Calling the Global Warming Charlatans “Nazis”

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On February 20th, the noted meteorologist, Dr. Roy W. Spencer, fed up with being called a “denier” of global warming, posted a commentary on his blog titled “Time to push back against the global warming Nazis.”

“When politicians and scientists started calling people like me ‘deniers’, they crossed the line. They are still doing it,” said Dr. Spencer. “They indirectly equate (1) the skeptics’ view that global warming is not necessarily all man made nor a serious problem with (2) the denial that the Nazi’s extermination of millions of Jews ever happened.” The Holocaust happened, but global warming’s latest natural cycle ended about 17 years ago and, as a lot of people have noticed, it has been getting cold since then.

“Like the Nazis,” said Dr. Spencer, “they advocate the supreme authority of the state (fascism), which in turn supports their scientific research to support their cause…” In the case of global warming, this huge hoax was put forth by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The UN would like to be the world’s global government, but that’s not going to happen. In the meantime, the IPCC provided scientists that cooperated with lots of money for their alleged research, all of which “proved” that carbon dioxide was dramatically heating the Earth. Others like Al Gore made millions selling “carbon credits”. Along the way, both Gore and the IPCC received a Nobel Peace Prize.

Dr. Spencer received a Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981. He was a Senior Scientists for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center where he and a colleague, Dr. John Christie, received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites. He became a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2001 and continues to advise NASA as a U.S. Science Team Leader. As he points out on his blog, his research has been supported by U.S. government agencies, so the usual claim by Greens that he is a paid stooge of Big Oil just doesn’t work in his case.

Dr. Spencer’s decision to call a Nazi a Nazi ignited a lot of discussion among the global warming hustlers and those whom they have been calling “deniers” for many years. I always found it particularly offensive, but I suspect those I called charlatans and hustlers felt the same way. The difference, however, is the connotation applied to the term, “denier.” Even today anti-Semites of various descriptions deny that six million Jews died in the death camps of Nazi Germany during World War Two along with millions Christians and Eastern Slavic Europeans

What makes this particularly offensive and horrid is the fact that those in the Nazi leadership under Adolf Hitler were all environmentalists, deeply committed to conservation and similar expressions that put the Earth above the value of human life.

This is all revealed in a book by R. Mark Musser, “Nazi Oaks”, now in its third printing. Musser was introduced to environmentalism at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, from which he graduated in 1989. In 1994 he received Master of Divinity and spent seven years as a missionary to Belarus and in the Ukraine.

Musser’s book is absolutely astonishing as he documents how “Green” the Nazis were from their earliest years until their defeat. It was Heinrich Himmler, the Reich Leader from 1929 to 1945, who was responsible for the “Final Solution”, the mass killing of Europe’s Jews. He led the Nazi party’s SS.

As Musser notes, “The Nazis were trying to eliminate both global capitalism and international communism in order to recover a reverence for nature lost in the modern cosmopolitan world.” The Nazis also held Judeo-Christian values in contempt.

“That this evolutionary Nazi nature religion was clothed in secular biology and colored by environmental policies and practices, is a historical truth that has been ignored and underreported for too long a time in all the discussions about the Holocaust,” writes Musser.

I am inclined to believe that it is no accident that the global warming charlatans began to use the term “deniers” to describe skeptics.

By 2011, a Gallup poll that surveyed people in 111 countries revealed that most of the human race did not see global warming as a serious threat. Still, worldwide 42% told Gallup that they thought global warming was either ‘somewhat serious’ or ‘very serious.’ That was down from 63% in polls taken in 2007 and 2008 in the U.S.

More than just a spat between scientists, in April 2012, the Congressional Research Service estimated that, since 2008, the federal government had spent nearly $70 billion on ‘climate change activities.’ That kind of money could build or repair a lot of bridges and roads. It could fund elements of our military. It could be spent on something other than a climate over which neither the government nor anyone in the world has any influence.

Bursting onto the national stage, Dr. Spencer’s decision to call the global warming scientists Nazis for their efforts to intimidate or smear the reputations of those whose research disputes their claims, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. a Wall Street Journal columnist, wrote on March 1 that “Surely some kind of ending is upon us. Last week climate protesters demanded the silencing of Charles Krauthammer for a Washington Post column that notices uncertainties in the global warming hypothesis.”

“In coming weeks,” wrote Jenkins, “a libel trial gets under way brought by Penn State’s Michael Mann, author of the famed “hockey stick” graph (Editor’s note: an IPCC graph Mann created that asserted a sudden, major increase in heat has been widely debunked) against the National Review, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writer Rand Simberg and roving commentator Mark Steyn for making wisecracks about his climate work.”

Revelations of several thousand emails between IPCC scientists, one of whom was Mann, were christened “climategate” and demonstrated the efforts in which they engaged to suppress the publication of any papers that questioned global warming in scientific journals. As the climate turned cooler, they became increasingly alarmed.

What we are likely witnessing are the long death throes of the global warming hoax. Calling those scientists and others like myself “deniers” and other names simply reveals the desperation of those who are seeing a great source of money slip away under the spotlight of scientific truth, nor will they be able to impose their lies on the rest of us.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license. Attribution: Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-P049456 / CC-BY-SA

Common Core’s Little Green Soldiers Fighting Climate Change

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Remember the children singing praise songs to Obama back in 2008?  Remember young teenage boys marching in formation and shouting out thanks to Obama for their promising futures?

