I doubt any shire in Australia has tried as hard as Mornington Peninsula’s to terrify ratepayers about global warming.  The shire has even sent all residents a booklet, Climate change: What we are doing about it, that warns that many of them could die from global warming over the next few decades.

Average annual temperature will rise by up to 3.5 degrees by 2070, placing greater stress on elderly residents and those living in older homes with inadequate insulation. The increased incidence of exteme heat days and heat waves, in conjuction with a growing and ageing population in the peninsula, has the potential to contribute to significant mortality in future decades. Potential impacts: Ability to affect entire population, especially elderly and infants; 27,000 elderly, 8000 infants and young people; Increased mortality and morbidity in vulnerable groups.

You don’t often come across scaremongering so brazen - or so wildly and irresponsibily exaggerated. Let me try to reassure the poor residents. Let’s note, for a start, that that global temperatures haven’t actually risen over the past decade. Let’s note also that by 2070, we’ll be so much richer that we can afford at the very minimum air-conditioners for everyone to save them from this allegedly apocalyptic heat.

But there is one more thing to consider. I had to go to hospital on Thursday and found the waiting time for treatment had blown out to hours. Reason? Winters, not summers, and cold, rather than heat, is what makes us sickest and most fills our hospitals. And we should fear global cooling far more than global warming. Some data? We are more likely to die in winter of temperature-related diseases: (Bi, P., Parton, K.A., Wang, J. and Donald, K. 2008. Temperature and direct effects on population health in Brisbane, 1986-1995. Journal of Environmental Health(, Bi et al. report that “death rates were around 50-80 per 100,000 in June, July, and August [winter], while they were around 30-50 per 100,000 in the rest of the year, including the summer,” .  (T)he researchers further note that “it is understandable that more deaths would occur in winters in cold or temperate regions, but even in a subtropical region, as indicated in this study, a decrease in temperatures (in winters) may increase human mortality.”

A recent New Zealand study confirms it’s chilly days, not warm ones, that are deadliest to the old and very young: “From 1980-2000 around 1600 excess winter deaths occurred each year with winter mortality rates 18% higher than expected from non-winter rates. Patterns of EWM by age group showed the young and the elderly to be particularly vulnerable.” Read more evidence that we have more to fear from a continued cooling than the hypothisized warming here.

Borenstein claim: In northern Greenland, a part of the Arctic that had seemed immune from global warming, new satellite images show a growing giant crack and an 11-square-mile chunk of ice hemorrhaging off a major glacier, scientists said Thursday. And that’s led the university professor who spotted the wounds in the massive Petermann glacier to predict disintegration of a major portion of the Northern Hemisphere’s largest floating glacier within the year. If it does worsen and other northern Greenland glaciers melt faster, then it could speed up sea level rise, already increasing because of melt in sourthern Greenland. The crack is 7 miles long and about half a mile wide. It is about half the width of the 500 square mile floating part of the glacier. Other smaller fractures can be seen in images of the ice tongue, a long narrow sliver of the glacier.

But Borentein does reveal the truth in his article: Excerpt: University of Colorado professor Konrad Steffen, who returned from Greenland Wednesday and has studied the Petermann glacier in the past, said that what Box saw is not too different from what he saw in the 1990s: “The crack is not alarming. I would say it is normal.”

But, Borenstein, cannot let Steffen’s comment that the ice crack is “normal” go unchallenged so he pulls the old “consistent with” game. “Scientists don’t like to attribute single events to global warming, but often say such events fit a pattern.”

Note from Marc Morano: AP’s Seth Borenstein has yet another one of his attempts to promote climate hysteria. To read more about Borenstein’s woeful reporting see: AP Incorrectly Claims Scientists Praise Gore’s Movie, Scientists Counter Computer Model Sea Level Rise Fears, Media Hype on ‘Melting’ Antarctic Ignores Record Ice Growth . Also see real story on Greenland here: Latest Scientific Studies Refute Fears of Greenland Melt from July 2007. 

Icecap Note: See how Borenstein and others continue to ignore the real data like the cooling for the last 7 years and the increase in ice last winter near Greenland and the levelling off and decline of sea level.

See larger image here

It’s amazing how ideas with no merit become popular merely because they sound good. Most every politician and pundit says “energy independence” is a great idea. Presidents have promised it for 35 years. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were self-sufficient, protected from high prices, supply disruptions and political machinations?

The hitch is that even if the United States were energy independent, it would be protected from none of those things. To think otherwise is to misunderstand basic economics and the global marketplace. To be for “energy independence” is to be against trade. But trade makes us as safe. Crop destruction from this summer’s floods in the Midwest should remind us of the folly of depending only on ourselves. Achieving “energy independence” would expose us to unnecessary risks - such as storms that knock out oil refineries or droughts that create corn - and ethanol - shortages.

