Tag Archive for: global warming

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]

There is No Global Warming and Will Be None for Decades

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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

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

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

Morano vs. Nye on CO2:

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

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

Morano vs. Nye on Development in Poor Nations:

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

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

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

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

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

Full Transcript below: 

Stossel

January 23, 2014 Thursday

SHOW: STOSSEL 9:00 PM EST

Chill Out

BYLINE: John Stossel

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

SECTION: NEWS; Financial

LENGTH: 7553  words

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

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

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

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

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(APPLAUSE)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

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

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, my god.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Terrible tornadoes in Oklahoma. Horrible.

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

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Carbon could cost us the planet.

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

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

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

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

STOSSEL: Who will win this war?

UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: It’s a happy ending.

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

(END VIDEO TAPE)

ANNOUNCER: And now, John Stossel.

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

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

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

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

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

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

(END VIDEO CLIP)

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

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

STOSSEL: Bill Nye?

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

 

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: — of a hockey stick?

NYE: — shaft of a hockey stick…

STOSSEL: — it’s going to shoot up.

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

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

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

(CROSSTALK)

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

(CROSSTALK)

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

MORANO: Sure.

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

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

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

STOSSEL: Well, they’ve got to…

MORANO: He’s also…

STOSSEL: — get money from…

(CROSSTALK)

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

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

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

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

STOSSEL: Bill?

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

STOSSEL: We agree on that.

NYE: There used to be…

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

MORANO: Yes.

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

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

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

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

STOSSEL: Climate does change.

MORANO: Sure.

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

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

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

NYE: Yes.

MORANO: — before they reinvented past temperatures.

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

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

(CROSSTALK)

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

NYE: What about the weight?

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

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

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

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

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

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

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

(END VIDEO CLIP)

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

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

STOSSEL: We won’t?

NYE: — continually rebuild and displace people.

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

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

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

STOSSEL: There were fewer tornadoes.

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

MORANO: Yes.

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

Shouldn’t we be skeptical?

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

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

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

NYE: The problem…

(LAUGHTER)

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

MORANO: And God bless them. They need that.

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

STOSSEL: Why is that a problem?

NYE: They want to live the way we…

STOSSEL: That’s a good thing…

NYE: — live in the developed world.

MORANO: Would you deny them that?

NYE: So…

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

STOSSEL: Well, let Bill Nye…

MORANO: — took full advantage of.

STOSSEL: — answer that.

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

MORANO: Sure.

NYE: This is where the emerging technologies come in.

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

STOSSEL: I just want to play one more…

NYE: So…

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

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

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

(END VIDEO CLIP)

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

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

STOSSEL: No, they can do that.

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

STOSSEL: No, they can do that.

MORANO: No, they can do that.

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

STOSSEL: Nope.

NYE: Is that inappropriate?

Those — those things have been done.

STOSSEL: Right.

MORANO: Those are doable.

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

STOSSEL: Thank you, Bill Nye and Marc Morano.

NYE: Thank you.

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

PODCAST: How Mother Nature will Accelerate the Looming Fiscal Avalanche

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Many are writing about the looming fiscal cliff that Congress and the Obama administration will deal with upon return from the Thanksgiving break. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) warns of a looming fiscal avalanche.

In After Fiscal Cliff Comes Fiscal Avalanche, Rejection of U.S. Debt, Senator Lee writes, “While Washington is preoccupied with the so-called fiscal cliff, little attention has been given to the fiscal avalanche that will occur if we continue down an unsustainable, long-term path, causing markets to turn sour on U.S. debt and leading to a spike in interest rates.”

Senator Lee states, “The Congressional Budget Office projects that under the most likely policy scenario, in 30 years, net interest payments on the debt could total $3.8 trillion in today’s dollars. That is more than total government spending for 2011.”

Robert Wiedemer co-author of America’s Bubble Economy – Aftershock wrote America has suffered through a number of financial bubbles and the aftershock following each. To date each of these bubbles, the most recent being the housing bubble, have burst and fallen onto two other looming bubbles. These two bubbles are the “dollar bubble” and the “debt bubble”. Wiedemer predicts these two bubbles will burst when pricked by the pin called “inflation”.

The government fiscal policies which have lead the US to the fiscal avalanche may be helped along by mother nature.