The appointment of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education initially was seen as a savvy bipartisan move.  But under his watch the Department of Education has become a propaganda arm used to influence the next generation to accept the idea of catastrophic man-made climate change as per the UN, the Environmental Protection Agency, and such groups as the National Wildlife Federation.

In a multi-pronged approach, the Department is teaming up with various non-profit and government organizations and curriculum companies to promote “fun” contests and activities for students, while promoting the next phase of Common Core “State Standards”—in science.

For example, the Department’s latest Green Strides newsletter (February 28) announced three contests for K-12 students who display their agreement with the government’s position on climate change.

In that newsletter, the Department of Education announced that another federal agency, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and its National Environmental Education Foundation, have “launched an exciting video challenge for middle school students called Climate Change in Focus.”  In this contest, middle school students are asked to make a video that “expresses why they care about climate change and what they are doing to reduce emissions or to prepare for its impacts.”  To win loyalty to the EPA, it is announced that winning videos will be highlighted on the EPA website.  The effort sounds like the kids’ cereal box promotions of yore: the top three entries will receive “cool prizes like a solar charging backpack,” winning class projects will receive special recognition for their school, and the first 100 entrants will receive a year’s subscription to National Geographic Kids Magazine.

Another contest, National Wildlife Federation’s Young Reporters for the Environment, invites students “between the ages of 13-21 to report on an environmental issue in their community in an article, photo or photo essay, or short video.”  Entries should “reflect firsthand investigation of topics related to the environment and sustainability in the students’ own communities, draw connections between local and global perspectives, and propose solutions.”

Students are also encouraged to make nominations for “Champions of the Earth,” a “UN-sponsored award for environment, Green Economy, and sustainability.”  Among the 2013 laureates are Martha Isabel Ruiz Corzo, who orchestrated a public-private biosphere reserve status for a region in Mexico, and Brian McLendon, of Google Earth.

Students already get exposed to climate change and sustainability in textbooks which are bought with taxpayer funds, as well as in videos and online materials produced by taxpayer-supported Public Broadcasting.  Many students, of course, have had to sit through Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

Quite obviously, a middle school student does not have the necessary scientific knowledge to make videos about climate change—a particularly challenging scientific problem.

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)—the next phase of Common Core—will make the situation worse, however.  Students will be even less capable of distinguishing science from propaganda.  These standards, like those for math and English Language Arts, were produced by Achieve, a nonprofit education group started by corporate leaders and some governors.

As in the standards for English Language Arts and math, the NGSS are intended to be transformative, or as Appendix A states, “to reflect a new vision for American science education.”  They call for new “performance expectations” that “focus on understanding and applications as opposed to memorization of facts devoid of context.”

It is precisely such short shrift to knowledge (dismissively referred to as “memorization”) to which science professors Lawrence S. Lerner and Paul Gross object.  The standards bypass essential math skills in favor of “process,” they asserted last fall at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation blog.

Common Core standards, in all disciplines, are written with a lot of fluff to conceal their emptiness.

Lerner and Gross discovered “inconsistency between strong NGSS (and Appendix C) assertions and what was actually found by the mathematicians, among others, of our reviewing group.”

(The Common Core math standards themselves have garnered much criticism among teachers, parents, and students; focusing so much on “process,” they make simple problems bizarrely confusing, as a collection of examples illustrates.)

Lerner and Gross condemn the “Slighting of mathematics,” which does “increasing mischief as grade level rises, especially in the physical sciences.”  Physics is “effectively absent” at the high school level.

“Several devout declarations” appear, however, the authors sardonically point out, as they note this one from Appendix C:

In particular, the best science education seems to be one based on integrating rigorous content with the practices that scientists and engineers routinely use in their work—including application of mathematics.

Lerner and Gross attack the “practices” strategy, as an extension of the “inquiry learning” of the early 1990s, which had “no notable effect on the (mediocre) performance of American students in national and international science assessments.”

With some sarcasm, they write, “It is charming to say ‘. . . students learn science effectively when they actively engage in the practices of science.’”  However,

Students will not learn best if they practice science exactly as do real scientists.  A firm conclusion in cognitive science contradicts that claim.  Beginners don’t and can’t ‘practice’ as do experts.  The practices of experts exploit prior experience and extensive build-up in long-term memory of scaffolding: facts, procedures, technical know-how, solutions to standard problems in the field, vocabularies—of knowledge in short.

Not only do the Next Generation Science Standards shirk the necessary foundations in math and science knowledge, but they explicitly call for including ideological lessons, such as “Human impacts on Earth systems.”  For grades K-2, students are to understand, “Things people do can affect the environment but they can make choices to reduce their impact.” In grades 3 through 5, students will learn “Societal activities have had major effects on the land, ocean, atmosphere, and even outer space.  Societal activities can also help protect Earth’s resources and environments.”  This is from part ESS3.C of the NGSS standards.

“Human impacts on Earth systems” are huge topics, when approached legitimately.  They present quandaries to scientists at the top levels.  Yet NGSS imposes them on kindergartners.  The objective, of course, is not teaching legitimate science, but indoctrination.

Amazingly, ten states have already voluntarily adopted the Standards.

Such efforts, coordinated by the Department of Education, threaten the future of science itself.

The President’s Science and where he gets it

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There are a lot of people who comment on climate change and global warming, both in blogs and in the com-media (as Dr. Krauthammer refers to the Media, most of whom are, indeed, comedic – if you find arrogant stupidity funny).

