Cape Town - Winter has struck with a vengeance in the Western Cape with some towns recording their first snow falls in almost 20 years.
The World Cup is being played under unseasonable even record cold conditions. Joannesburg’s 21F broke the record of 32F set in 2002. 20F on the 17th broke the record of 33F set in 1997. It was where the Brazil-Korea match was held (Brazil won). Temperatures at other cup sites included Bloemfontein (19F), Pretoria (32F), Capetown (46F cold rain). Elsewhere, Frankfort was 13F (14F on the 17th), Noupoort was 15F.
Several mountain passes in the Southern Cape and the Eastern Cape had to be closed after heavy snowfalls. Tourists expecting sunny skies in Cape Town were greeted by snow on Table Mountain, where the temperature never rose above 1C. It was the heaviest snowfall on the mountain since 2003.
Lucy Dixon, who works on a cattle and horse farm, said she had never seen so much snow in the area. “Every mountain was covered, even the famous Spandau Kop. I heard some farmers say it has never snowed like this since 1977. We have had up to six inches of snowfall.”
Enlarged here. See another image of media coverage here.
“If I hear ‘south’ I think ‘warm’,” said Michail Podlatsjof from Russia. “All I brought with me are shorts and T-shirts.”
Mountains elsewhere in the Western Cape and high lying areas were covered in snow. A forecaster at the SA Weather Service, Lynette van Schalkwyk, said in Cape Town it would remain cold in the Western Cape on Wednesday, but no more snow was expected. She said berg winds were expected to set in on Thursday. The higher temperatures made it impossible to forecast if there will still be snow at the weekend for sightseers.
Very cold
In Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and North West people might also wake up to “snow” on Wednesday. But forget about building a snowman. It’s not snow but the so-called black frost causing the blanket of white.
Temperatures will begin improving slightly on Thursday.
In KwaZulu-Natal, people were reminded on Tuesday that winter had well and truly settled in. Light to medium snowfalls were experienced in some regions with very cold temperatures around the province. Snow fell consistently on Tuesday morning in Kokstad, with light snow on Sani Pass, Nottingham Road and Matatiele.
Freezing temperatures and snow were experienced at Sani Top Chalet on Tuesday said manager Roger Aldous. “We have had mean temperatures. We are attached to an outdoor weather station and it says it’s -8C and with the wind chill it says -17C,” Aldous said on Tuesday afternoon.
Cold kills over 500 penguins in S.Africa
AFP
JOHANNESBURG - Cold winter weather in South Africa’s Eastern Cape region has killed nearly 500 African penguins in the last 24 hours, the national parks agency said Tuesday. “The chicks, aged between a few weeks old and about two months old and covered only with down feathers, succumbed to the cold and wet weather which has hit Bird Island,” national parks spokeswoman Megan Taplin told Sapa news agency.
According to the parks agency, the penguin population is already dwindling with only 700 breeding pairs left in the area.
ICECAP NOTE: Meanwhile NOAA using NCDC’s seriously contaminated global GHCN data base, proclaimed May to be the warmest May on record. In a few months, we will be showing why and how the three global data centers have created a thermometer hockey stick by eliminating or ignoring bad siting, urbanization and land use changes and other issues. They have also manipulated the ocean data (oceans cover 71% of th globe’s surface). See an early analysis - a work in progress - here. Some relative warmth was expected with El Nino but it is now gone and a cooling will begin with some lag and will accelerate with the developing La Nina. H/T Alexandre at the METSUL.
By Marlo Lewis, CEI
Senior Fellow, Competitive Enterprise Institute
Sen. Lisa Murkowski scored a political victory last week even though she fell short by four votes of achieving a legislative victory.
Despite vicious smear campaigns by the likes of MoveOn.Org, Climate Progress, and Environmental Defense Action Fund, despite a White House veto threat, and despite me-too criticism from Nixon and Ford alum Russell Train and the subsidy-seeking Auto Alliance, all 41 Republican Senators and six Democrats voted for Sen. Murkowski’s resolution to stop EPA from ‘enacting’ controversial global warming policies through the regulatory back door.
Thanks to Sen. Murkowski’s courageous leadership, the Democratic Party is now the Party of Endangerment - that party taking ownership of all the regulatory consequences of EPA’s endangerment rule; hence the party responsible for endangering America’s economic future.
