American energy,” said Pyle, “reaffirms that their agenda is not about the climate at all—it’s about driving up the cost of producing and using natural gas, oil, and coal in America. The proof is the EPA’s own research on methane which shows that this rule will have no discernible impact on the climate.”

S. Fred Singer, founder and Director of the Science and Environmental Policy Project as well as a Senior Fellow with The Heartland Institute says “Contrary to radical environmentalists’ claims, methane is NOT an important greenhouse gas; it has a totally negligible impact on climate. Attempts to control methane emissions make little sense. A Heartland colleague, Research Fellow H. Sterling Burnett, says “Obama is again avoiding Congress, relying on regulations to effectively create new laws he couldn’t legally pass.”

As Larry Bell noted, even by the EPA’s own calculations and estimates, the methane emissions limits, along with other limits on so called greenhouse gases “will prevent less than two-hundredths of a degree Celsius of warming by the end of this century.”

That’s a high price to pay for the loss of countless plants that generate the electricity on which the entire nation depends for its existence. That is where the EPA is taking us.

Nothing the government does can have any effect on the climate. You don’t need a PhD in meteorology or climatology to know that.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of The Peoples Cube.

America’s Best Climate Prediction Expert Finally Gets Noticed

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In Orlando, Florida is a lone climate researcher who, for almost eight years, has been putting the U.S. government’s best scientists and science agencies to shame, when it comes to accurately making major climate predictions. This is especially true when compared to Al Gore-style global warming politicians, government funded university Ph.D. climate scientists and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN-IPCC).

The UN-IPCC is the UN’s climate research arm that historians may someday remember best for unreliable climate models and associated wildly exaggerated, and erroneous temperature and sea level rise predictions. The “climategate’ scandal at the UN will likewise be prominent for the disclosure that its supposed ‘best climate scientists” falsified or manipulated climate data to fit the politically motivated manmade global warming storyline.

In March 2013, while I was the Florida Editor for the online conservative journal Watchdogwire.com, I had the chance to review the track record of this maverick in the field of climatology. When I was done I put my name on a column naming him “America’s best climate prediction expert.” I added to it in April 2014 updating his list of predictions he had made. He is Mr. John L. Casey, a former White House and NASA space program consultant, Space Shuttle engineer, and high tech start-up company executive.

His first important climate research findings were issued in a press release in spring 2007. Later his only, yet seminal, peer reviewed paper with its associated theory on climate change driven by the Sun, was published on line for all to review. It is called the “Relational Cycle Theory.” Despite a sterling background in the space program at the highest levels of the U.S. government, in 2007 and 2008 he was nonetheless without a Ph.D. or any climate research papers. Thus, when he issued his first climate predictions he was immediately labeled by left wing media global warming zealots and even some publicity seeking conservatives as a “scam artist,” “hoaxer,” and a “fraud.” His pronouncements of the end of global warming within a few years and the start of a new cold climate, was a message no one wanted to hear including both Republican and Democrat presidential candidates (McCain and Obama) and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore, who were all saying manmade global warming was a real threat. The timing on John’s first predictions could not have been worse.

Many would have given up on this financially ruinous and personally punishing quest to tell the truth about the climate. Fortunately for all Americans, John did not. Over the years, John started the Space and Science Research Corporation (SSRC), wrote a leading climate book, and in 2013, began to publish the bi-annual Global Climate Status Report (GCSR). He has made well over one hundred radio and TV interviews and public presentations across the United States. He is now the most referenced climatologist on the internet regarding the next potentially dangerous cold climate.

In September 2013, the CEO of influential Newsmax Media, Chris Ruddy, was captivated by John’s first book “Cold Sun.” He decided to throw all of his rapidly growing media company’s resources behind John’s research. John’s first climate book “Cold Sun” was updated and recast as “Dark Winter.” Under “The Cold Truth Initiative” as Newsmax calls it, “Dark Winter” is now being promoted nationwide.

Three months after publication, and “Dark Winter” has reached number four on Amazon’s 100 “Best Sellers” list of climate books! See the list at by clicking here.

The books ahead of him are the typical manmade global warming books one of which is fictional. That makes John’s “Dark Winter” the number 1 best selling global cooling, and I dare say best selling ‘truthful,’ climate book in the USA. Of the top four, his is the only book written by a proven climatologist.

America’s best climate prediction expert is at last receiving the credit he is due. When will the rest of the media, the scientific establishment, and our leaders in Washington recognize this one man’s courage, skills, and his selfless mission to help our people prepare for the new long cold climate?