I’m sorry to say that the Obama Administration’s highest ranking authority on matters of Science, Dr. John Holdren, is a disgrace to his position as Chair of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). I say so in defense – not that he needs my defense – of Prof Roger Pielke Jr, a professor at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Prof Pielke maintains an online blog: http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/

which I commend to you as a reliable source of information. Prof Pielke testified in Summer 2013, with other scientists, before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. In February, 2014, Dr. Holdren contradicted Prof Pielke’s testimony to the committee, dismissing Prof Pielke as being “…outside the scientific mainstream” as regards a link between climate change and extreme weather. Pielke denied such a link, a link often claimed by Holdren and President Obama himself. During his February golf trip to California, President Obama directly blamed the drought there on climate change. As Pielke says:

The bottom line here is that this is an extremely poor showing by the president’s science adviser. It is fine for experts to openly disagree. But when a political appointee uses his position not just to disagree on science or policy but to seek to delegitimize a colleague, he has gone too far.

It’s amusing that Holdren was previously close to Teresa and John Kerry. I guess we know where Secretary Kerry gets his knowledge of environmental policy. It’s also amusing to read John Holdren’s opinion from February, 2009, that because of climate change, we were going to lose the ice cover on the Arctic Ocean – all year:

…if you lose the summer sea ice, there are phenomena that could lead you not so very long thereafter to lose the winter sea ice as well. And if you lose that sea ice year round, it’s going to mean drastic climatic change all over the hemisphere.

Such is the environmental expertise informing the Obama Administration – stupid and dishonest.

Frontiers of Evil: Amendment 1 & Florida’s “Emerald Necklace” of Greenways

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1000 Friends of Florida has played a key role in supporting state funding for the acquisition of environmental land and establishing Florida State’s Nationally recognized “emerald necklace” of Greenways.

1000 Friends of Florida’s vision for Florida’s future: “Imagine livable neighborhoods and communities where kids can rid their bikes to school or the park and parents can walk to the store or take a bus to work if they wish. This is the future towards which 1000 Friends are working.” Translation: This plan eliminates the automobile and controls your movement by taking away your liberty and choice of travel. People will be living in confined areas in order to bike and walk for everyday needs. Now think about tropical storms and 100 degree weather without air conditioning which has been deemed unsustainable. Ask all of your elected officials for their car keys.

According to a recent Sun Sentinel article on Greenways: “put away your car keys and take out your running shoes or your horse (if you have one, and while you can still own one). Florida State planning and proposals for Greenways and Trails, which are paved bike paths and walkways eliminating the AUTOMOBILE, while taking away your liberty and your choice of travel.”

Florida was the first state in America to establish a comprehensive statewide plan for Ecological Greenways which serves as a critical component of the Florida Greenways Trails System (FGTS) plan. Florida has been a leader in Greenways and Trails. The State was recognized in 2008 as the first-ever Best Trails State in America for its work in facilitating outstanding statewide systems. Florida Ecological Greenways Network comprises 25,620,000 acres of land out of 34,721,280 total acres under conservation.

Greenways and Trails are being sold as a beautiful recreation for hiking, bicycling and walking, family orientated time together.

Why does enjoying the outdoors require millions of acres of land, with millions of tax dollars? Will this land eventually be turned into conservation land
where humans are not allowed?

GREENWAY MAP

Greenways

A visionary graphic indicating possible ecological greenway connections from one end of the state to the other. What are Greenways, and what is their purpose?

Greenways are a misleading concept given to people that love the outdoors and animals, which I am one. It is so fulfilling to be out in nature, in a gorgeous setting of blue skies, green trees and plants, and citing God’s creatures. Walking, biking, and other recreational activities fill your heart and clear your mind of all everyday distractions. BUT THIS IS NOT THE INTENT!

First Greenways are the corridors which connect conservation land, preserves reserves, parks and wildlife corridors. Greenways are developed by confiscating land through land acquisitions purchased with your tax dollars. All of this will develop an enormous ownership and control of water and land that will be off limits to all humans. Greenways are another scheme of land grabbing which will eventually combine all conservation lands with environmentalist programs designed to get the people off open land. This goes back to the United Nations Sustainable Development (Agenda 21)

BIODIVERSITY MAP

BioDiversity

Greenways and Smart Growth:

Their important need for Greenways and Trails is that they can be used as part of a Growth Management strategy. (a/k/a Agenda 21) Not only do Greenways provide alternative means of transportation, but Greenways help shape the Urban form (UN Human Settlements) by interconnecting natural areas functioning as greenbelts, agricultural reserves and/or to separate land use buffers. In addition, Greenways are used as development buffers, water quality (storm water) purifiers, air quality purifiers, scenic roadway buffers, and/or conservation easements. When abused as UN Agenda 21 demands, individuals are forced off their land.

Thanks to past and present Governors, their Cabinets, and the Acquisition and Restoration Council (ARC), our Tallahassee Legislators, working with special interest groups, Public-Private-Partnerships (PPP’s), Florida Association of Counties, Florida Dept. of Environmental Protection (FDEP), Florida Dept. of Transportation, Florida Forever, 1000 Friends of Florida, The Nature Conservancy (UN related), Audubon Society, Sierra Club, Water Management Districts, Florida Wildlife, Florida Fish and Wildlife, Parks and Recreation, and the list goes on, over 50% plus, of Florida land is involved in some environmental program. Many of these programs were not about conservation. These programs are about taking of private land putting in public hands off the tax roles at the behest of some conservation program. This is all about money, power and control. Are Florida Legislators incompetent, corrupt and unethical? Or just ignorant?

