The Toyota Prius has become the flagship car for those in our society so environmentally conscious that they are willing to spend a premium to show the world how much they care. Unfortunately for them, their ultimate ‘green car’ is the source of some of the worst pollution in North America; it takes more combined energy per Prius to produce than a Hummer. Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.

When you pool together all the combined energy it takes to drive and build a Toyota Prius, the flagship car of energy fanatics, it takes almost 50 percent more energy than a Hummer - the Prius’s arch nemesis. Through a study by CNW Marketing called “Dust to Dust,” the total combined energy is taken from all the electrical, fuel, transportation, materials (metal, plastic, etc) and hundreds of other factors over the expected lifetime of a vehicle. The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles - the expected lifespan of the Hybrid. The Hummer, on the other hand, costs a more fiscal $1.95 per mile to put on the road over an expected lifetime of 300,000 miles. That means the Hummer will last three times longer than a Prius and use less combined energy doing it. Read more details here.

The perennial tug of war over what average people should think and do about human-caused global warming has just experienced another big yank, this time from those saying actions to cut greenhouse gases are a costly waste of time. The office of Senator James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican and ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, released a report online today listing hundreds of scientists and links to peer-reviewed studies that it says challenge whether humans are dangerously influencing climate. This new ‘consensus busters’ report is poised to redefine the debate, the news release said. But when you sift through the studies, what emerges (to me at any rate) is not so much the shattering of a consensus as a portrait of one corner of the absolutely normal, and combative, arena in which scientific ideas emerge and either thrive or fade.

To many scientists and students of scientific history, there really is no such thing as a consensus. There is a preponderant view at any one point in time, but it is largely defined by disagreement, not agreement. Someone comes up with a new framing for how the world works and tests that conception (where possible) through experimentation, observation, analysis and (for complex phenomena without comparable control cases) simulation. Peers challenge the finding like intellectual piranhas, nipping at faulty logic, flawed data or unsupported conclusions. Whatever remains is sturdy and powerful, until some new line of thinking and analysis uproots it. Read more here.

Could this be the global warmers’ last big meeting? Could it be that global warming is ending, just at a time when the panic-driven global warmers are preparing to lower the carbon tax boom on the American public? And what brought about global warming in the first place? Was it carbon dioxide and the dastardly SUV, the reasons most touted by the main body of the world’s political scientists? The issue has been promoted to the nth-degree by a corrupt and dishonest mass media.

There is growing evidence that the sun itself plays a major role in the warming and cooling of the planted, cited by dozens of reputable scientists based on a history of climate and temperatures dating back thousands of years.  It appears ever more likely that the sun itself, the giver of all energy to the planet, contributes substantially to the warming and cooling cycles of earth. When the sun is active with sunspot and solar storms, more solar energy reaches the earth. When the sun is dormant (void) of such storms, less energy is emitted and temperatures on the earth begin to cool. At present, the sun is approaching a more dormant status, and temperatures that reached a high at the turn of the century have now stabilized at slightly lower levels.

The cooling effect of the Sun’s inactivity will take several more years to establish itself as a genuine measure of climate direction. The nation will know if and when the solar observations prove to be true. At that time, Al Gore and all the global warming hucksters will claim credit for the change in climate. Until then, normal weather continue its pattern of ups and downs, as it has over the centuries, with floods, droughts, tornadoes and hurricanes harming hundreds of millions of poor people and destroying hundreds of endangered species. Read more here.

E. Ralph Hostetter, a prominent businessman and agricultural publisher, also is a national and local award-winning columnist.

EcoWorld Editor’s Note: When you strip away the ideology, the truth still matters, so not just for balance but for integrity, we continue to post features like this. The denial industry is not going to go away until the truth is known, and truth can withstand skepticism. And what if the skeptics are right? Because even if AGW is real, would unleashing the power of free enterprise to adapt to changing climate realities be a better use of resources than trying to eliminate combustion through massive new transfers of wealth from the private sector to the public sector? In our view, $100 dollars per barrel of oil is a sufficient incentive for alternative energy to have a chance. Further, eliminating subsidies for fossil fuel should come before new taxes and subsidies to develop alternative energy. Reforming the public sector should come before any new taxes.

One of Monckton’s points, #30, deserves highlighting - like many of us, he rejects the position that CO2 is pollution. Without CO2 plants could not have photosynthesis, which is necessary for plants to grow and generates oxygen for humans to breath. Plants cannot breath without CO2. For such a fundamental misconception to enter into law via the U.S. Supreme Court ought to alert anyone to the fact something is wrong here. Let the gardens of private land and the gardens of public discourse adapt and benefit from this truth; CO2 is life, and airborne toxic molecules and particulates are something else altogether. In that spirit, on with the story. - Ed “Redwood” Ring.

Read more of the editor’s refreshingly open-minded comments and then read Lord Monckton’s thorough refutation of the gospel according to Gore here.