Congratulations to John L. Casey, a man who understands climate and climate policy better than anyone, period.

In Veto Threat, President Claims 6 Years Isn’t Enough Time to Study Keystone Pipeline

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On the first day of taking control of the U.S. Senate, Republicans ran into some trouble:

Democrats managed to put the kibosh on a planned Energy and Natural Resources [ENR] Committee hearing today on Keystone XL, forcing Republicans to cancel the event. Sen. Dick Durbin, on behalf of Barbara Boxer, objected to a GOP floor move seeking unanimous consent to appoint Lisa Murkowski and Maria Cantwell as the leaders of ENR. The appointment was necessary for the move to take place because Democrats do no formally organize until today. Objecting to the UC request prevented the committee from being able to organize in time for today’s hearing, which was then scrapped.

While a minor setback, it typifies the many delays and obstacles put in front of the Keystone XL pipeline since permits applications were filed in 2008.

However, as soon as the bill to approve the job-creating, energy infrastructure project was filed in the Senate, theWhite House threatened to veto it.

The Statement of Administration Policy on the bill states the bill “seeks to circumvent longstanding and proven processes for determining whether cross-border pipelines serve the national interest” and “prevents the thorough consideration of complex issues.”

In other words, the President wants you to believe that there hasn’t been enough time to study the pipeline.

That’s absurd.

The Keystone XL pipeline has been studied for over six years. Five times, the State Department has issued reports that the project would have minimal impact on the environment.

Oil Sands Fact Check Keystone XL timeline.

For a larger view click on the chart.

In the time it’s been studied you could have built one Golden Gate Bridge (with time to spare), built three Pentagons, or watched all six Star Wars movies 3,917 times.

The most recent State Department analysis found that along with little environmental impact, the Keystone XL pipeline will create 42,000 jobs, generate $3.4 billion in economic activity, and generate $55.6 million in local property taxes once it’s operating.

Estimated local property taxes from the Keystone XL pipeline. Source: Tax Foundation.

 Reaction to the President’s veto threat was greeted with bipartisan disappointment. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY):

I assure you, threatening to veto a jobs and infrastructure bill within minutes of a new Congress taking the oath of office — a bill with strong bipartisan support — is anything but productive.

Bill co-sponsor, Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV):

His decision to veto such a commonsense bill prior to the unfolding of regular congressional order and the offering of amendments appears premature and does little to mitigate the congressional gridlock. It is time that we address the critical issues of moving America toward energy independence and fostering job growth and economic prosperity.

By working at a snail’s pace, the administration has turned this project into a mobilization tool for anti-energy activists. It has allowed special interest demagoguery to trump sober policy analysis and made the Keystone XL pipeline a symbol of a dysfunctional federal permitting process.  People in Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the rest of America have waited long enough.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board advised Congress to vote to approve the pipeline anyway [subscription required]:

Members of both parties should move ahead despite the veto threat and call his bluff. At least the country will see who is the real obstacle to faster growth and job creation.

Agree. Tell Congress to support the Keystone XL pipeline.

Businesses, investors, and entrepreneurs wondering if it’s still possible to build big things in America are watching,labor unions that support the pipeline are watching, and a majority of the public who supports the pipeline is watching.

Pew Research Poll on the Keystone XL pipeline.
EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of pipe to be used for the Keystone XL pipeline in a field in Gascoyne, ND. Photo credit: Sean Hackbarth.

White House Climate Lunacy

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As January 2014 arrived with a blast of cold air ominously dubbed the “polar vortex”, the White House released a video in which the Chief Science Advisor to President Obama, Dr. John Holdren, managed to get on both sides of it, declaring the “extreme cold” to be “a pattern that we expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues.” How the Earth is getting both colder and warmer at the same time defies reality, but that is of little concern to Dr. Holdren and, indeed, the entire global warming—now called climate change–hoax.

Earlier, in November 2013, the White House made Dr. Holdren available to social media saying he would answer “any questions that you have about climate change…” As noted by Jim Lakely, Communications Director of The Heartland Institute, the invitation welcomed questions “but only if they conform to the notion that human activity is causing a climate crisis, and restricting human activity by government direction can ‘fight it.’” The answers would have to wait “because the White House social media experts are having a hard time sifting through the wreckage of their ill-conceived campaign and finding the very few that conform to Holdren’s alarmist point of view.”