Relying heavily on the research of experts globally, as well as his own original research that correctly predicted the change in the Sun’s behavior, Mr. John L. Casey has spelled out in his book Cold Sun a convincing case that a new cold era has arrived. In Cold Sun, Mr. Casey presents the evidence showing:

1. Global warming ended years ago.
2. The Sun has entered an ominous state of ‘hibernation.’
3. The Earth’s ocean and atmospheric temperatures are dropping rapidly and are now on a long term decline for the next thirty years.
4. Glacial ice worldwide is growing again and the threat of rising sea levels is over.
5. Why we should be preparing now for the coming cold and its ill-effects including record earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions as well as global agricultural devastation.

Mr. Casey’s predictions of mother nature taking her own course fly in the face of current government policies at the national, state and local levels. In this exclusive interview Mr. Casey explains how mother nature will have her way no matter what we try to do:

While government is focused on reducing CO2 emissions to prevent global warming, the earth is in fact cooling. According to Casey this cooling will shorten the growing season causing food prices to increase, require more fuel and energy to heat homes and businesses. The US will experience an increase in the number of natural disasters costing human life loss and property damage on a grand scale. The US ability to recover from such natural disasters here and globally will be restricted by our debt and cost to service that debt in the long term.

The world’s growing population depends on food. Brian M. Carney in his article for the Wall Street Journal asks, “Can The World Still Feed Itself?“. Mr. Carney interviews Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Chairman of Nestle’ the world’s largest food-production company. According to Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe, “Politicians do not understand that between the food market and the energy market, there is a close link.” That link is the calorie.

Carney reports, “The energy stored in a bushel of corn can fuel a car or feed a person. And increasingly, thanks to ethanol mandates and subsidies in the U.S. and bio-fuel incentives in Europe, crops formerly grown for food or livestock feed are being grown for fuel. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s most recent estimate predicts that this year, for the first time, American farmers will harvest more corn for ethanol than for feed. In Europe some 50% of the rapeseed crop is going into bio-fuel production, according to Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe, while “world-wide about 18% of sugar is being used for bio-fuel today.”

What does this all mean?

If John Casey is correct in his predictions, and SSRC always is, then cold weather brings with it a shorter growing season and increased demand for fuel to keep people warm. Therefore, we must have policies that increase calories, not decrease the food supply.

These natural events will occur during the same 30 year period where our payments on the national debt will increase to $3.8 trillion.

RELATED COLUMN: Are we living in the Hunger Games?

Global Climate Status Report sent to Senator Reid and Speaker Boehner

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The Orlando, Florida based Space and Science Research Corporation (SSRC) announced the public release of the Executive Summary for its Global Climate Status Report for 2013. This scientific data based document provides political leaders, business executives, educators and the general public with a concise overview of the actual climate trends now present and an analysis of the Earth’s climate future based on these trends.

In the Executive Summary, the SSRC report authors show convincing evidence that the Earth’s atmospheric and oceanic temperatures are on a long term temperature cool down as a result of the just started reduction in the Sun’s energy output. Called a “solar hibernation,” this rare and powerful natural cycle of the Sun has been shown to bring long and potentially dangerous cold climate eras to the planet.

Using data form numerous researchers and science organizations, in addition to the SSRC’s own research, the Executive Summary spells out with detailed charts of climate trends, what is actually happening with the climate.

According to SSRC President, Mr. John L. Casey, “This report was planned for some time. Clearly though, its release at this time is intended to put some reality into the ongoing Congressional debates about to begin on the administration’s proposed new carbon taxes and other regulations supposedly designed to stop man-made global warming.”

“The government’s release of its own draft climate assessment report continues to show our government is on the wrong track for addressing climate change and is still shackled to the disproved greenhouse gas theory of climate change. As is well known, however, past predictions about the climate using that theory have been all wrong, global warming ended years ago, and now a new cold climate has arrived. The general public and our leaders need the truth about climate change at their disposal before making long term decisions about climate change for government policy and managing their day-to-day lives. This next climate change to a potentially dangerous cold climate needs to be well understood by all so they can best prepare for what is coming,” notes Casey.

“I am sending letters and copies of the report to Senate President Harry Reid and Speaker of the House John Boehner as well as other leaders at the federal and state level,” states Casey.

The Executive Summary is now posted for public download from the SSRC web site. The full Global Climate Status Report, will be available for a fee when published on March 4, 2013.

Democrats Against Sustainable Development and Smart Growth

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If you go to your city, county, school board or state official website you will see words like “sustainable development” and “smart growth”. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) uses these words on its website. The FDEP website states, “The goal of the Sustainable Initiatives programs is to promote sustainability in Florida businesses, schools and homes. Sustainability is meeting the needs of the present population without compromising the ability of future populations to meet its needs.”

