By Myron Ebell
We have just learned that the Senate Finance Committee may mark up a bill on Thursday that includes a one-year extension of the wind production tax credit. A more detailed alert will follow with action items after we have learned more. Note that the Romney campaign yesterday issued a statement opposing an extension of the wind PTC. I have pasted that statement below. Also note that the Finance Committee includes several Republicans who support wind subsidies. I have pasted all members of the committee below.
Official statement from Romney Campaign:
“President Obama’s promise to ‘easily’ create 5 million green energy jobs has become a particularly depressing punchline amidst the endless disappointments of the last four years. The President spent $90 billion in taxpayer stimulus dollars, some of which went to his donors and political allies or was sent to create jobs overseas instead of here in America. Now we have American wind and solar energy sectors that combine to produce only one percent of our energy - and our wind industry has actually lost 10,000 jobs.”
“The President may believe that his economic plan ‘worked’ and that America wants to repeat the experience for another four years, but the facts don’t back that up. Mitt Romney believes it is a time for a new approach to ensure our nation’s energy independence. He will allow the wind credit to expire, end the stimulus boondoggles, and create a level playing field on which all sources of energy can compete on their merits. Wind energy will thrive wherever it is economically competitive, and wherever private sector competitors with far more experience than the President believe the investment will produce results.”
Baucus, Max (MT) , Chairman
Rockefeller, John D. (WV)
Conrad, Kent (ND)
Bingaman, Jeff (NM)
Kerry, John F. (MA)
Wyden, Ron (OR)
Schumer, Charles E. (NY)
Stabenow, Debbie (MI)
Cantwell, Maria (WA)
Nelson, Bill (FL)
Menendez, Robert (NJ)
Carper, Thomas R. (DE)
Cardin, Benjamin L. (MD)
Hatch, Orrin G. (UT), Ranking Member
Grassley, Chuck (IA)
Snowe, Olympia J. (ME)
Kyl, Jon (AZ)
Crapo, Mike (ID)
Roberts, Pat (KS)
Enzi, Michael B. (WY)
Cornyn, John (TX)
Coburn, Tom (OK)
Thune, John (SD)
Burr, Richard (NC)
Contact the committee and tell them to stop wasteful spending.
By Steve Goddard
(CNN) - The mainland United States, which was largely recovering Monday from a near-nationwide heat wave, has experienced the warmest 12 months since record-keeping began in 1895, a top government science and weather agency announced Monday.
The report from the National Climatic Data Center, which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, does not take into account blistering heat from this month, with 2,116 high temperature marks either broken or tied between July 2 and July 8 in communities nationwide.
Past 12 months warmest ever recorded in United States - CNN.com
We have been hearing that the last 12 months is the warmest in US history. It is not surprising, because USHCN is massively cheating - by adding 2.5 degrees on to 2012 temperatures relative to 100 years ago.
The graph below plots the adjustments which are being made to the average monthly mean temperatures (enlarged).
Data is taken from these three files here, here and here.
Note that it is not TOBS which is the big offender. They have some massive data tampering going on after the year 2000. The US temperature record is corrupted beyond comprehension.
Maximum Temperatures Plunging In The US For More Than 80 Years
Posted on July 24, 2012
Maximum temperatures are less affected by Urban Heat Island effects than minimum temperatures, and are a better judge of the temperature trend than mean temperatures. As you can see, temperatures in the US have been declining since 1920.
By Anthony Watts
I noticed with my morning coffee that Tom Nelson had a Google Trends graph that piqued my interest, so I decided to expand upon it a bit before getting back to work. After looking at my results, the title of this post could just as easily be “off the radar”. Have a look:
Source: Google Trends
You can clearly see when An Inconvenient Truth was released, the 2007 IPCC report and subsequent Nobel prize, and when Climategate occurred. That Gore blip in the summer of 2010 was the “Sex Poodle” episode.