Sadly, in addition to the United Nations where the hoax originated and any number of world leaders including our President and Secretary of State, Pope Francis has announced that he too believes the Earth is warming. Someone should tell him that it has been in a natural cooling cycle going on twenty years at this point!

AA - John Holdren

Dr. John Holdren

Of course, such facts mean nothing to Dr. Holdren and even less to the President. That is why we are likely to not only hear more about climate change from him, but also discover that the White House intends the last two years of Obama’s term in office to be an all-out effort to impose restrictions and find reasons to throw money at the hoax. Dr. Holdren was no doubt a major contributor to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy initiative announced on December 3rd.

This “Climate Action Plan” called the “Climate Education and Literacy Initiative” is primarily directed at spreading the hoax in the nation’s classrooms and via various government entities as the National Park Service so they can preach it to the 270 million people who visit the nation’s 401 parks each year. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will sponsor five regional workshops for educators and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, along with the American Geosciences Institute and the National Center for Science Education will launch four videos likely to be shown in schools.

Joining the White House will be the Alliance for Climate Education, the American Meteorological Society, the Earth Day Network, Green Schools Alliance, and others. It adds up to a massive climate change propaganda campaign, largely paid for with taxpayer funding.

The “science” that will be put forward will be as unremittingly bogus as we have been hearing and reading since the late 1980s when the global warming hoax was launched.

When Dr. Holdren faced a 2009 confirmation hearing, he moved away from his early doomsday views on climate change, population growth, and the possibilities of nuclear war. Though warned by William Yeatman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute that Dr. Holdren had “a 40-year record of outlandish scientific assertions, consistently wrong predictions, and dangerous public policy choices” that made him “unfit to serve as the White House Science Advisor”, the committee voted unanimously to confirm him. They should have read some of his published views.

Regrettably Congress generally goes along with the climate change hoax. Dr. Holdren noted that “Global change research (did) well in the 2013 budget. One can look at that as a reaffirmation of our commitment to addressing the climate change challenge. There’s $2.6 billion in the budget for the United States Global Change Research Program.”

Let me repeat that. $2.6 BILLION devoted to “research” on global warming or climate change. One must assume it is devoted to finding ways for mankind to cope with the non-existent global warming or the threat of a climate change about which mankind can do nothing. It is comparable to saying that humans can get the Sun to increase or decrease its radiation.

In June 2014, Ron Arnold, the executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise and Washington Examiner columnist, noted that Dr. Holdren has long held the view that the U.S. should “de-develop” its “over-developed” economy.

That likely explains the Obama administration’s attack on the use of coal, particularly in utilities that use it to generate electricity. In the six years since the policy has been pursued by the EPA, coal-fired utilities have been reduced from providing fifty percent of the nation’s electricity to forty percent. Less energy means less investment in new business and industrial manufacturing, less jobs, and less safety for all of us who depend on electricity in countless ways.

Arnold reported that “Holdren wrote his de-development manifesto with Paul and Anne Ehrlich, the scaremongering authors of the Sierra Club book, ‘The Population Bomb.’” Aside from the fact that every prediction in the book has since proven to be wrong, but it was clear then and now that Dr. Holdren is no fan of the human population of the planet. Like most deeply committed environmentalists, it is an article of faith that the planet’s problems are all the result of human activity, including its weather.

In December 2014, Dr. Holdren expressed the view that worldwide carbon dioxide emissions should be reduced to “close to zero”, adding “That will not be easy.” This reflected the deal President Obama agreed to with China, but carbon dioxide plays no discernable role whatever in “global warming” (which isn’t happening) and is, in fact, a gas essential to all life on Earth, but particularly for all vegetation that is dependent on it for growth.

Dr. Holdren’s continued presence as the chief Science Advisor to the President encourages Obama to repeat all the tired claims and falsehoods of global warming and climate change. It is obscene that his administration devotes billions of dollars and countless hours to spreading a hoax that is an offense to the alleged “science” it cites.

AA - Arctic Ice FreeThe North and South Poles are not melting. The polar bear population is growing. The seas are not dramatically rising. Et cetera!

One can only hope that a Republican-controlled Congress will do what it can to significantly reduce the money being wasted and reverse the EPA war on coal and the utilities that use it to produce the energy the nation requires.

For now, Dr. Holdren will continue to use his influence in ways that confound and refute the known facts of climate science. How does it feel to be the enemy of an environment that Dr. Holdren and others regard as more important than human life?