Another example is the University of Florida sustainability website. The about page reads, “Simply defined, sustainability is meeting contemporary needs without compromising the ability of future generations to satisfy their needs. More comprehensively, it means looking at the issues and problems facing our world with a new perspective – one that focuses on three interdependent areas of concern: ecological preservation, economic viability, and social justice.” Note the words “social justice”.

Florida even has a Sustainability Institute, whose mission is to address, “Direct threats, such as sea level rise and extreme weather events, and indirect risks linked to our region’s status as a global destination and trade center, place Florida on the front lines of the fight against global warming. ”

So why are Democrats, especially progressive ones from California, against sustainable development and smart growth? Answer: It is all about taking away property rights.

The leader of these progressive Democrats is Rosa Koire, ASA, who is a forensic commercial real estate appraiser specializing in eminent domain valuation.  Her twenty-eight year career as an expert witness on land use has culminated in exposing the impacts of Sustainable Development on private property rights and individual liberty.

Koire is on the Board of Directors and Executive Director of The Post Sustainability Institute. The Post Sustainability Institute was established to study the impacts that “Sustainable Development” and “Communitarianism” have on liberty.  The intent is to track the progression of the sustainability movement and to forecast the most likely outcomes if it proceeds unchecked.

Koire became involved in 2005 when she was elected to a citizens’ oversight committee in Santa Rosa, Northern California, to review a proposed 1,300 acre redevelopment project in which 10,000 people live and work. Her research into the documents justifying the plans led her, with her partner Kay Tokerud, to challenge the fraudulent basis for the huge Gateways Redevelopment Project. The City, in an attempt to block Koire from exposing the project, removed the neighborhood in which Koire and Tokerud’s properties were located from the redevelopment area.

Koire and Tokerud fought on, however, not wanting to abandon the thousands of business and property owners still in the area. They formed a business and property owners association and a non-profit organization (Concerned Citizens of Santa Rosa Against Redevelopment Law Abuse) and were able to raise nearly $500,000 in donations and pro bono legal work to sue the City of Santa Rosa to stop the project. The court case, Tokerud v. City of Santa Rosa, lost in Superior Court but the court ruled that they could continue, and they appealed to the San Francisco First District Court of Appeals where they lost again in 2009. The three years of litigation fighting eminent domain and the redevelopment project succeeded in delaying the project while the economy collapsed–the City has failed to implement its plans, but still has the power of eminent domain over the 1,100 acre area until 2018.

Koire is the author of the book “Behind The Green Mask“. In the book Koire states:

No matter where you live, I’ll bet that there have been hundreds of condos built or planned in the center of your town recently. Over the last ten years there has been a “planning revolution: across the US. It was the implementation of Growing Smart.

Your commercial, industrial and multi-residential land was rezones to “mixed use”. Nearly everything that got approvals for development was designed the same way: ground floor retail with two or three stories of residential above. Mixed use.

Very hard to finance for construction, and very hard to manage since it has to have a high density of people in order to justify the retail. A lot of it empty and most of the ground floor retail is empty too. High Bankruptcy rate. Two areas like this in Jacksonville Florida – off Gate and Southside where Three Forks Restaurant is? And at Town Center mall. [My emphasis]

Florida has been run by Republicans for over a decade. It was during that decade that “sustainable development” became the cause of the party and those elected at every level. All in the name of the taking of property to insure social justice for future generations.

Danger: Energy Economic Zone Ahead

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Government is famous for wasting time and money all at the expense of taxpayers. The greatest waste has been attributed to the “green movement” and its efforts to save the planet by controlling human activities, such as emissions of CO2. This political and uniquely unscientific movement has led the Florida legislature to create comprehensive planning legislation, implement caps on carbon emissions and most recently create an Energy Economic Zone (EEZ) pilot project.

Sarasota County has established by ordinance an Energy Economic Zone. The first public hearings on the EEZ pilot project in Sarasota County are being held in September. Citizens and business will learn what the EEZ is all about. But what is end purpose of an EEZ? What will be accomplished by establishing an EEZ in Sarasota County?

My answer: The greatest expansion of local government power over your and my pursuit of happiness.

Here are ten reasons why I believe the Sarasota County EEZ will fail:

1. Any governmental expansion of power always meets with stiff public resistance and the EEZ is meeting stiff resistance. The EEZ has been denounced with bi-partisan support in Sarasota County. Neighborhood associations, anti-growth proponents and Democrats are standing shoulder to shoulder with TEA Party groups, 912 Project members and the Republican Party of Sarasota Executive Committee to denounce this project and its attempt to control the lives of citizens.