Obama officials and their congressional allies talk as if the endangerment rule were a legislative hammer enabling them to bully opponents into supporting cap-and-trade as the price of averting an economically-chilling era of litigation-driven greenhouse gas regulation under the Clean Air Act.
That is doubtful. A legislative extortion strategy works only if Republicans and moderate Democrats are too dumb to appreciate the political victory they and Sen. Murkowski just achieved.
The Party of Endangerment miscalculates, because pro-growth lawmakers are not stuck between a rock and a hard place. They have a third option: Just say no to cap-and-tax, let President Obama and his congressional allies take ownership of the regulatory cascade and economic fallout emanating from the endangerment rule, and then exploit the political backlash.
University of Colorado climatologist Roger Pielke, Jr. put the point very well more than a year ago: “Far from being an incentive for Congress to act on its own, the looming possibility that EPA will take regulatory action is a strong incentive for Republicans to stalemate Congressional action and a nightmare scenario for Democrats.”
Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute came to the same conclusion. Threatening to sic EPA on the economy is tantamount to promising to commit political suicide. Team Obama, he says, might as well tell Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats, “Don’t make me raise energy prices! You’ll really be in trouble with your voters when I raise their energy prices!”
By denying President Obama bipartisan cover for greenhouse gas regulation via the Clean Air Act, last week’s Senate vote turned the endangerment rule into a political liability for Democrats in an election year. The pressure has just gone up on moderate Democrats and Republicans alike to avoid sharing the blame for virtual energy taxes that increase gasoline prices and destroy jobs. Hence, the prospects for cap-and-trade are now dimmer than ever.
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EPA Vote: Momentum Builder?
By Amy Harder, National Journal
Will the Senate’s refusal to strip the EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases encourage efforts to pass climate and energy legislation?
Last week, the Senate defeated a resolution by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, to overturn EPA climate regulations. The result, which fell four votes short of passage, set off a barrage of statements from senators and interest groups saying the vote is—or is not—symbolic of how lawmakers would vote on comprehensive energy and climate legislation.
Does the vote build momentum for broader climate and energy policy? Should the Senate rally around the energy-only bill introduced last week by Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., which has the support of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Murkowski? Does the EPA vote add impetus to the broader package introduced by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Joe Lieberman, I/D-Conn.?
Guest post by Richard Tol on Roger Pielke Jr. Blog
Much has been said about the procedures of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But at the end of the day, everything comes down to people. The average IPCC author is smart enough to violate the spirit of any rule while complying with its every letter. The right group of people would produce a sound and honest report even if there were no rules at all.
That is why my submission to the review panel of the Inter Academy Council focuses on the selection of lead authors. The panel will announce its findings at the end of summer - and the IPCC will announce the authors for the Fifth Assessment Report next week.
This is very unfortunate. I think that the IPCC should suspend the AR5 process, fix the procedures for nominating and selecting authors, and postpone the report to 2015. I’d rather bet on New Zealand winning the world cup.
That said, the leaders of Working Group 2 are making an effort. I have been critical of the IPCC. I think that climate change is real, really caused by humans, and a problem that should be solved - but I also think that there are bigger, more urgent environmental problems (let alone other problems) and that the policies put forward by our dear leaders are ineffective, misdirected and needlessly expensive. Nonetheless, WG2 has put me forward as a convening lead author of one of the chapters in AR5.
I tentatively accepted, knowing that this would be a lot of difficult work under immense scrutiny.
Guess what? Although the Irish government nominated me, it will not financially support my participation - not even travel costs - because of...substantive differences over environmental policy.
Political interference in the IPCC continues.
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France and Japan propose an ‘IPCC for nature’
Delegates from 97 countries meet in South Korea to hear plans for an international body to monitor destruction of flora and fauna
• ‘Human wellbeing is utterly dependent on the natural world’
• Biodiversity crisis - species loss could cost us the Earth
World governments are meeting this week to try to set up a new international body that would put the global destruction of the natural world on an equal footing with the threat of climate change.
The proposed new organisation would be modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), which was set up 22 years ago.
Since then, it has launched global warming and climate change to the top of the political and economic agenda.
The meeting, at Busan in South Korea, follows growing evidence in the last few years about the huge rate of destruction of species and the ecosystem services they provide for humans - from regulating local weather and fertilising soil to providing a rich gene pool for medical researchers.