© Alan Caruba, 2015

Take Your Pick of Lies about Ozone, Methane or Mercury

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Is it surprising that the Environmental Protection Agency continues to tell big fat lies about anything it wants to ban, but is reluctant to show the “science” on which the bans are based?

There is currently a piece of legislation under consideration by Congress, the Secret Science Reform Act, to force the EPA to disclose its scientific and technical information before proposing or finalizing any regulation.

This is what Nicolas Loris of The Heritage Foundation had to say regarding the mercury air and toxics rule that the EPA claims would produce $53 billion to $140 billion in annual health and environmental benefits. “The two studies that represent the scientific foundation for 1997 ozone and PM2.5 National Ambient Air Quality Standards are highly questionable and the data concealed, even though the studies were paid for by federal taxpayers and thus should be public property.”

In addition to claims about carbon dioxide as a dreaded “greenhouse” gas, methane is also getting the attention of those opposed to “fracking”, a technique that has provided access to both natural gas and oil. James M. Taylor, a Senior Fellow with The Heartland Institute, a free market think tank, noted in January that “Natural gas has high methane content, but the methane is converted to energy when natural gas is burnt.” Citing U.S. Energy Information Administration data, Taylor noted “The ongoing decline in methane emissions supplements ongoing declines in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.” Since 2000 both are down between 6% AND 9%.

The EPA is forever claiming billions in “health benefits” that result from their regulations. The public never gets to see the data on which such claims are based. The regulations, however, cost billions.

The day before Thanksgiving, the EPA announced that it intends to propose an updated national standard for ground-level ozone, otherwise known as smog, based in part on the enforcement of rules concerning mercury. The previous day, the Supreme Court said it would review the agency’s standards requiring reductions of mercury emissions and other elements the EPA regards as toxic air pollution.

To put all this in perspective, in August CNS News’ Penny Starr reported on a study by the National Association of Manufacturers regarding the EPA’s proposed regulation of ozone. It found that “it could be the costliest federal rule by reducing the Gross National Product by $270 billion per year and $3.4 trillion from 2017 to 2040, and adds $3.3 trillion in compliance costs for the same period.” NAM president, Jay Timmons, said “The regulation has the capacity to stop the manufacturing comeback in its tracks.”

Concurrently with NAM, the American Petroleum Institute released an analysis of the NAM study that said “The nation’s air quality has improved over the past several years, and ozone emissions will continue to decline without new regulations.” NAM’s vice president of energy and resources policy, Ross Eisenberg, said, “We are rapidly approaching a point where we are requiring manufacturers to do the impossible.”

That, however, is exactly what the ozone regulation is intended to do. This has nothing to do with health and everything to do with destroying the nation’s power producers and manufacturers, reducing vital electrical energy, and forcing factories of every description to close.

At the upper levels of the atmosphere, the stratosphere, ozone is essential to the survival of life on Earth because ozone filters harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation from sunlight. Otherwise the radiation would damage both plant and animal life. The reason you get sunburned is that too much UV radiation has caused it. Like everything else in nature, too much or too little determines the harm or benefit it provides, but that too is largely determined by nature.

Ozone is a form of elemental oxygen, but it’s not something you want to breathe. As Wikipedia notes, “It is not emitted directly by car engines or by industrial operations, but formed by the reaction of sunlight on air containing hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides that react to form ozone directly at the source of the pollution or many kilometers down wind.” The initial mandate of the EPA to clean the air and water has been achieved. That is why smog is relatively rare nationwide. Further regulation is regressive.

As for mercury, in 2011 the EPA issued 946 pages of new rules requiring U.S. power plants to sharply reduce their emissions of mercury even though they were already quite low. As with the proposed ozone rules, the EPA claimed that they would cost $10.9 billion annually to implement, but would save 17,000 lives while generating $140 billion in health benefits. This is all just hogwash. Such figures are just plucked out of the air or, worse, based on “science” the public paid for but is not allowed to see!

Does anybody find it bizarre that, while the EPA is trying to remove the tiniest amounts of mercury in the environment, in 2011 Congress passed a law eliminate the incandescent light bulb and required their replacement by fluorescent lights that contain mercury?

As Willie Soon and Paul Driessen wrote in a 2011 Wall Street Journal commentary, “Mercury has always existed naturally in Earth’s environment. Mercury is found in air, water, rocks, soil and trees, which absorb it from the environment.” They noted that “Since our power plants account for less than 0.5% of all the mercury in the air we breathe, eliminating every milligram of it will do nothing about the other 99.5% in our atmosphere.”