Here’s a similar graph with the maximum number of relevant phrases plotted, along with some news items that mark the timeline:
Source: Google Trends
Head of UN panel blasts Climategate affair
Ottawa Citizen Dec 7 2009
Climategate inquiry shows scientist didn’t falsify data
Vancouver Sun Feb 3 2010
Climategate inquiry mostly vindicates scientists
Huffington Post Jul 7 2010
British academics win right to temperature data held by university at center of Climategate
Washington Post Jul 1 2011
More Climategate emails leaked
TheChronicleHerald.ca Nov 23 2011
UK police close Climategate investigation
Hindustan Times Jul 18 2012
Here is one I found amusing. Like an EKG heartbeat (in red), we have the yearly heatwaves in the NH summer garnering more interest. But most interestingly, when the seasonal interest turns to heat waves, global warming takes a dip each time.
Source: Google Trends
This suggests to me that the global searching public isn’t connecting heat waves to “global warming” as some journalists, bloggers, and activists would like you to do.
Messaging FAIL.
by Verity Jones
Reading an article Black-Scholes: The maths formula linked to the financial crash on the BBC website today, the oft-mentioned link between prosperity and global temperature came to mind (from William Herschel’s 1801 observation that when there were fewer spots, wheat prices were higher to, at a stretch, links with the Dow Jones here).
The article describes how the development of an equation and models that provided the financial world with a way out to calculate value of future options and all kinds of other financial assets led to over-reliance on such methods. Replace the terminology in places with that of climate science and you’ll get what I mean:
Stewart says the lessons from Long-Term Capital Management were obvious. It showed the danger of this kind of algorithmically-based trading if you don’t keep an eye on some of the indicators that the more conventional people would use,” he says. “They [Long-Term Capital Management] were committed, pretty much, to just ploughing ahead with the system they had. And it went wrong.”
“It was abuse of their equation that caused trouble, and I don’t think you can blame the inventors of an equation if somebody else comes along and uses it badly,” he says.
For “more conventional people” read skeptics. And the trouble with climate models…
Predictions of the IPCC’s First Assessment Report in 1990, compared to the subsequent temperatures as measured by NASA satellites (UAH Data). Graph by Dr David Evans, reposted from Jo Nova...but it’s not just models.
“And it wasn’t just that equation. It was a whole generation of other mathematical models and all sorts of other techniques that followed on its heels. But it was one of the major discoveries that opened the door to all this.”
When you try to use mathematics in the service of elucidating a very complex problem, one where you have poor actual data, and you put too much reliance on the answer you get, you have a problem. Here, the issue of surface temperatures, metadata and UHI comes to mind.
The results described in the article include the collapse of a hedge fund.
But for Ian Stewart, the story of Black-Scholes - and of Long-Term Capital Management - is a kind of morality tale. “It’s very tempting to see the financial crisis and various things which led up to it as sort of the classic Greek tragedy of hubris begets nemesis,” he says.
“You try to fly, you fly too close to the sun, the wax holding your wings on melts and you fall down to the ground. My personal view is that it’s not just tempting to do that but there is actually a certain amount of truth in that way of thinking. I think the bankers’ hubris did indeed beget nemesis. But the big problem is that it wasn’t the bankers on whom the nemesis descended - it was the rest of us.”
And that’s just it with climate projections and CAGW predictions too - it is all of us who are being asked to pay the price. The difference is that a collapse of AGW predictive capability should ease the burden of tax and regulation, however it is likely that the controls enabled by ‘sustainability’ are too delicious for governments to let go.
Theres a PJTV video too (Best. Sentence. Ever.) that comments on WM Briggs’ modern aphorism “The love of theory is the root of all evil”. Starting with Steve Zwieck, it criticises CAGW supporters, and those who prefer to perfect theories and models rather than deal with the complexity of the real world. It is really worth watching.
Hot Air comments:
It’s not really the theory that people love - it’s the wealth and power they can grab by exploiting the theory.