Another major report this summer, commissioned by the United Nations, is expected to say that the economic benefits of policies to protect and restore biodiversity are worth 10 to 100 times the costs
“If the true value of ecosystem services - economic, social and spiritual - were factored into decision-making, wetlands, forests and reefs would be viewed and treated very differently,” said French ecology secretary, Chantal Jouanno, and campaigner Janet Ranganathan in an article for the Guardian.
“How to ensure cross-governmental participation and buy-in is therefore the key question for countries gathering at Busan.
“The future health of the natural world, and humanity’s wellbeing, may depend on it.”
The proposed “IPCC for nature” could provide regular, independent reports on the state of global and regional biodiversity - reflecting the IPCC’s five-yearly assessments of the state of climate science, forecasts for impacts and advice about how to tackle the problem.
Perhaps more important would be the symbolic significance of an organisation which sent out a message that governments and global organisations were finally taking the biodiversity crisis as seriously as they have climate change, say supporters.
“Climate change may have captured public attention, but the global collapse of ecosystems and loss of biodiversity is equally threatening to human wellbeing,” said Ranganathan, a vice-president of the World Resources Institute.
“The IPCC helped give climate change a global profile. The time has come for an IPCC for nature.”
The creation of the body, provisionally named the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), was first formally proposed last year.
This week delegates from 97 governments and 50 organisations are meeting for what could be the official go-ahead for the new body.
The Busan effort has been championed by the Japanese and French governments and supported by others including the UK, which is helping fund the event.
The IPBES website reported there was “overall support” for the proposed new body.
But crucial decisions need to be made, including how independent it would be of other international bodies and whether its remit would include primary research.
A more likely scenario is that it would focus on co-ordinating research and filling in “knowledge gaps”, developing tools for policymakers and skills training in developing countries.
Other details, such as which countries would be members, where it would be based and how it would be funded also need to be ironed out.
“I would say the tone of the conversation is supportive, but there’s a lot of work to be done to agree on extremely important issues,” said Professor Bob Watson, chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and vice chair of IPBES. “I’d hope by Friday we’d come to agreement.”
Responding to likely concerns that the IPCC model has been discredited - at least with the public - by stories about mistakes in its last assessment report and allegations that scientists at one of the leading research centres, the University of East Anglia, had withheld data improperly, Watson added: “We are looking at what should be similar or dissimilar to the IPCC.”
As well as giving regular reports, the IPBES could co-ordinate international and regional research, advise policymakers on how to protect and restore habitats and help to build the “capacity” to do research.
The proposed new body might also encourage more research into links between biodiversity and climate change.
IPBES initiatives could possibly also chime with the proposed “barometer of life” which would monitor 160,000 of the world’s 2 million known species to track the changing fortunes of the natural world. See post here.
By William LaJeunesse
The seven experts who advised President Obama on how to deal with offshore drilling safety after the Deepwater Horizon explosion are accusing his administration of misrepresenting their views to make it appear that they supported a six-month drilling moratorium—something they actually oppose.
The experts, recommended by the National Academy of Engineering, say Interior Secretary Ken Salazar modified their report last month, after they signed it, to include two paragraphs calling for the moratorium on existing drilling and new permits.
Salazar’s report to Obama said a panel of seven experts “peer reviewed” his recommendations, which included a six-month moratorium on permits for new wells being drilled using floating rigs and an immediate halt to drilling operations.
“None of us actually reviewed the memorandum as it is in the report,” oil expert Ken Arnold told Fox News. “What was in the report at the time it was reviewed was quite a bit different in its impact to what there is now. So we wanted to distance ourselves from that recommendation.”
Salazar apologized to those experts Thursday.
“The experts who are involved in crafting the report gave us their recommendation and their input and I very much appreciate those recommendations,” he said. “It was not their decision on the moratorium. It was my decision and the president’s decision to move forward.”
In a letter the experts sent to Salazar, they said his primary recommendation “misrepresents” their position and that halting the drilling is actually a bad idea.
The oil rig explosion occurred while the well was being shut down – a move that is much more dangerous than continuing ongoing drilling, they said.
They also said that because the floating rigs are scarce and in high demand worldwide, they will not simply sit in the Gulf idle for six months. The rigs will go to the North Sea and West Africa, possibly preventing the U.S. from being able to resume drilling for years.