Governor Rick Scott is CEO of Acquisitions and Restorations Council (ARC), along with members of his Cabinet: Jeff Atwater, Pam Bondi, and Adam Putnam.

wildlifecorridor (1)They approve land acquisitions like Greenways corridors and the Florida Wildlife Corridor comprising 720,000 acres of land that will expand in the future into thousands of more acres. Florida Wildlife Corridor will run up the eastern coast of the United States to Maine when finished. This land will be off limits to humans (just like in the Hunger Games). The Wildlife Corridor was the critical link in Florida because this will connect to all Greenways, Blueways, Conservation Land, National and State Parks, Preserves and Reserved Land. This will be a massive land take over by Un-Elected Bureaucrats. Instead of doing their jobs and protecting Floridians private property they are pursuing bath salts, charities and a liberty minded sheriffs. Who protects you?

Governor Rick Scott is also CEO of Enterprise Florida (This is a Public-Private-Partnership, PPP). The website states they endorse and support Sustainable Development (which comes from the United Nations Agenda 21) while promoting statewide regionalism which eliminates counties and local government.

Regionalism is Communism.

To obtain a clear picture of the total loss of land, we have to take into considerations all land taken off the books including Federal and State. Florida National Parks and Preserves consist of roughly of 2,521,163.19 acres of land. Reserved lands which relate to military and Indian are not clear, but the map below will give you an idea.

Considering 161 Florida State Parks spanning over 700,000 acres of land and over 100 miles of sandy beaches the amount of Florida land in the public domain is staggering. How much is enough?

Water managementwest (1)

Eglin-Blackwater River and Blackwater River State Park (West Portion). For a larger view click on the map.

Eglin Air Force Base covers 464,000 acres of land. An Eglin permit is required to access the 250,000 acres of the Eglin reservation, conditionally open to public recreation. Governor Rick Scott and his Cabinet approved a land acquisition in 2013, adding an additional 21,000 acre purchase to Buffer Eglin AFB. This was done without the approval of the people in the area who will now see a decrease in property value.

This is considered a critical linkage, connecting Eglin AFB to the Blackwater River State Forest. The linkage is approximately 53,000 acres with 24 percent in existing conservation lands and 23 percent in proposed conservation lands (future land acquisitions) and with a total of approximately 40,000 acres of private land.

Water management (1)

Eglin-Blackwater River and Blackwater River State Park (East Portion). For a larger view click on the map.

This gives you a clearer understanding of Greenways and how they are being used to connect conservations lands, and land corridors. This is land that you will not be allowed on. This pattern follows the United Nations Biodiversity Map. This is land grabbing putting the cost burden on the people in Florida, for their communist agenda which requires no private property.

Regional Planning Councils, NGO’s and Sustainable Developers, show these maps individually to your local boards so no one connects the dots to show the true picture of loss of private property. These comprehensives or vision planners incorporate these Greenways and Trails into their plans locking up large parcels of land while they never expose the true goal to connect all Greenways eliminating private property. They work with massive land acquisition and permanent easement schemes. For a true picture connect these maps.

Conservationists and other approaches to safeguard the Ecological Processes, a Greenway, like their natural counterparts, environmental corridors can operate in six basic ways (This comes from the American Greenways and Trails):

As habitat for plant and animal communities As a conduit for plants, animals, water, sediments, and chemicals; As a barrier preventing movement; ( I take it that means human movement ) As a filter allowing some things to pass while inhibiting others; (I take it this means humans passing through also) As a source for animals or seeds which move to other parts; ( I take it humans can’t move to other parts ) As a sink for trapping sediments, toxins, or nutrients.

They have stated their intentions very clearly here, and it doesn’t include humans.

Regional Councils and Sustainable Development Planners incorporate Greenways and Trails strategies in their zoning and land planning because they are for open spaces, land acquisition, permanent easements, and herding people into small areas, small units of high density. They are following United Nations Agenda 21. Get control of the land, get the people off of it, and get them into cities (high density, sustainable developments often referred to as pack’em, stack’em winding up like Detroit, their first model.)

Land acquisitions are the key to accomplishing the Greenways and Land Corridors. That is why:

1000 Friends of Florida, Florida Forever are largest land acquisition organization in the country, The Nature Conservancy (the richest), with budgets filled by Governor Rick Scott and his Cabinet with their Acquisitions and Restoration Council (ARC), The rest that are mentioned above are also important to achieve this huge land grabbing that is going on in Florida, exclusive of the Greenways. None of this accounts for the millions of acres of land under conservation and land owned by Environmental Groups, all five of the Water Managements Districts, Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP), Florida Wildlife, and more.

Conservation is a good thing, it makes some things sustainable. But conservation crosses the line, when land is accumulated with our tax dollars just for the purposes of accumulation, making species and plants more important than human life and the American Dream as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. No man or organization (including the U.N.) has the right to dictate where and how Americans live. Only God gives us our rights, man takes them away.

Today unfortunately our Public Schools k-12, Universities, and Colleges across the nation are allowing our children to be brain washed on how to live under the United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda 21. Books like: “Rescue Mission Planet Earth” a Child’s Edition of UN Agenda 21 has been in schools since 1994. Today these children are in government and bureaucratic positions and use your tax dollars to create these land grabbing schemes.