2. Economic zones do not work. County Commissioner Nora Patterson in an e-mail to an opponent of the EEZ states, “Our existing enterprise zone [in Newtown] is truly a depressed area and I can tell you in advance that the overall situation has not improved, in fact quite the opposite given the economic downturn.” So Commissioners know that enterprise zones do not work from the Newtown failure. Why throw good money after bad? Because it feels good to do so. The EEZ is being driven by ideology, not by any proven method to create jobs or expand the economy in Florida.

3. One of the purposes of the EEZ is to create energy efficiencies and thereby reduce energy usage. This is a FALSE premise as greater efficiency leads inextricably to greater energy usage. This phenomenon is called the “rebound effect”. Increasing the efficiency of lighting encourages us to illuminate more. This means that we need more energy, not less to meet future demand, expected to increase by 30% over the next decade. The EEZ concept is a fallacy, even if the five sitting County Commissioners believe in this fallacy, it is still a fallacy.

4. The incentives provided in the ordinance as currently written are not defined. This makes the ordinance open to broad interpretation by staff in its implementation. We have experienced what happens when bureaucrats are given the leeway to implement policy in Florida. This has happened with numeric water standards being imposed on the state by the Environmental Protection Agency. Placing Draconian standards on water quality to save us from ourselves. Standards that cannot be met!

5. The incentives are front loaded without regard to clearly defined end results. Under the current proposed ordinance businesses would be awarded incentive grants in addition to tax abatements for job creation. The business would promise to create new “green jobs”. This is a failed model, see reason #2 above. You and I do not pay a business until the job is done. In this case County government is so trusting that they will pay upfront for a promise of future job creation. The County has tried this recently with Sanborn studios. Sanborn Studios closed its Lakewood Ranch facility in December 2011 after just one year in operation. The company that promised to produce Hollywood movies, TV shows and create more than 100 jobs in Sarasota got a $650,000 grant from Sarasota County. It is good to learn from experience right?

6. The EEZ is “crony capitalism” writ large. Crony capitalism is a term describing an economy in which success in business depends on close relationships between business people and government officials. It may be exhibited by favoritism in the distribution of legal permits, government grants, special tax breaks, and so forth. The proposed ordinance establishing an EEZ is the ultimate example of crony capitalism. Government picks the winners and losers, not the free markets. This always leads to corruption and political favoritism.

7. Government does not create jobs! The great myth is that government can via incentives create something from nothing. Jobs are created only when a business cannot meet the market demand for its products or services. That is an economic fact. What can government do to help create a market for a product or service? Nothing, absolutely nothing. What government can do best is to do the least. That is to say government is best that governs least. Protecting property rights is the role of government.

8. All of the County Commissioners are Republicans dedicated to limited government and the U.S. Constitution. The Republican Party of Sarasota Executive Committee passed a resolution condemning “local ‘sustainable development’ policies such as Smart Growth, Wildlands Project, Resilient Cities, Regional Visioning Projects, and other ‘Green’ or ‘Alternative’ projects.” The EEZ falls squarely into all of these categories! A copy of the full resolution was presented to each Commissioner.

9. The County’s attempt to establish an EEZ has led to at least one law suit. According to Kathy Attunes, “The EEZ and attached Enterprise Zone incentives are separate statutes. It can be argued that the Enterprise Zone statutes exist independently of the EEZ statute (377.809), and these state Enterprise Zone statutes apply independent of any local eligibility requirements and a $300,000 cap. The EEZ green standards and $300,000 cap are not outlined in the Enterprise Zone statutes; the statutes do not mirror each other. We are concerned that the EEZ statute and linked Enterprise Zone incentives are in conflict, which potentially sets the County up for litigation brought by businesses who have met Enterprise Zone criteria but not County EEZ standards. We do not want the BCC to proceed with a program that opens the door to a flood of untargeted Enterprise Zone tax breaks, and the possibility of having local control negated by state statute.” I agree more litigation will follow.

10. Finally, this is just bad public policy and a waste of taxpayer money.

There are many other reasons why the EEZ is bad policy for Sarasota County but in the interest of brevity I have listed only my top ten.

I do not need nor want government telling me how to save energy. I am perfectly able doing that on my own. If I wish to waste energy then I will pay an economic price for that behavior. That is how personal freedom and free markets work. Government forcing choices upon me is morally wrong. The EEZ is morally wrong!