Trade also saves us money. “We import energy for a reason,” says the Cato Institute’s energy expert, Jerry Taylor, “It’s cheaper than producing it here at home. A governmental war on energy imports will, by definition, raise energy prices.” Anyway, a “domestic energy only” policy (call it “Drain America First”?) is a fantasy. America’s demand for oil is too great for us to supply ourselves. Electricity we could provide. Not with windmills and solar panels - they are not yet close to providing enough - but coal and nuclear power could produce America’s electricity.

But cars need oil. We don’t have nearly enough. That doesn’t keep the presidential candidates from preying on the public’s economic ignorance. “I have set before the American people an energy plan, the Lexington Project - named for the town where Americans asserted their independence once before,” John McCain said. “This nation will achieve strategic independence by 2025.”

Barack Obama, promising to set America on a “path to energy independence,” is upset that we send millions to other countries. “They get our money because we need their oil."His concern that “they get our money” is echoed in commercials funded by Republican businessman T. Boone Pickens, who wants government subsidies for alternative energy. He tries to scare us by saying, “$700 billion are leaving this country to foreign nations every year - the largest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind.”

Don’t Obama and Pickens realize that we get something useful for that money? It’s not a “transfer”; it’s a win-win transaction, like all voluntary trade. Who cares if the sellers live in a foreign country? When two parties trade, each is better off - or the exchange would never have been made. We want the oil more than the money. They want the money more than the oil. They need us as much as we need them. And Obama is wrong when he implies that America imports most of its oil from the Mideast. Most of it comes from Canada and Mexico.

McCain and Obama talk constantly about how much they will “invest” - with money taken from the taxpayers, of course - to achieve energy independence. “[W]e can provide loan guarantees and venture capital to those with the best plans to develop and sell biofuels on a commercial market,” Obama said. What makes Obama think he’s qualified to pick the “best plans”? It’s the robust competition of the free market that reveals what’s best. Obama’s program would preempt the only good method we have for learning which form of energy is best. Has he learned nothing from the conceits of his predecessors? Jimmy Carter, saying that achieving energy independence was the “moral equivalent of war,” called for “the most massive peacetime commitment of funds to develop America’s own alternative.” Then he wasted billions of our tax dollars on the utterly failed “synfuel” program.

John Stossel is co-anchor of ABC News’ “20/20” and the author of ‘Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity,” which is now out in paperback.

A news wire by the EFE news agency got great attention in the Latin American media in the recent days. A study conducted by the Mexican university UNAM (Universidade Nacional Autonoma de Mexico) warns that a new Little Ice Age is imminent. The forecast calls for a period of 60 to 80 years of cooling due to the reduced solar activity. The research was presented by Victor Manuel Velasco of the UNAM’s Geophysics Institute. Velasco told the audience during a conference that the recent break in the Perito Moreno glaciar (Argentina) occurred for natural reasons and cannot be attributed to global climate change.

The Mexican researcher also criticized the forecasts of the IPCC of a warming globe. Victor Manuel Velasco emphasized the Sun is undergoing a period of transition towards a period of very low activity. An English translation of his report follows:

An expert from the National Autonomous University of Mexico predicted that in about ten years the Earth will enter a “little ice age” which will last from 60 to 80 years and may be caused by the decrease in solar activity. Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the UNAM, as argued earlier during a conference that teaches at the Centre for Applied Sciences and Technological Development.

Velasco Herrera described as erroneous predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), pursuant to which the planet is experiencing a gradual increase in temperature, the so-called global warming. The models and forecasts of the IPCC “is incorrect because only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity,” said the specialist also in image processing and signs and prevention of natural disasters. The phenomenon of climate change, he added, should include other kinds of factors, both internal, such as volcanoes and the very human activity, and external, such as solar activity. “In this century glaciers are growing”, as seen in the Andes, Perito Moreno, Logan, the highest mountain in Canada, and with Franz-Josef Glacier, New Zealand, said Velasco Herrera. The prognosis on the emergence of a new Ice Age has little uncertainty as to their dates. The latest, according to Victor Manuel Velasco, could arrive in approximately two years. In another lecture he gave at the beginning of last December, the same expert had said that the cooling would arrive within 30 or 40 years. And in early July, Velasco Herrera said that satellite data indicate that this period of global cooling could even have already begun, since 2005.

See other similar prognoses of a turn to colder conditions in the last year here.

If there is a proof of bias towards a cause that would serve a certain political and ideological view of the world, this must be the position that the much of the popular media has taken on global warming. As an institution the press has abdicated its position in providing fair and balanced coverage of climate change. It has become advocacy journalism and most all the major networks and magazines are guilty of it. But thanks to magazines and websites like the Energy Tribune and the internet blogosphere and talk radio, the truth can still be found. 12 Facts about Global Climate Change That You Won’t Read in the Popular Press:

1. Global temperatures have been cooling since 2002 (0.3F), even as carbon dioxide has continued to rise (3.5%).

2. Carbon dioxide is a trace gas and by itself will produce little warming. Also, as CO2 increases, the incremental warming is less, as the effect is logarithmic so the more CO2, the less warming it produces.