In the 2013, Tallahassee session your representatives would NOT pass a Bill Protecting Private Property. However these people have no problem taking your tax dollars to steal your property rights and freedom. This makes the big picture even more distressing. They do not have your best interest at heart, they do not use true science. They are greedy and short sighted and care more about their wallet and careers and THEY WANT YOUR VOTE.

“As a young girl, Pa (my grandfather) took me to all the Parades celebrating our Country’s Holidays. Pa would put his hand over his heart whenever “Old Glory” went by, and standing next to him I would feel this enormous warmth of pride. Now when I see our Flag with the same pride I had then, I have tears in my eyes. This isn’t the American I grew up in and what America stands for. I find myself fighting for America on American Soil against Americans that are giving America to a communist United Nations, using their Environmental Programs and fraudulent technology.” Neil Rice Our children are a gift from “God,” Not Man. We owe the children of this Great Nation to be taught the truth, and how to conserve in the correct manner and with common sense.

Teach them to take care of things so they will last.

Florida citizens have a huge task to overcome to stop all of this. More and more people are paying attention. I think the state of the economy is opening people’s eyes, as they are becoming more affected by the entire environment around them.

EDITORS NOTE: This column is co-authored by Neil Rice, Roy Callahan, Karen Schoen and AgEnders.

The featured image is courtesy of cs:ŠJů. The use of this image does not imply in any way the endorsement of the author or this column. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

Cognitive Dissonance and the Pause in “Global Warming”

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In case you’re not familiar with the term, “cognitive dissonance” was coined by Leon Festinger and his colleagues in the 1956 book, When Prophecy Fails. It is a groundbreaking work in social psychology, an attempt to explain how people deal with the failure of a deeply held belief. A classic example, cited by Festinger, was the failure of prophecies of the End Times and beginning of The Millenium, as preached by William Miller, a retired ship’s captain and lay preacher. Miller published his calculations of biblical chronology in 1818, calling for the End of Days on 22 October, 1844. The belief was widely held in upstate New York and New England; thousands of families sold their homes and belongings in preparation for being taken up into heaven. Festinger sought to understand and explain how these “Millerites” dealt with the discomfort of conflicting ideas and opposing sentiments (“dissonance”) after the prophecy failed.

Of course, all of us have experience with cognitive dissonance – a lost love, a failed business, a contract that went to a competitor, a promotion we didn’t receive. We pick ourselves up and go on, with a healthier psychology – one that understands and accepts what went wrong. Most of the “Millerites” accepted that they were too willing to believe, that they wanted to believe they were among the few who had been favored with the truth. The most interesting response, however, is the variety Festinger termed “deflection”; deflectors admit the prophecy was not fulfilled, but not because of falsehood or hoax. They weren’t fooled, or taken advantage of; rather, there was a countervailing force that nullified what should have been. And, yes, scientists – especially those whose sense of self is bound up in publications and graduate students and post-doctoral followers and graduate programs – are liable to such an unhealthy psychological response.

Incidentally, in case you’re interested in the application of “cognitive dissonance” in a larger, political context, see the article in last week’s issue of The Weekly Standard, which deals with the Obama as Messiah expectations. The supposed racism of the American public is a classic deflection mechanism to explain the Obama failures.

I’m not a psychologist, I’m a meteorologist, but I’ve wondered for years how the believers in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) would deal with the necessary failure of their belief. It was only a matter of time before the “prophecy” of climate disaster became an obvious failure. Contrary to scores of computer climate models, there has been no global warming for 17 years. These models are totally wrong, along with the physical mechanisms they assume. As the Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman said:

“…then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is—if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.”

There are now at least ten different “explanations” from serious “climate scientists,” explaining how unforeseen external events – i.e., “deflections” – prevented CO2 from increasing the Earth’s temperature. Here are five not unreasonable explanations. If you want to see all ten, they’re available at What’s Up With That.

1) Low solar activity We are currently just past the peak of solar cycle #24, which, indeed, has been about half as intense as cycles 22 and 23. Unfortunately, the solar scientists are predicting cycles 25 and 26 – out to 2040 or so – will be even weaker. Who knows? And why should we cut back on fossil fuels if the Sun controls the climate? We will certainly need artificial heat and light if the Sun is getting weaker, and we might want that greenhouse effect warming too. Incidentally, the solar scientists are definitely NOT part of the “97%”.

2) The heat went into the oceans We have thousands of ocean buoys (the Argo network) out there, which measure temperature and heat content down to 2000 feet below the surface. Somehow, they missed measuring any of that heat as it went by. Darn. And, if there was no heating of the air, what heated the ocean anyway?

3) Volcanic aerosols cooled the Earth Wait! What? Volcanoes also put out tremendous CO2 , don’t they? And we measure the CO2 in the atmosphere, and it’s been going up at a steady, predictable rate – no big change. People tend to notice big volcanic eruptions, which put aerosols up into the stratosphere, where they remain for months (unlike the lower atmosphere, where they get rained out in a week or so). The last big eruption was Pinatubo, in 1993. But, if volcanoes control the climate, what part of our government predicts volcanic eruptions? We can predict the climate if we can predict volcanoes? Or stop their eruptions?

4) We just didn’t measure the right stations There’s a lot of territory in the Arctic and Antarctic where there aren’t any weather stations and observers. The
warming was there, alright; we just didn’t measure it. Volunteers needed. Seriously, too many of our weather stations are in airports (lots of tarmac, lots of
jet exhaust) where measurements are of doubtful validity. A recent Chinese paper claims most of the “heat waves” are due to the growth of cities around previously isolated weather stations.