During the United Nations Bali climate conference, a hundred prominent international scientists released an open letter warning that any attempt to control the Earths climate is an ultimately futile and would constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity’s real and pressing problems. It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. The notion that mankind has any impact on climate or weather is absurd.

If I were to devise a plan to destroy the greatest economy, creator of wealth, center of innovation, and exemplar of individual liberty that has ever existed in human history, I would patiently create fear of a global disaster involving the one thing over which humans never had and never will have control, the earth’s climate. I would then propose a resolution that would cost that economy billions in carbon credits to keep it from occurring. Read more here

Marc Morano is the director of communications for Senator James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who has long contended that dangerous human-driven global warming is a hoax, attended the talks on behalf of his boss. Some of the concerns he expresses below were addressed in my Week in Review story today.

The UN climate conference in Bali revealed a few things:
1) The UN certainly knows how to throw a party and choose an exotic island paradise venue.
2) The UN once again displayed its intolerance for dissenting opinion as it squelched a team of scientists attending the conference who were promoting an abundance of peer-reviewed scientific data debunking the IPCC predictions. In addition, the UN and the much of the media shamefully ignored a letter debunking climate fears signed by over 100 prominent scientists (including renowned scientists like Dr. Reid Bryson, “the father of meteorology� and Dr. Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists (more on the letter is here). This follows UN leaders saying it was “immoral� to question predictions of climate doom. The media’s failure to cover many significant issues at the conference underscores the need for news outlets like the Inhofe EPW Press Blog.
3) If the UN were serious about reducing worldwide emissions, it would incorporate the developing worlds’ emissions into its plans. As Senator James Inhofe (Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee has consistently said, technology promotion and sharing are the only real way to achieve meaningful reductions in the future, not a failed Kyoto 2 approach.
4) Once again, the UN conference revealed that politics and the preservation of its bureaucracy are more important than “solving� the so-called “climate crisis.� The idea of a global carbon tax was urged at the conference as well as calls for massive “redistribution� of wealth.
5) After spending a whole week in Bali, I can say one thing with absolute certainty: If we were facing a man-made climate catastrophe and the United Nations were our only hope to solve it, we would all be doomed.

I nearly didn’t go to Bali. The UN, which had not wanted any dissent at this carefully-staged event, rejected my journalistic credentials out of hand, and without explanation. However, a non-government organization came to the rescue and the high priests didn’t dare to say No a second time. That would have looked too obvious. I proved my journo-cred by writing a major article in the Jakarta Post on day 1 of the conference, cheekily claiming my share of the Nobel Prize because the IPCC had made a correction to its latest Holy Book at my suggestion, and concluding that, since our influence on the climate is a non-problem, and the correct approach to a non-problem is to do nothing, my fellow-participants should have the courage to do nothing and push off home.

The Post circulated the article to all delegates and syndicated it worldwide, provoking weeping and gnashing of dentures among the zombies at my challenge to the scientific accuracy of the Holy Books of the IPCC. I don’t think the UN will dare to question my journalistic credentials again. The UN’s sinister bureaucrats were furious that their attempt to stop me writing in the newspapers from the conference had failed. So they interrupted a presentation by me to delegates, threatened to have me thrown out by Security if I addressed any meeting open to the Press in the conference venues, and cancelled without reason a room they had previously booked for our team’s daily conferences.

Bryan Leyland, the leader of our delegation and an engineer far too highly-qualified to be an IPCC reviewer, asked the IPCC lead author how many more years of temperatures failing to rise as predicted would convince him to give up the pretence that the IPCC’s predictions have any connection with reality. Answer came there none. Read full diary account here.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) new Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of its Synthesis Report (SR) should be taken with several chunks of salt. The summary itself is a political document that downplays assessments of uncertainty from the scientific reports written by the main body of the IPCC, which themselves are far more subjective than the IPCC would have one believe. Equally important, both the IPCC’s summaries and main reports omit much contrary evidence. In several cases, the SR disagrees with the reports on which it is based, and it fails to take account of cautionary publications in the scientific literature that were available early enough to have been incorporated into the SR. Climate change and climate policy are key issues for future human welfare, but that concern should translate into sober analysis and actions that are likely to do more good than harm. The people of the world should not let themselves be steamrolled by a report that reflects the IPCC’s interest in promoting climate change fears, rather than in conveying the weight of the scientific evidence.

In other words, the SPMs contain what the IPCC’s political leadership wishes to emphasize about climate change, and this political leadership has never been shy about affirming that its ostensibly dispassionate scientific reviews are intended to serve the political goal of stimulating the world’s governments to impose deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Commenting on the then-upcoming release of the WG I SPM, IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said, “I hope that [the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment] will shock the governments so much that they take action."According to Der Spiegel, “When Renate Christ, the secretary of the IPCC, is asked about her opinion of reporting on climate change, she refers to articles that mention ‘climate catastrophe’ and calls them ‘rather refreshing.’” Read the full report here.