They also said the best and most advanced rigs will be the first to go, leaving the U.S. with the older and potentially less safe rights operating in the nation’s coastal waters.
By Greg Pollowitz, NRO
Jon Krosnick, a professor of communication, political science and psychology at Stanford, has an op-ed in the New York Times touting his own poll on global warming and suggests that his poll accurately reflects the views of Americans, while other polls that show dwindling support for global warming are either being read wrong, or being spun. An excerpt:
“But a closer look at these polls and a new survey by my Political Psychology Research Group show just the opposite: huge majorities of Americans still believe the earth has been gradually warming as the result of human activity and want the government to institute regulations to stop it.
In our survey, which was financed by a grant to Stanford from the National Science Foundation, 1,000 randomly selected American adults were interviewed by phone between June 1 and Monday. When respondents were asked if they thought that the earth’s temperature probably had been heating up over the last 100 years, 74 percent answered affirmatively. And 75 percent of respondents said that human behavior was substantially responsible for any warming that has occurred.
For many issues, any such consensus about the existence of a problem quickly falls apart when the conversation turns to carrying out specific solutions that will be costly. But not so here.
Fully 86 percent of our respondents said they wanted the federal government to limit the amount of air pollution that businesses emit, and 76 percent favored government limiting business’s emissions of greenhouse gases in particular. Not a majority of 55 or 60 percent - but 76 percent.
Large majorities opposed taxes on electricity (78 percent) and gasoline (72 percent) to reduce consumption. But 84 percent favored the federal government offering tax breaks to encourage utilities to make more electricity from water, wind and solar power.
And huge majorities favored government requiring, or offering tax breaks to encourage, each of the following: manufacturing cars that use less gasoline (81 percent); manufacturing appliances that use less electricity (80 percent); and building homes and office buildings that require less energy to heat and cool (80 percent).
Thus, there is plenty of agreement about what people do and do not want government to do.
Our poll also indicated that some of the principal arguments against remedial efforts have been failing to take hold. Only 18 percent of respondents said they thought that policies to reduce global warming would increase unemployment and only 20 percent said they thought such initiatives would hurt the nation’s economy. Furthermore, just 14 percent said the United States should not take action to combat global warming unless other major industrial countries like China and India do so as well.
Our findings might seem implausible in light of recent polls that purport to show that Americans are increasingly skeptical about the very existence of climate change. But in fact, those polls did not produce conflicting evidence at all.”
What’s missing from the op-ed, however, is an actual link to his poll or his methodology. Everyone knows that the way you ask questions can influence their outcome; so if you’re going to write an op-ed about the poll, why hide the questions? And why would the New York Times run the op-ed without such a link? Read post here.
ICECAP NOTE: The survey was sponsored by Stanford with a grant from the National Science Foundation, both with a huge vested interest in propagating the myth and timed for the actions in DC on EPA regulations and government energy/emission tax bills. The survey is thus untrustworthy.
By Freedom Action
Dear Fellow Patriot,
I am writing to ask you to take two minutes to e-mail your Senators and help stop the biggest threat to America’s freedom and prosperity that President Obama has attempted so far.
That’s right - a bigger threat than the bailouts, the “stimulus” bill, and the trillion dollar deficits. Even a bigger threat than ObamaCare. We must not let it happen again. President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has taken the first steps to control our entire economy in the name of saving the planet from global warming. The EPA has declared carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are pollutants that endanger public health and welfare and is rushing through Clean Air Act regulations to tell us how much and what kind of energy we can use.
The EPA has already decided that the American people are going to have to use a lot less energy in the near future. How much will we have to pay for that energy? A lot more. Higher electric rates, higher gasoline prices, higher heating bills, higher airline fares, higher food prices, and higher prices for nearly every product we buy.
President Obama himself said that under his plan, electricity prices will “necessarily skyrocket.” A recent study by Harvard University’s Belfer Center predicts that to achieve Obama’s goals will require gasoline prices of $7 to $9 a gallon.
Yet, there is hope from an unlikely source that Obama can be stopped - the U. S. Senate. On June 10, the Senate will vote on a Resolution offered by Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) to deny the EPA the authority to regulate our energy use. The vote looks like it will be very close. You can make the difference by e-mailing both your Senators today to tell them to vote Yes on the Murkowski Resolution of Disapproval of the EPA’s Endangerment Finding. You can do this by using Freedom Action’s automated form.