Exactly.
H/T Kirk Myers
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Dr. Bob McMurtry, a prominent member of the Canadian health establishment, joins the victims of industrial wind turbines (IWT’s) in their call for Health Canada to turn over their future wind turbine noise study to Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). While the study is being conducted, they demand an immediate moratorium on all pending and proposed IWT projects.
The victims are represented by the North American Platform Against Wind Power (NA-PAW), and the European Platform Against Windfarms (EPAW), which regroup over 600 associations of victims from 26 countries. These federations, and Dr. McMurtry, are dissatisfied with the way the study is to be conducted. Health Canada (HC) being an arm of the Canadian government, they say, it offers no guarantee as to impartiality, which is the most crucial point in this matter.
Arm’s length studies could be assured with involvement from CIHR, according to Dr Robert McMurtry: “research into adverse health effects is a good idea, but is being addressed by the wrong agency which is a regulatory branch of Health Canada. A better approach is to assign the task to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, which reports to Minister Aglukkaq and is more capable of establishing causation, prevalence, and answering other important questions.”
Recently obtained Health Canada Scientific Advisory Board documents reveal that HC have already agreed to not let the results be “causative,” and not become a tally of how many people have been affected. These are the first signs that, already, the study is being used as a political stratagem, says Sherri Lange, of NA-PAW. She warns: “the study, if conducted by Health Canada, may not provide the clarity and truth that is being demanded by Canadians.”
The victims are also concerned that the best specialists on the matter may not be consulted as they are not listed in the initial list of 25 experts to assist with this study. They also feel that, now that the authorities have finally admitted there could be a health problem, the principle of precaution must be applied and a moratorium must be called immediately.
Dr. McMurtry concurs: “the admission by Health Minister Aglukkaq that there are substantial gaps in our knowledge reveals the absence of evidence-based guidelines. There is thus the need for a moratorium on further IWT development until the requisite evidence of safe placement of wind turbines is available.”
Sherri adds: “several families and physicians have reported wind turbine associated heart attacks, and even suicides. When a family has lost home enjoyment and restful sleep, with no chance of recovering them, we have a recipe for despair. We cannot afford to wait another two years and a thousand more turbines till the study is done. The devastation of lives must stop immediately.”
We can’t look to Europe for a solution to the health problem, says Mark Duchamp of EPAW. “Denmark recently conducted a study on the matter, but it was done by a consultant whose main client is the wind industry. As a result, it wasn’t truthful, and monstrous 3 MW turbines continue to be installed too close to homes and workplaces at great risk to public health. Tricks were used in the measurements of low-frequency noise and infrasound, as denounced by Professor Henrik Moeller, a renowned acoustician from the University of Aarlborg (1). In the circumstances, the world is looking at Ontario for, at last, an unbiased study. That must be the work of CIHR.”
The federations demand the participation of the following specialists in the study:
Dr. Robert Y. McMurtry, M.D., F.R.C.S. (C), F.A.C.S., Canada; Carmen Krogh, BSc Pharm, Researcher Wind Turbines - Adverse Health and Social Justice, Canada; Stephen Ambrose, Acoustician, USA; Dr. Jeffery Aramini, Epidemiologist, Canada; Dr Arline Bronzaft, Noise and Health Specialist, USA; Dr Steven Cooper, ENG Fellow Australian Acoustical Society and Member of Institute of Noise Control, USA; Professor Phillip Dickinson, Acoustician, New Zealand; Barbara J. Frey BA, MA and Peter J. Haddon, BSc, FRICS, Scotland; Dr Christopher Hanning, BSc, MB, BS, MRCS,LRCS, LRCP, FRCA, MD, Sleep Disturbance and Wind Turbines, UK; Professor Colin Hansen, Acoustician, Australia; Dr Magda Havas, Biological and Health Effects of Electromagnetic and Chemical Pollution, Canada; Richard James, INCE Acoustician, USA; Dr Mauri Johansson, Specialist in Community Health and Occupational Medicine, Denmark; Dr. Sarah Laurie, CEO Waubra Foundation, Australia; Professor Henrik Moeller, Acoustic Specialist, Denmark; Dr. Michael Nissenbaum, Radiologist, USA; Dr. Carl Phillips, Epidemiologist, USA; Dr. Nina Pierpont, Author of Wind Turbine Syndrome, USA; Robert Rand, Acoustician, USA; Dr. Daniel Shepherd, Noise and Health Specialist, New Zealand; Dr Malcolm Swinbanks, Acoustician, UK; Dr.Robert Thorne, Health Sciences and Acoustics, Australia.