The fundamental EPA lies about ozone and mercury involve the issue of toxicity. Since both are a natural part of the Earth, and since the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and since life expectancy has been increasing dramatically in recent decades, the likelihood that either represents a threat requiring the expenditure of billions to reduce tiny amounts of their emissions is based on environmental ideology, not on science.

Even if it was based on alleged science we would, as noted, not be allowed to see the data. If this reminds you of the way ObamaCare was foisted on “the stupid voters”, you’re right. The EPA hopes you are stupid enough not to realize that it is engaged in the destruction of the economy.

Editor’s Note: Help Dr. Jeremy W. Grabbe of SUNY Plattsburgh at Queensbury by participating in his survey about climate change. Go to www.surveymonkey.com/s/WHLF7XS and take a minute to answer the questions.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

Fracking is Fundamental

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“It is a sad day when a state chooses to listen to the fear, uncertainty, and doubts spread by anti-fossil fuel agitators rather than making a decision for economic strength that would benefit schools, communities, and many of its poorest citizens—especially when the vilified technology, hydraulic fracturing, has been used safely and successfully for more than 60 years and has brought prosperity to other formerly struggling regions.” – Marita Noon, Executive Director, Citizens Alliance for Responsible Energy Policy Advisor, The Heartland Institute.

Responding to the announcement by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo that the state would ban fracking, Ms. Noon joined others, bringing their expertise to bear on a topic that remains a concern only because environmentalist enemies of energy in America continue to lie about it every chance they get.

The Fracking Truth book coverIn his book, “The Fracking Truth–America’s Energy Revolution: The Inside, Untold Story”. Chris Faulkner wrote “Furthermore, it’s been commonplace for decades. Worldwide, it’s estimated that more than 2.5 million wells have been fracked and the U.S. accounted for about half of those. Today, about 35,000 wells are fracked each year in all types of wells. And it’s impact on industry? It’s been estimated that 80% of production from unconventional sources such as shales would not be feasible without it.”

The Governor’s decision has everything to do with wooing the support of environmentalists in New York and nothing to do with the jobs and billions in tax revenue that fracking would have represented.

New York’s acting health commissioner, Howard Zucker, justified the decision saying that “cumulative concerns” about fracking “give me reason to pause.” Are we truly expected to believe that five years of study since the initial 2009 memorandum about fracking any provided reason to ban it? If the use of fracking technology dates back to 1947 without a single incident of pollution traced to it, what would it take to create “cumulative concerns” except ignorance or prejudice against the facts?

Even the Environmental Protection Agency has never found evidence of the chemicals used in fracking entering the nation’s groundwater. Moreover, fracking fluid is 99.5% water and sand. The rest is a mixture of chemicals similar to household products that could be found under the kitchen sink.

As Dr. Jay Lehr, Science Director of The Heartland Institute, a free market think tank, points out, “Today we only fracture wells that are drilled horizontally and that requires 1,500 feet of vertical depth for the well” and thus “all such wells are way below local water wells.”

How idiotic, then, is it to seal off some twelve million acres of the Marcellus Shale, an underground rock formation with natural gas reserves that have helped create energy production booms in North Dakota, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Colorado, and Ohio?

A December 19 Wall Street Journal editorial noted that just across New York’s border with neighboring Pennsylvania, “A 2011 Manhattan Institute study estimated that each Marcellus Shale well in Pennsylvania generates $5 million in economic benefits and $2 million in tax revenue.” Companies there have generated more than $2.1 billion in state and local taxes since the fracking boom began. As one observer noted, “The ban ignores New York’s “6% unemployment rate, a depressed upstate region, and the fourth highest electricity prices in the nation.”

I don’t know how long it will take for the vast majority of the U.S. population to conclude that everything the environmentalists and their propagandists in the nation’s schools and media have to say about energy is as vast a hoax as the now discredited “global warming”, since renamed “climate change.”

Energy is the master resource, the lifeblood of ours and the world’s economy, the basis for electricity, for the ability to travel vast distances, for machines that enable vast harvests of crops by barely 2% of the U.S. population, to power all manufacturing, and to heat or cool our living and workplaces.

Fracking is yet another technological miracle and, of course, the environmentalists oppose it.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

RELATED ARTICLE: CIA Veteran Sees Russian Connection to 2 Anti-Fracking Groups.