Forty-one Senators, including three Democrats, are sponsoring the Murkowski Resolution, which is officially titled Senate Joint Resolution 26 (or S. J. Res. 26). We must put pressure on the Senate to reach the 51 votes needed to pass the resolution on June 10. It’s critical that Senators hear from their constituents immediately.
The left has geared up to defeat the Murkowski Resolution. Environmental pressure groups and big government groups are throwing millions of dollars into radio and television advertising. They are running some of the most dishonest political ads I’ve ever seen in key States like Arkansas, Louisiana, and Nebraska.
That’s why it is absolutely essential that you make your voice heard in Washington. Please take two minutes to fill in your name and address and click Send on Freedom Action’s web site. Your e-mail will be sent to the offices of both your U. S. Senators.
Why is President Obama and the EPA doing this? They say: It’s to stop global warming. What global warming!? The scientist at the center of the ClimateGate scandal admitted recently there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995. In fact, since 2002, global temperatures have gone down slightly.
Do you see a pattern here? Make wild claims about global warming and looming catastrophes. Manipulate the data, ignore the facts, and shut up anyone who tries to speak the truth. Then regulate the economy on the basis of phony science and scare stories. It’s all straight out of Al Gore’s playbook.
The fact is that America and the world get over 80% of the energy we use from the three fossil fuels - coal, oil, and natural gas. Coal provides 50% of our electricity. Oil provides over 90% of our vehicle fuels. Yes, burning these three fuels produces carbon dioxide, a naturally-occurring trace gas necessary for life on Earth. Without carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, plants could not photosynthesize solar energy. And without greenhouse gases, Earth would be too cold to support life.
Affordable energy is the basis of the American standard of living. What will happen if Obama’s EPA forces us to reduce drastically the use of fossil fuels? First, a regulatory nightmare. Followed by an economic train wreck that will make us poorer.
Here’s what Mississippi’s Republican Governor, Haley Barbour, said in support of the Murkowski Resolution: “Reducing greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act will undoubtedly increase the cost of energy, increase the cost of doing business, increase the cost of consumer products, and jeopardize millions of jobs by putting U.S. manufacturers at a disadvantage against foreign competitors.”
That’s why the Senate vote on June 10 on S. J. Res. 26 is so critical to America’s future. And we can win this vote. A number of Democratic Senators who voted for ObamaCare are getting nervous about voting against the wishes of their voters again so soon with elections approaching in November. As President Reagan said, “When you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat.” By contacting your Senators today, you and hundreds of thousands of other American patriots will be turning up the heat.
Tell Your Senators to Vote Yes on June 10 here.
If the global warming scare is based on phony science, why is President Obama so determined to regulate greenhouse gas emissions? It’s all about big government control over our lives and the economy. Thomas Friedman, the loony liberal columnist for the New York Times, let the cat out of the bag when he said that he fantasizes that we should be like China and “authorize the right solutions ... on everything from the economy to the environment.” Just forget about democracy, constitutional rights, limited government and stuff like that, and authorize the right solutions! Well, President Obama is working to do just that.
Cap-and-trade (better known as cap-and-tax) legislation was the first attempt to put government in charge of how much energy we can use. The House passed the Waxman-Markey cap-and-tax bill on June 26, 2009 by a 219-212 vote.
Many big corporations, such as Goldman Sachs, General Electric, Duke Energy, General Motors, and Dow Chemical, support cap-and-tax because they would be rewarded with hundreds of billions of dollars of windfall profits from special deals in the legislation.
But the American people figured out that cap-and-tax meant much higher energy prices for them and said “No!” That’s why the Kerry-Lieberman cap-and-tax bill is dead in the Senate. And that’s why President Obama is resorting to backdoor EPA regulations to raise energy prices through the roof.
What is most outrageous is that they think they can mount this sneak attack on American consumers without Congressional approval. Senate passage of the Murkowski Resolution to block the EPA regulations will send a strong message to the White House to back off and put immediate pressure on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) to hold a vote on the Resolution in the House. Already, 170 House Members have co-sponsored an identical House version of Senator Murkowski’s Resolution. This list includes two Democratic committee chairman and a number of other senior Democrats.