Deroy Murdock
The Obama Administration plans a significant increase in federal auto mileage or CAFE standards. The much higher standards will boost car prices...taking cars right out of the hands of some 6.8 million drivers. Far worse, the smaller, lighter, more plasticized cars and light trucks that these rules will put on the automotive market will be more dangerous -thus increasing traffic accident deaths and injuries.
Let’s hear it for Washington’s latest “smashing” success!
(Deroy has been a friend and think tank colleague for over 15 years. I expect to be sending you more of his columns from time to time over the coming months.)
I hope you like this terrifying piece - and will post it, quote from it and forward it to your friends and colleagues.
Best regards,
Paul Dreissen
EPA’s new CAFE mileage standards kill
They will prevent many families from buying cars - and leave more grieving for lost loved ones
Washington taxes and regulations keep yanking money from Americans’ wallets. Now EPA is preparing to make prices for cars and light trucks rise beyond the reach of low-income drivers. That’s bad enough. But from there, things grow deadly.
At fault is a regulatory regime known as Corporate Average Fuel Economy, and commonly called CAFE standards. Congress mandated these mileage rules in 1975, during a seemingly decade-long energy crisis. Washington has periodically hiked CAFE standards in an ongoing effort to boost automobile efficiency.
Lacking magic wands, car manufacturers spend money to obey these laws. And then - surprise! - up go sticker prices. Now EPA is using its self-proclaimed authority over carbon dioxide to justify tough new mileage standards, on the ground that they will reduce global warming and thus improve human health and welfare.
The National Automobile Dealers Association calculated on April 12 that a Chevrolet Aveo, the most affordable vehicle it studied, would climb from $12,700 to $15,700 by 2025, because of the rules. This $3,000 hike (in 2010 dollars, and without factoring in the costs of carrying a three to five-year loan) would prevent 6.8 million humble drivers from qualifying for loans to finance their purchases.
“Fuel economy improvements must be affordable,” New Mexico Ford dealer Don Chalmers told journalists at the estimate’s unveiling. “If my customers can’t buy what I’ve got to sell, there are no savings at the gas pump and there is no environmental benefit.”
Is this what Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson calls “environmental justice?”
Team Obama is fueling these anticipated price hikes by boosting CAFE standards from 35.5 miles per gallon in 2016 to 54.5 MPG by 2025.
As they have for 37 years, car companies will follow these new rules by making cars thinner and lighter, and made more from plastic and aluminum than from crash-resistant steel. Smaller, slighter vehicles get better mileage. But that hardly matters when a car smacks into a sycamore or cement wall, tumbles down a slope, or slams head-on into another vehicle.
That’s when even the most eco-conscious drivers would trade lower MPG for protective layers of thick steel. That’s real health and welfare.
The laws of physics are stubbornly impervious to Obama’s green slogans, no matter how abrasively he shouts them. (And note that the President and many Administration officials get chauffeured around in big limousines that are anything but low-mileage.) The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety concluded in 2007 that “None of the 15 vehicles with the lowest driver death rates is a small model. In contrast, 11 of the 16 vehicles with the highest death rates are mini or small models.”
“Fuel-standard lethality is as obvious as a smashed windshield,” J.R. Dunn observed in The American Thinker. He chillingly has detailed the mayhem that CAFE standards have unleashed.