International Emissions Idiocy

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Most of the people of the world have concluded that the decades of warnings about “global warming” and its successor, “climate change”, is just idiotic nonsense. Few believe that humans ever had or ever will have any role in what the weather will be tomorrow or a thousand years from now. They are right.

One of the most distinguishing factors about the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory has been the way its advocates have always predicted major changes decades into the future. When the future arrived, as it has since the first doomsday predictions were made in the late 1980s, they simply push off the next arrival date for another couple of decades. A classic example is the prediction that that Arctic and Antarctic sea ice would have all melted by now. Instead the global cold weather have been making new records of late.

Delegates from two hundred nations attended the 20th session of the Conference of the Parties and the 10th session of the Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol which took place from December 1 through 12. COP 20/CMP 10 was hosted by the Government of Peru in Lima. The event is part of the United Nations agenda that began with the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988.

The Kyoto Protocol dates back to 1997 and sets limits on how much “greenhouse gas” emissions, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2), nations could permit. The theory, now long since debunked, that CO2 was rising and would cause the Earth to warm too much was right in only one respect. There is more CO2, but the Earth has been in a cooling cycle for some 19 years at this point. The U.S. did not ratify, i.e. sign onto the Protocol. The Senate unanimously rejected it. Canada later withdrew from it. China and India were both exempted from it!

So what we have been witnessing have been a bunch of international officials wrangling over something that did not happen and will not happen.

The hard core “Warmists” wanted the climate change agreement to be legally binding under international law. They were led by those from the European Union. They and others wanted more money to be spent on renewable energy, wind and solar, and money given to poor countries to help them deal with climate change.

The COP20 conference was not about the climate. It was about funding wind and solar energy projects that have proven globally to be huge, expensive failures, and about providing money to poor countries that, as often as not, are poor because they are poorly governed. It’s a scheme based on totally false “science.”

Cover - Climate for the LaymanAs to the “science” proclaiming a warming Earth and that “greenhouse gas emissions” are responsible, the easiest and most entertaining way to learn the real science is to read Anthony Bright-Paul’s new book, “Climate for the Layman.”

Bright applies the known knowledge of the universe in which we live with the kind of logic you are not likely to hear from the likes of Al Gore or Bill Nye the “science guy.” Add to them the blissfully ignorant legions of “leaders” of various nations who have signed off on “global warming” without a lick of knowledge with which to refute the lies and you get idiotic conferences and demands to end the beneficial use of fossil fuels which improved our lives long before and since the IPCC was created.

“So how does one measure the temperature of something that has a multiplicity of temperatures and is constantly on the move?” asks Bright. “It is clearly impossible.” How difficult is that to understand?

“In my dictionary,” says Bright, “’Global’ is defined as ‘worldwide’. So let us ask ourselves the question—has there been a worldwide warming of 0.07 degrees Celsius? Has there been a uniform increase in temperatures worldwide? The answer is simple. It is utterly impossible to make such declaration”, adding that “It is completely impossible to measure the temperature of the atmosphere which is 100 kilometers high and which has a huge range of temperatures in a continuous state of flux.”

If it cannot be measured then years from now the climate cannot be predicted. The weather—what is happening where you live—can only be predicted in general terms for the next few days and that is largely thanks to modern satellites. Moreover, the weather is never exactly the same from day to day. Meteorologists focus on what’s happening now, but climatologists measure the climate in units of decades, the smallest of which is thirty years. The largest take in millions of years.

Carbon dioxide is such a minor “trace” gas—0.04% of the Earth’s atmosphere–that most people are astonished to learn that it is Nitrogen and Oxygen that make up 99% of the atmosphere. Both are transparent to incoming and outgoing radiation. It is the Earth that acts as a conductor of heat, affected as always by solar radiation. It is the Sun along with the actions of the oceans and volcanic activity that determines the weather and, long term, the climate.

Virtually everything you have heard or been told about “greenhouse gas emissions” is pure bunkum.

The Earth is not a greenhouse closed in by heat trapping gases. It is the mass of the Earth that absorbs the Sun’s radiation and reflects it into the atmosphere. The process is so dynamic that there is no way to accurately predict what the temperature anywhere on any day.

The IPCC and its idiotic “climate change” conference wants you to believe it can predict the climate of the entire world! And control it.