As I said, it looks to be a very close vote on June 10. That’s why I urge you to e-mail your Senators today and tell them to vote Yes on the Murkowski Resolution of Disapproval. It’s the most important action you can take right now to stop Obama’s big government takeover.
Here’s some background on us - Freedom Action: Freedom Action is a web-based grassroots activist group dedicated to more freedom and less government. Our motto is what Margaret Thatcher said about President Reagan, “He put freedom on the offensive.”
Senator James M. Inhofe (Republican-Oklahoma) is the Ranking Member and former Chairman of the Environment and Public Works and was named the most conservative Senator by National Journal. This is what Senator Inhofe said about us: “I have been leading the fight against the global warming hoax in the Senate for a decade. Myron Ebell and his team have always been there fighting beside me. Freedom Action is an invaluable ally.”
America did not become great because big government told us what to do and will not remain great if we continue down the path laid out by President Obama. We have a difficult struggle to block President Obama on this and on many other issues to come.
But a clear sign that the tide has turned in our direction is the fact that the most important global warming vote in the Senate this year is not on whether to pass the Kerry-Lieberman cap-and-tax bill, but on whether to stop EPA from regulating America into energy poverty.
We can stop Obama’s EPA power grab by working together to make Congress feel the heat. I invite you to join us at Freedom Action in going on the offense for freedom.
Click here to send a message to your Senators now. Remember, the vote is on Thursday, June 10th.
Thanks for all you do to keep America strong!
Yours for freedom,
Myron Ebell
By Nissa Darbonne, Editor-at-Large, Oil and Gas Investor
Americans - well, the world - loves cheap energy. Remind them of that, says Fox Business newsman and news-maker John Stossel.
Stossel addressed energy and other business leaders today on “Prosperity and Its Enemies” at the second annual Institute for Energy Research (IER) lunch forum in Houston on how prosperity in the U.S. is under attack, and at the greatest risk to those who are struggling the most to prosper.
His address is timely, considering newer government intervention in business - this time in offshore oil and gas drilling. One of the some 300 luncheon attendees asked how energy producers and other pro-business leaders can explain the importance of U.S. energy production.
Stossel says that explaining that more Louisiana Gulf Coast residents are employed by the energy industry than the fishing industry will fall upon unpiqued ears. Instead, he says, emphasize that U.S. energy production contributes to Americans’ access to cheap energy. Oil is produced from thousands of feet below Earth’s surface, and at times under thousands of feet of water too; brought to the surface and put into thousands of miles of pipe or into ships; refined into gasoline; transported to fueling stations in trucks; and the price is less than $3 a gallon, with some 70 cents of that going to the government.
“It still costs less than the bottle of water they sell at the gas station,” Stossel notes.
Government interference in free markets is costly, inefficient and counter-productive. Americans yell for more government regulation, yet don’t recognize the affordable quality of life created by free markets, he says. Why?
“Maybe we take these miracles for granted.” After purchasing goods for a month with a plastic card, a statement arrives that accounts for each purchase, to the penny, he notes. Yet, “the government can’t even count votes.”
In interviewing domestic-energy advocate T. Boone Pickens on Fox News, Stossel broke a window to demonstrate how the unenlightened may think jobs are created (via destruction vs. production), such as the fallacy of thinking wind - and solar-power generation create more jobs than they destroy. It’s “the broken-window fallacy” noted by 19th century French economist Frederic Bastiat.
Educating voters that “wealthier is healthier,” Stossel says, and how the greatest wealth is created from free markets is “an endless fight. We have to keep fighting it.”
The free market is alive and well in Houston area where a neighbor just (1) changed electricity providers under Texas deregulation that allows the consumer to choose provider and price and (2) chose the 8.5-cent-per-kWh provider with 3% renewable content over the 9.5-cent-per-kWh provider with 100% renewable content.
Green is good, but reason always wins- well, in the free marketplace; maybe not in Washington.
Notes: The Institute for Energy Research (IER) is devoted to educating and informing policy-makers, media and American public on the benefits of a free-market approach to energy policy. It can be found here.
Stossel can be reached here. See the “broken window” video here.
Karin Kapsidelis Media General News Service
The ideological battle over global warming that heated up with last fall’s “Climategate” e-mail controversy has spilled over to the grounds of the University of Virginia. At the center of the latest skirmish are two former U.Va. professors who represent opposing views on the dangers of climate change.