According to the Brookings Institution, a 500-lb weight reduction of the average car increased annual highway fatalities by 2,200-3,900 and serious injuries by 11,000 and 19,500 per year. USA Today found that 7,700 deaths occurred for every mile per gallon gained in fuel economy standards. Smaller cars accounted for up to 12,144 deaths in 1997, 37% of all vehicle fatalities for that year.
How many deaths have resulted? Depending on which study you choose, the total ranges from 41,600 to 124,800. To that figure we can add between 352,000 and 624,000 people suffering serious injuries, including being crippled for life. In the past thirty years, fuel standards have become one of the major causes of death and misery in the United States - and one almost completely attributable to human stupidity and shortsightedness.
Focus briefly on the tears and tombstones behind these casualty figures. Most of these injuries involved major pain and hardship. Nearly each one of these CAFE-caused deaths featured crying loved ones, a casket, and someone inside it who probably made people smile just days earlier.
The only good news here is that road deaths have fallen lately, but for other reasons.
Says Dr. Soumi Eachempati, Chief of Trauma Services at Manhattan’s Weill Cornell Medical Center: “I feel the recent decreases in fatality data are due to many safety measures including better airbags, more states having seat belt laws, higher seat belt compliance, more strict drunk driving laws, better trauma care, better EMS, more traffic congestion in certain areas, and what some feel are safer road conditions.”
But rather than leave bad enough alone, Obama and company clamp down, ever harder. Strengthening CAFE standards by 53.5 percent by 2025 likely will yield deadlier cars. Airbags will do only so much while surrounded by materials that recall aluminum or vinyl siding.
Before Washington sends additional Americans to early graves, Team Obama should step off the gas pedal and ponder the physicist who wrote Traffic Safety. Dr. Leonard Evans was perfectly clear: “CAFE kills, and higher CAFE standards kill even more.”
New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. A version of this article originally appeared on National Review Online.
Science Magazine
The editor of Conservation Biology has been forced out over the issue of advocacy in the premier journal. Erica Fleishman of the University of California, Davis, was told late last month by the Society for Conservation Biology’s (SCB’s) governing board that it felt that she had been insisting on removing advocacy statements from research papers, and that it had been decided not to renew her contract. Several prominent members of the journal’s editorial board have resigned in protest, and the SCB president has created a new committee in a bid to ease tensions.
Conservation Biology is the most highly cited publication in conservation biology with an impact factor of 4.9. Fleishman had been editor in chief of the journal for about 2.5 years. She received an annual $20,000 honorarium for 25 to 30 hours a week of work, including more hands-on editing than is typical at other journals, intended to make papers more accessible to a range of fields. “It’s been a huge part of my life,” she says.
Fleishman estimates that about 10% of papers submitted to the journal contain statements of advocacy, typically a few sentences in the discussion section. Although she suggested to authors that they consider not including such comments, she says she only insisted that they be identified as opinion. A handful of authors, including some who serve SCB’s board of governors, objected, she says. Ultimately, any changes are the author’s decision, Fleishman says. “We have never said, ‘We will not publish your paper if you don’t change this.’ “
Fleishman says she first heard from the executive committee of the board of governors that it didn’t want to renew her contract, which expired in February, on 23 May. After members of the journal’s editorial board objected to her firing, the executive committee met twice to reconsider, but Fleishman was told last Thursday that the decision was final.
SCB president and board member Paul Beier of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff says that there had been “friction” between Fleishman and some members of the board of governors for months to a year. The decision not to renew her contract “has been beyond excruciating for me,” he says, adding that Fleishman is “a person of utmost integrity.” Beier has created a joint committee of the board of governors and editorial board to discuss how to improve relationships.
Among those who have resigned from the editorial board in protest is David Ehrenfeld of Rutgers University, who founded the journal in 1987. Fleishman “has been treated shamefully,” he says, estimating that more than 20% of the 60-member editorial board has resigned over the issue.