Not a single dime of U.S. taxpayer’s money should be devoted to either the U.N. or any bogus “global warming” claims. We could begin by defunding the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations to limit “greenhouse gas emissions”, the reason they give for closing coal-fired plants to produce electricity.

We should laugh Secretary of State John Kerry off the stage every time in claims that climate change is the greatest threat to life on Earth.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

VIDEO: Marc Morano and Apollo 7 Astronaut Walt Cunningham in contentious debate at Lima Summit

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Apollo 7’s Walt Cunningham: ‘My background in space science. My doctoral thesis that I was working on was fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field. I have no political inhibitions at all, I just think we ought to be honest about this and not be trying to use it to our own ends to try to get money from the government.’ Also see: Apollo Astronaut Slams UN for perpetrating the ‘one of the biggest frauds in the field of science’

Marc Morano: ‘The UN is first and foremost political and they have bastardized science to achieve a political end…The UN claims that they can alter global temperature and storminess and weather events many decades to 100  years into the future. And the United Nations does not have that power — that is reserved for medieval witchcraft.’

Morano: ‘If we did face a climate catastrophe and we had to rely on the UN, we would all be doomed!  People in the developing world need carbon based energy. It has been one of the greatest liberators of mankind in the history of our planet. It brought us long life expectancy, low infant mortality. We should be here to praise carbon based energy.’

UN Climate TV Description of Debate:

Marc Morano, Walt Cunningham , CFACT

From Lima: COP20 UN Climate Change Conference 2014 in December 2014

COP20 (11/12/14) – Marc Morano of CFACT and Walt Cunningham talk to RTCC about their opinion that human activity cannot alter the climate. They feel that global efforts to tackle climate climate change, particularly in the UN, are politically and financially driven, referring to these efforts as the “global warming war”. They also debate the idea that their views are only held by a small minority of climate scientists, arguing that this notion is based on flawed evidence. In addition they talk about the difficulty of securing funding as a sceptical organisation, likening their struggle to David and Goliath. They go on to state that continuing to rely on carbon intensive energy is the best protection against extreme weather events.

Climate Depot’s Selected Transcripts:

Marc Morano: The UN is first and foremost political and they have bastardized science to achieve a political end. The head of the IPCC climate panel has said they are at the ‘beck and call’ of governments. So there whole mission is to enrich the UN. They are using that to claim that they can alter global temperature and storminess and weather events many decades to 100  years into the future. And the United Nations does not have that power — that is reserved for medieval witchcraft.

It’s about centrally planning a global economy — that is the agenda. It has got nothing to do with climate science. The UN is hyping the alarmist science and it is really bad science at times – when UN scientist and spokesmen are claiming that every weather event it proof of global warming.

In 1846, aborigines blamed bad weather on the introduction of the white man. In 1933, Syria banned the yoyo because they thought it caused drought. During WW2, many people thought the war caused bad weather. In the 1970s bad weather was blamed on global cooling. Now they are blaming our SUVs and modern way of living for bad weather. Bad weather happens all the time.

Question: UN asks Cunningham and Morano about alleged 97% consensus:

Walt Cunningham: ‘It is one of the most ridiculous numbers that I have ever seen used in this process.

UN TV interviewer to Cunningham: What are your qualifications?

Cunningham: My background in space science. My doctoral thesis that I was working on was fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field. I have no political inhibitions at all, I just think we ought to be honest about this and not be trying to use it to our own ends to try to get money from the government.

Morano on alleged 97% consensus:  The media refers to Rajendra Pachauri as the top climatologist, his background is in economics and engineering, he was a train engineer. The idea that somehow skeptics aren’t qualified to dissent. As Walt mentioned the 97% consensus alleged is not even 97 scientist, it is 77. Other survey have come out since and there have been peer-reviewed studies debunking them.

The UN is self-selected. Governments pick scientist that will play ball and toe the line. It is a political pressure group disguised as science – the IPCC. It is really appalling what is happening.

Cunningham: They go ahead and sell that then to the public who is not scientifically trained and does not understand when you should accept data and when you should not accept data. These people are politically driven, financially driven.

UN TV Asks About Funding of Skeptics

Morano: Fossil fuel donations to groups like the Sierra club exceed our annual budgets by 3 or 4 times. We are truly the David vs. the Goliath that is the global warming establishment.