5) Pacific Decadal Oscillation went into its cold phase Oh dear – this explanation actually makes sense. There is a sixty-year cycle of changing temperature in the Pacific Ocean; El Nino and La Nina are part of this cycle. The PDO was in its cold phase from 1940 through 1976; remember those 1974 articles (front page) by TIME and Newsweek about the coming Ice Age? But the PDO has been going on for millennia; it’s not part of some new “climate change.” It’s merely the shortest cyclic change we’re aware of. And, of course, there’s nothing we can do about it. Like the other “deflections” being offered.

So what? Well, according to Festinger, deflectors don’t accept the failure of “the cause;” they just come up with excuses. (E.g., Harry Reid claiming that failures of ObamaCare are “just lies” – from 5+ million Americans.) That is what the “climate change” community seems to be doing. In fact, even the change of nomenclature from “global warming” to “climate change” was a step on the path to deflection rather than acceptance of failure. I’m aware of few “climate scientists” who have made a retraction of the religion; Judith Curry, at Georgia Tech, is one of very few.

So, your children and grandchildren will continue to hear about “climate change” and “carbon pollution” for years to come, until a generation of believers dies off or retires from their academic chairs. It took 40+ years for “continental drift” to become accepted, rather than heresy.

Be strong.

If you’d like to understand more about climate change – yes, the climate does change, mostly by natural causes – may I recommend a bargain book? Amazon.com sells a very comprehensive book (407 pages), with lots of references, called The Resilient Earth by Simmons and Hoffman. In the Kindle edition, it’s available for $5.99. In case you don’t have a Kindle, Amazon offers a free app – yes, free – that you can download to your desktop or laptop computer that will allow you to read a Kindle document there.

EDITORS NOTE: The features image is the Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931) composition titled Composition in Dissonances.

Greenpeace Co-Founder: Geologic History ‘fundamentally contradicts’ CO2 Climate Fears

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Selected Highlights of Dr. Patrick Moore’s Feb. 25, 2014 testimony before the U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee:

‘There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years.

‘Today, we live in an unusually cold period in the history of life on earth and there is no reason to believe that a warmer climate would be anything but beneficial for humans and the majority of other species…It is “extremely likely” that a warmer temperature than today’s would be far better than a cooler one.’

Earth’s Geologic History Fails CO2 Fears: ‘The fact that we had both higher temperatures and an ice age at a time when CO2 emissions were 10 times higher than they are today fundamentally contradicts the certainty that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main cause of global warming…When modern life evolved over 500 million years ago, CO2 was more than 10 times higher than today, yet life flourished at this time. Then an Ice Age occurred 450 million years ago when CO2 was 10 times higher than today.’

Obama Science Czar John Holdren’s testimony here.

Selected Highlights of Dr. Patrick Moore’s Feb. 25, 2014 testimony before the U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee:

“Today, we live in an unusually cold period in the history of life on earth and there is no reason to believe that a warmer climate would be anything but beneficial for humans and the majority of other species. There is ample reason to believe that a sharp cooling of the climate would bring disastrous results for human civilization.

Humans are a tropical species. We evolved at the equator in a climate where freezing weather did not exist. The only reasons we can survive these cold climates are fire, clothing, and housing…It is “extremely likely” that a warmer temperature than today’s would be far better than a cooler one.

Earth’s Geologic History Fails CO2 Fears:

‘When modern life evolved over 500 million years ago, CO2 was more than 10 times higher than today, yet life flourished at this time. Then an Ice Age occurred 450 million years ago when CO2 was 10 times higher than today. There is some correlation, but little evidence, to support a direct causal relationship between CO2 and global temperature through the millennia. The fact that we had both higher temperatures and an ice age at a time when CO2 emissions were 10 times higher than they are today fundamentally contradicts the certainty that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main cause of global warming.’

On UN IPCC’s 95% confidence in man-made global warming: ‘Extremely likely’ is not a scientific term but rather a judgment, as in a court of law. The IPCC defines “extremely likely” as a “95-100% probability”. But upon further examination it is clear that these numbers are not the result of any mathematical calculation or statistical analysis. They have been “invented” as a construct within the IPCC report to express “expert judgment”, as determined by the IPCC contributors.

Why does the IPCC believe that a virtually identical increase in temperature after 1950 is caused mainly by “human influence”, when it has no explanation for the nearly identical increase from 1910-1940?

What we do know with “extreme certainty” is that the climate is always changing, between pauses, and that we are not capable, with our limited knowledge, of predicting which way it will go next.”

Full Statement of Patrick Moore, Ph.D. Before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Subcommittee on Oversight – “Natural Resource Adaptation: Protecting ecosystems and economies”

February 25, 2014

Chairman Whitehouse, Ranking Member Inhofe, and members of the Committee. Thank you for the opportunity to testify at today’s hearing.

In 1971, as a PhD student in ecology I joined an activist group in a church basement in Vancouver Canada and sailed on a small boat across the Pacific to protest US Hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska. We became Greenpeace.

After 15 years in the top committee I had to leave as Greenpeace took a sharp turn to the political left, and began to adopt policies that I could not accept from my scientific perspective. Climate change was not an issue when I abandoned Greenpeace, but it certainly is now.