Marked-up draft of UN Rio+20 agenda reveals shocking “sustainability” wish list.
An American family of four could owe the UN $1,325 per year.
The United Nations plans to make its Rio+20 Sustainable Development Conference “the most significant environmental conference in history.” A draft planning and agenda document, “The Future We Want,” marked-up by myriad ultra-liberal NGOs, provides an unvarnished look at what lurks behind Rio+20.
“Americans, their free world partners and people in developing nations who hope to lift themselves out of poverty should be on their guard. Otherwise Rio+20 could easily trap them in a future we dread,” said Craig Rucker, CEO of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, a Washington, DC-based organization that advances the needs of people, while also protecting wildlife and environmental values.
The UN’s international NGO allies want to expand previous calls for a “green economy,” by including new demands for “resource justice” and new mechanisms to ensure “contraction and convergence for over- and under-consumers of natural resources.” People do not need advanced degrees to figure out whose economies and lifestyles the activists intend to “contract,” Rucker commented.
Another agenda item would have the world end “speculation” in energy, raw material and economic markets. However, history has taught that it is extremely difficult even to define “speculation,” and that attempts to control investment, development and resource allocation frequently end in disaster.
The international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) also advocate making national environmental policies subject to “international legal frameworks and regulations,” and “strengthening international environmental governance ... within the institutional framework of sustainable development.” That would make national sovereignty “the most endangered species in Rio,” CFACT president David Rothbard stated.
The NGOs would place both nature and man in jeopardy, since they call for curbs on “any technologies that might imply a serious risk for the environment or human society, including in particular synthetic biology, geo-engineering, genetic modification, nuclear energy and nanotechnology,” Rothbard observed.
They would curtail the very technologies that allow us to provide for people’s needs in the most efficient, least intrusive manner. Few policies are more counterproductive than forcing people to grow low yield crops that are susceptible to insects and drought, or to rely on inefficient energy technologies, he said.
The document also seeks to impose staggering financial burdens on people in developed nations. It would give the UN 0.7% of a nations- gross domestic product - some $1,325 per year for an American family of four. A Canadian family would pay $1,211, while their counterparts would be taxed $1,206 in Germany and $1,171 in Japan. Norwegian families would take dubious first place honors, paying a whopping $2,445 every year. Other countries’ obligations, based on World Bank 2010 data, can be found on CFACT.tv.
The NGOs most popular agenda item appears to be increased funding and powers for the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which they want to turn into an international version of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “People concerned about the impacts that EPA has had on American energy prices and jobs - for minimal health or environmental benefits - should be especially wary of giving vast new powers and funding to the UNEP, which is completely unelected and unaccountable,” Rucker commented.
On climate and energy, activists claiming to be acting for “indigenous peoples” said the UN should insist that developed countries shift rapidly to low-carbon energy use. Not to be outdone, environmental NGOs are demanding that developed countries cut carbon dioxide emissions by 95% by 2050. That would take the United States back to what it emitted around the time of the Civil War, while accomplishing nothing for the climate.
To pay for this expansive eco-wish list, the United Nations and NGOs also want to give the UN authority to tax every currency conversion and financial transaction, fuel sales and air travel tickets - and seize all funds that currently provide subsidies and tax deductions for fossil fuel and nuclear power. These funds would be in addition to the extensive foreign aid already provided by taxpayers and treasuries of developed nations.
CFACT invites people to examine this remarkable document at CFACT.tv - and determine for themselves how much it actually represents “the future we want.”
The Committee is taking a delegation to Brazil to expose these potentially devastating policy proposals. “We also intend to inject some much needed common sense into the deliberations, and ensure that at least some consideration is given to the needs of real people, especially the world’s poor - and not just to the unreasonable and often outrageous demands of Deep Ecology, anti-development activists,” Rucker said.