U.Va. has before it separate demands for information - a civil subpoena from the state attorney general and a Freedom of Information request from Greenpeace. Both resulted from the leak in November of more than a thousand e-mail messages hacked from the climate research unit of the University of East Anglia in England. U.Va. last month filed a petition in Albemarle County Circuit Court seeking to block Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s civil investigative demands, or CIDs, for climate research by former U.Va. professor Michael Mann.
The university has sought an extension to the FOI request that Greenpeace filed in December for information on former state climatologist Patrick J. Michaels and another retired professor, both of whom are outspoken skeptics of global warming, as is Cuccinelli. “We have not received one document from U.Va., but we haven’t dropped it,” said Kert Davies, research director for Greenpeace US.
U.Va. has come under criticism by conservative groups alleging it is complying with Greenpeace’s freedom of information request while fighting the attorney general’s civil investigative demands.
But there are major differences in the scope of two requests. Exemptions under the state Freedom of Information Act protect certain documents that are being sought by the CIDs, said U.Va. spokeswoman Carol Wood. FOI requests also cover only records and do not allow for the fact-finding “interrogatories” sought under the CIDs, she said. While a CID is not subject to the limitations of the FOI law, there are limitations on the use of the acquired information, said Cuccinelli spokesman Brian Gottstein.
He said it offers the subject protections that the FOI law does not. Greenpeace’s FOI request covers both Michaels and retired environmental science professor S. Fred Singer, who have accused climate researchers of overstating their case. Davies said Greenpeace’s FOI request was the direct result of media appearances by Michaels and Singer about the Climategate e-mails, which included correspondence by Mann, a prominent climate researcher now at Pennsylvania State University. Greenpeace is seeking transparency about who is financing attempts to undermine research supporting global warming, Davies said.
Michaels and Singer are a “vigorous part of the echo chamber” that is “exaggerating the importance of these stolen e-mails,” he said.
Greenpeace is seeking a list of grants that financed research by Michaels and Singer, and their conflict-of-interest statements and disclosure forms on outside income. It also seeks their correspondence with industries such as ExxonMobil and conservative advocacy organizations, as well a correspondence that mentions topics related to climate change.
Singer has publicly criticized academia for its outcry over Cuccinelli’s action but not over the Greenpeace FOI. But until yesterday, he was not aware that Greenpeace also was seeking information on him. Told that his name appeared on the FOI request, Singer questioned Greenpeace’s standing to seek the information but said he had no objection to U.Va. complying with the request. “I have nothing to hide,” he said.
Michaels would not comment on the Greenpeace request. “I’m not a legal expert on that,” said Michaels, now senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute. Michaels, the state climatologist for 27 years, resigned in 2007 amid criticism that the utilities industry was financing his private research.
Mann also would not comment on the Greenpeace FOI and whether he saw a distinction with his own case. He said by e-mail that he is unfamiliar with the details of the Greenpeace request, “and frankly I’m entirely focused on the attacks against me.”
He called Cuccinelli’s investigation “an abuse of power” and praised U.Va. for standing up for Thomas Jefferson’s principles “in the face of politically motivated, anti-scientific attacks.”
Mann noted that Jefferson was one of the world’s first climate scientists. While at U.Va., Mann said, he and his students used Jefferson’s observations for an article about weather conditions in Virginia in the late 18th century. “Jefferson, no doubt, would be particularly horrified to see the very sort of science that he held so dear subject to attacks by politically driven ideologues who find the conclusions of scientific research to be inconvenient to the vested interests they represent,” he said. An e-mail message by Mann referring to a statistical “trick” was much publicized during Climategate, but a Penn State inquiry found no wrongdoing on his part. “The so-called ‘trick’ was nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion,” the inquiry report said. Mann was cleared of three of four allegations made against him. A fourth inquiry now under way is looking at whether he deviated from accepted practices in his research.
Davies said global warming skeptics are using tactics such as Cuccinelli’s CID and “paralyzing FOIs” filed with universities to thwart climate research. By seeking raw scientific data that can only be fulfilled by the researcher, the requests have the effect of stopping the academician from working, he said.
Cuccinelli’s CID was filed as a result of information that surfaced in the Climategate e-mails, his spokesman has said. The attorney general is investigating whether Mann violated the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act by presenting false or misleading data related to climate change when seeking research grants. Read full post here.
Karin Kapsidelis writes for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.