There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years. If there were such a proof it would be written down for all to see. No actual proof, as it is understood in science, exists.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states: “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.” (My emphasis)

“Extremely likely” is not a scientific term but rather a judgment, as in a court of law. The IPCC defines “extremely likely” as a “95-100% probability”. But upon further examination it is clear that these numbers are not the result of any mathematical calculation or statistical analysis. They have been “invented” as a construct within the IPCC report to express “expert judgment”, as determined by the IPCC contributors.

These judgments are based, almost entirely, on the results of sophisticated computer models designed to predict the future of global climate. As noted by many observers, including Dr. Freeman Dyson of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, a computer model is not a crystal ball. We may think it sophisticated, but we cannot predict the future with a computer model any more than we can make predictions with crystal balls, throwing bones, or by appealing to the Gods.

Perhaps the simplest way to expose the fallacy of “extreme certainty” is to look at the historical record. With the historical record, we do have some degree of certainty compared to predictions of the future. When modern life evolved over 500 million years ago, CO2 was more than 10 times higher than today, yet life flourished at this time. Then an Ice Age occurred 450 million years ago when CO2 was 10 times higher than today.

There is some correlation, but little evidence, to support a direct causal relationship between CO2 and global temperature through the millennia. The fact that we had both higher temperatures and an ice age at a time when CO2 emissions were 10 times higher than they are today fundamentally contradicts the certainty that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main cause of global warming.

Today we remain locked in what is essentially still the Pleistocene Ice Age, with an average global temperature of 14.5oC. This compares with a low of about 12oC during the periods of maximum glaciation in this Ice Age to an average of 22oC during the Greenhouse Ages, which occurred over longer time periods prior to the most recent Ice Age. During the Greenhouse Ages, there was no ice on either pole and all the land was tropical and sub-tropical, from pole to pole. As recently as 5 million years ago the Canadian Arctic islands were completely forested.

Today, we live in an unusually cold period in the history of life on earth and there is no reason to believe that a warmer climate would be anything but beneficial for humans and the majority of other species. There is ample reason to believe that a sharp cooling of the climate would bring disastrous results for human civilization.
Moving closer to the present day, it is instructive to study the record of average global temperature during the past 130 years. The IPCC states that humans are the dominant cause of warming “since the mid-20th century”, which is 1950.

From 1910 to 1940 there was an increase in global average temperature of 0.5oC over that 30-year period. Then there was a 30-year “pause” until 1970. This was followed by an increase of 0.57oC during the 30-year period from 1970 to 2000. Since then there has been no increase, perhaps a slight decrease, in average global temperature. This in itself tends to negate the validity of the computer models, as CO2 emissions have continued to accelerate during this time.

The increase in temperature between 1910-1940 was virtually identical to the increase between 1970-2000. Yet the IPCC does not attribute the increase from 1910-1940 to “human influence.” They are clear in their belief that human emissions impact only the increase “since the mid-20th century”. Why does the IPCC believe that a virtually identical increase in temperature after 1950 is caused mainly by “human influence”, when it has no explanation for the nearly identical increase from 1910-1940?

It is important to recognize, in the face of dire predictions about a 2oC rise in global average temperature, that humans are a tropical species. We evolved at the equator in a climate where freezing weather did not exist. The only reasons we can survive these cold climates are fire, clothing, and housing. It could be said that frost and ice are the enemies of life, except for those relatively few species that have evolved to adapt to freezing temperatures during this Pleistocene Ice Age. It is “extremely likely” that a warmer temperature than today’s would be far better than a cooler one.

I realize that my comments are contrary to much of the speculation about our climate that is bandied about today. However, I am confident that history will bear me out, both in terms of the futility of relying on computer models to predict the future, and the fact that warmer temperatures are better than colder temperatures for most species.

If we wish to preserve natural biodiversity, wildlife, and human well being, we should simultaneously plan for both warming and cooling, recognizing that cooling would be the most damaging of the two trends. We do not know whether the present pause in temperature will remain for some time, or whether it will go up or down at some time in the near future. What we do know with “extreme certainty” is that the climate is always changing, between pauses, and that we are not capable, with our limited knowledge, of predicting which way it will go next.

Thank you for the opportunity to present my views on this important subject.

Attached please find the chapter on climate change from my book, “Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist”. I would request it be made part of the record.

Related Links: 

Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore: ‘Thank goodness we came along & reversed 150 million-year trend of reduced CO2 levels in global atmosphere. Long live the humans’ – Moore: ‘CO2 is lower today than it has been through most of the history of life on earth…At 150 ppm CO2 all plants would die, resulting in virtual end of life on earth’

Former Greenpeace co-founder turned climate skeptic Dr. Patrick Moore calls NAS ‘tipping point’ study ‘pure junk’: ‘Low point for US National Academy of Science. Warns of ‘tipping points’ in climate like ‘drunk drivers’

Former Greenpeace Founding Member Dr. Patrick Moore refutes warmist’s attack point by point:

Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore: Oil is the ‘most important source of energy to support our civilization’ – ‘If it is the aim of ‘environmentalists’ to stop fossil fuel production and use, end fracking, end coal mining, end use of oil, then they are promoting a policy that would have disastrous consequences for human civilization & the environment. If we stopped using fossil fuel today, or by 2020 as Gore proposes, at least half the human population would perish & there wouldn’t be a tree left on planet within a year, as people struggled to find enough energy to stay alive’

Greenpeace Co-Founder Dr. Patrick Moore Rips Windfarms: ‘They are ridiculously expensive and don’t work half the time…The industry is a destroyer of wealth and negative to the economy’ –Moore: ‘And no matter how many are built, they won’t replace coal, gas or hydro or nuclear plants, because they are continuous and wind is not always reliable’

Greenpeace Co-Founder Dr. Patrick Moore Questions Man-Made Global Warming, Calls it ‘Obviously a Natural Phenomenon’ – ‘We do not have any scientific proof that we are the cause of the global warming that has occurred in the last 200 years…The alarmism is driving us through scare tactics to adopt energy policies that are going to create a huge amount of energy poverty among the poor people’

GMO Wars: Greens Exploit Widespread Science Ignorance

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I frequently have to tell people that I am a science writer, not a scientist. The only science course I took in college was zoology and I passed it only because my paper on Procyon Lotor—raccoons—demonstrated an ability to do some good research and present it cogently.