UN TV asks about funding of GOP candidates by climate ‘deniers’:

Morano: They always mention the Koch brothers. One survey found the Koch Brothers are only 59th giving in U.S. politics. Way down the line. American labor unions are the largest and of course they mostly give to Democrats. Any perceived advantage is not there. The Left and the climate establishment has people like Tom Steyer who has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to Democrats just on the climate issue. So if you want to play the money game, skeptics are the David vs. the Goliath of the climate establishment.

UN TV asks what if skeptics are wrong about global warming?

Morano: You are basically saying what is wrong with an insurance policy? Well the UN is selling a policy with a very high premium with no payout. If we did face a climate catastrophe and we had to rely on the UN, we would all be doomed! The UN is in this for political reasons. Carbon based energy is the best ‘insurance’ against extreme weather, bad weather. The more development you have the more you can handle floods, hurricanes, droughts. Despite the fact that those are all on either stable or declining trends. Carbon based energy, coal, oil, natural gas, that is what the developing world needs more than anything.

The United Nations knows all about carbon based energy, this is one of the highest carbon footprint conferences they have ever had. Your president, IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri says he lives in airplanes.

People in the developing world need carbon based energy. It has been one of the greatest liberators of mankind in the history of our planet. It brought us long life expectancy, low infant mortality. We should be here to praise it. And it turns extreme weather into weather we can deal with. The more infrastructure you have from carbon based energy, the more you can deal with bad weather.

Related Links:

Skeptics Cleared Off Stage: Apollo 7 Astronaut Rushed Off Stage At UN Climate Summit To Make Way For Kerry Photo Op – Skeptics’ presentation at UN Abruptly Cut Short

Greenpeace faces ‘criminal’ prosecution for desecrating Peruvian sacred sites – Forced to apologize – Exclusive Video of Peruvians reacting

Reactions to Lima summit conclusion:

Warmists slam ‘lackluster’ Lima climate deal: ‘Little scientific relevancy…half-baked…bare minimum… political expediency won’

Lima climate conference tensions may bring storm clouds to Paris

Associated Press: ‘Weather porn? Storms take over evening news’

Paper: New era of cheap oil ‘will destroy green revolution’

Paper: UN climate negotiators pass watered-down deal in Lima

Lima climate change talks end in agreement – but who won?

UN summit rejects solar power as ‘too unreliable’ – Chose ‘diesel generators’ instead! Lima ‘organizers rejected powering the [summit] with solar panels on the grounds they were too unreliable’

Paper: ‘Lima climate talks reach global warming agreement’ – ‘Deal would for first time commit all countries – including developing nations – to cutting emissions’

Lima’s UN Climate Conference The Most Disgraceful, Destructive Ever…Time To Disband The Traveling Parasitic UN Circus

IS LIMA A FAILURE?

Obama’s Possible Paris Climate Agreement End Run Around the Senate

Skeptics Welcomes Non-Binding And Toothless UN Climate Deal

UN Climate Talks Once Again Break Down Over ‘Climate Reparations’

Tame tornadoes: Quietest 3 years for twisters on record

UN planning a global carbon tax?

Claim: Rising sea levels could make Florida beach front property ‘worthless’ in a few decades

German Scientists: ’2°C Target Purely Political’

Ice Expanding! Highest Global Sea Ice Since 1988

Shock News Report: BBC News: ‘Arctic sea ice volume holds up in 2014′ – ‘Ice may be more resilient than many observers recognize’

Roundup: UN’s COP-20 Ignored by Sunday Talkies and Video of Greenpeace Activists Damaging World Heritage Site

Bianca Jagger adds some glamour to the Lima climate jamboree: ‘Time is running out’ !

Video Coming Soon: Walt Cunningham & Marc Morano in contentious debate with UN TV Host

With Gore seated in the front row, John Kerry Tries To Out-Gore Al Gore in Lima

Harvard Astrophysicist: 2014 ‘Hottest Year’ Claim A ‘Prostitution Of Science’

Analysis: Kerry’s UN climate speech was packed with misinformation

UN SECRETARY GENERAL CONTINUES TO IGNORE CLIMATE REALISTS

John Kerry warns of ‘moral failure’ at climate conference

Kerry warns of climate ‘tragedy’

Time to tackle global warming running out, Pope tells climate summit

Skeptics Cleared Off Stage: Apollo 7 Astronaut Rushed Off Stage At UN Climate Summit To Make Way For Kerry Photo Op

UN hosts climate skeptics at summit: Apollo Astronaut Slams UN for perpetrating the ‘one of the biggest frauds in the field of science’