In the decades since then I have had the opportunity to write about many science-based topics and it became evident that a huge portion of our society and worldwide is ignorant of how science functions and the incredible advances for mankind that it has provided.

It is this ignorance that is constantly exploited by the many environmental groups. Scaring people about the climate has been their bread and butter for decades, but a natural cooling cycle that is approaching two decades in a few years is killing that goose that laid so many golden eggs. The same is occurring for “renewable energy” as Europe is beginning to regret pouring billions into wind energy while multi-million U.S. subsidies are on the chopping block as well.

The “food police” are generating a scare campaign about genetically modified food crops. As Dr. Jay Lehr, the Science Director of The Heartland Institute, pointed out in a December 2013 article, “Not one single human has been harmed by genetically improved food.” So, naturally, some Greens are pushing to have everything made from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) subjected to warning labels.

Do you know who the first environmentalists were? Farmers! It is the original “green job” because farmers were among the original users of renewable energy—the solar power—to grow their crops. They used wind power to draw water and grind grain into flour. They built irrigation systems to make more efficient use of water.

When the United States declared its independence the nation was largely composed of farmers. Now less than two percent of the population grows enough food to feed all of us and have plenty left over to export. The current exception to this is California’s central value when farmers have been denied water to save the lives of bait fish, smelt. They’re getting no help from the federal government either.

Throughout the last century the American Farm Bureau Federation and state farm bureaus were leaders in conservation tillage, well-water testing, and many other environmental improvements. As one observer noted, “Long after the current excitement about the green economy has worn off, American farmers and ranchers will remain green collar workers as they have always been—efficient producers of food, fiber, and fuel and stewards of natural resources.

In the meantime, we are subjected to celebrities like Al Gore, Bill Maher, and Daryl Hanna, who have no science degree. The outspoken actors, Ed Begley and Leonardo Dicaprio only have a high school diploma and many others who opine on environmental issues are literally high school dropouts. A long list of news media personalities has no science degree. They include ABC’s Sam Champion, NBC’s Matt Laurer, and CBS’s Harry Smith. CBS’s Scott Pelley is a college dropout.

Among the scientists, many have degrees in areas that do not reflect meteorology or climatology. They include Bill Nye known as the “science guy” who has a degree in mechanical engineering.

As Dr. Lehr points out, “There is little food on the plate of humans anywhere that has not been genetically improved.” This goes back four thousand years to the creation of wine. In 1862, an Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel began to crossbreed simple garden peas to improve their taste, yield and strength. Thirty years later his work on the subject was published in the journal of the Royal Society of London, “and the new agricultural science of hybridization was born to improve our food.”

Wheat_harvest

Wheat harvest on the Palouse, Idaho, USA. Photo by USDA.

Writing in the February edition of Wheat Life, a publication for Washington state farmers, John Moffatt, a wheat breeder for Syngenta, noted that “Wheat is not only the largest crop in the world with acreage surpassing that of even corn and soybeans, it is also one of the most complex.” Sygenta is one of North America’s leading wheat genetic research companies, responsible for helping farmers grow profitable wheat with research that begins with seeds that undergo a certification process. Their crop varieties consistently outperform saved seed in yield, quality and test weight.

“If genetic labeling laws are passed throughout the United States,” warns Dr. Lehr, “it will severely set back the scientific and human health benefits of genetic food advances. Billions of people around the world have consumed genetically modified food since it became widespread during recent decades. Billions more will benefit from such foods in the coming decades.”

Meanwhile, the Green liars will continue to wage war on humanity. From Paul Ehrlich who in 1968 forecast global famine to the Club of Rome that in 1972 predicted exhausted resources and famine and then had to recant the forecasts in 1976, to an endless series of “science” lies before and since, it behooves us all to be wary and skeptical of their claims.

We owe a debt of gratitude to those scientists who have greatly enhanced the lives of the seven billion with whom we share planet Earth. We owe a lot to the farmers who, thanks to scientific breakthroughs in genetics, are feeding us.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo is by Mateusz Opasiński. Mateusz Opasiński does not endorse the author or his use of the work. This photo is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

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

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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.

RELATED COLUMNS:

The Hockey Schtick: If you can’t explain the ‘pause’, you can’t explain the cause…

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

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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.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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

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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

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Charles Krauthammer—The Myth of Settled Science

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

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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.”

800px-Coal_consumption

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.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

RELATED STORY: Obama To Announce Coal Regulation Via Executive Fiat (Recession to Follow)

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”

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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.

Cover - Climate Change Reconsidered IIDr. 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.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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

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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.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

RELATED COLUMN: SNOW IN 49 STATES…

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

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“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

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Keystone-pipeline-route

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.