3. CO2 has been totally uncorrelated with temperature over the last decade, and significantly negative since 2002.

4. CO2 is not a pollutant, but a naturally occurring gas. Together with chlorophyll and sunlight, it is an essential ingredient in photosynthesis and is, accordingly, plant food.

5. Reconstruction of paleoclimatological CO2 concentrations demonstrates that carbon dioxide concentration today is near its lowest level since the Cambrian Era some 550 million years ago, when there was almost 20 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as there is today without causing a “runaway greenhouse effect.”

6. Temperature changes lead, not lag, CO2 changes on all time scales. The oceans may play a key role, emitting carbon dioxide when they warm as carbonated beverages lose fizz as they warm and absorbing it as they cool.

7. Most of the warming in the climate models comes from the assumption that water vapor and precipitation increase as temperatures warm, a strong positive feedback. Water vapor is a far more important greenhouse gas than CO2. However, that assumption has been shown in observations and peerreviewed research to be wrong, and in fact water vapor and precipitation act as a negative feedback that reduces any small greenhouse warming from carbon dioxide.

8. Indeed, greenhouse models show the warming should be greatest at mid to high atmosphere levels in the tropics. But balloon and satellite observations show cooling there. The greenhouse signature or DNA does not match reality, and the greenhouse models thus must greatly overstate the warming - and in a court of law would have to be acquitted of any role in global warming

9. The sun has both direct and indirect effects on our climate. Solar activity changes on cycles of 11 years and longer. When the sun is more active it is brighter and a little hotter. More important though are the indirect effects. Ultraviolet radiation increases much more than the brightness and causes increased ozone production, which generates heat in the high atmosphere that works its way down, affecting the weather. Also, an active sun diffuses cosmic rays, which play an important role in nucleation of low clouds, resulting in fewer clouds. In all these ways the sun warms the planet more when it is active. An active sun in the 1930s and again near the end of the last century helped produce the observed warming periods. The current solar cycle is the longest in over 100 years, an unmistakable sign of a cooling sun that historical patterns suggest will stay so for decades.

10. The multidecadal cycles in the ocean correlate extremely well with the solar cycles and global temperatures. These are 60 to 70 year cycles that relate to natural variations in the largescale circulations. Warm oceans correlate with warm global temperatures. The Pacific started cooling in the late 1990s and it accelerated in the last year, and the Atlantic has cooled from its peak in 2004. This supports the observed global land temperature cooling, which is strongly correlated with ocean heat content. Newly deployed NOAA buoys confirm global ocean cooling.

11. Warmer ocean cycles are periods with diminished Arctic ice cover. When the oceans were warm in the 1930s to the 1950s, Arctic ice diminished and Greenland warmed. The recent ocean warming, especially in the 1980s to the early 2000s, is similar to what took place 70 years ago and the Arctic ice has reacted much the same way, with diminished summer ice extent.

12. Antarctic ice has been increasing and the extent last year was the greatest in the satellite monitoring era.

What will it take for the media to let go of their biases and begin doing their job, reporting the truth? See the Energy Tribune here.

The managers of a mutual fund that describes itself as “dedicated to providing both financial and pro-free enterprise ideological returns to Investors” want the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to advise publicly traded companies against publishing what the managers describe as “potentially false and misleading” information on global warming.

In a July 23 letter, Thomas Borelli and Steven J. Milloy, managers of the Free Enterprise Action Fund, asked the SEC to issue a general statement advising companies to avoid making unqualified public statements on what the fund managers say are unsettled questions involving climate change and other environmental issues.

“It’s not appropriate for companies to say the debate is over and the case is closed when it is becoming more apparent all the time that climatologists have no firm idea about what drives warming and cooling cycles,” Milloy told CNSNews.com. “We think statements of certainty about climate are actually misstatements.” Borelli and Milloy cited recent statements by scientific groups contesting the conclusion that carbon emissions caused by human activity are a significant cause of global warming. 

“The American Physical Society, the leading professional society for American physicists announced in July 2008 on one of its websites that, “There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution,” the managers say in their letter. They also point to a petition signed by more than 31,000 scientists that was released in May by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.  The petition says: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will cause in the future, catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”

Unfortunately, too many CEO’s fail to grasp the connection between high energy prices and the cost of environmental regulations they continue to pursue, Free Enterprise Action Fund’s Borelli told CNSNews.com.  “The CEO’s have not thought through all of the consequences of global warming regulations on their business,” he said. “It means more unemployment, higher energy prices and lower GDP (Gross Domestic Product), and they’re actually lobbying for this.”

Those companies that continue to press for regulations are essentially lobbying against their own earnings, said Borelli. Corporate America, however, is not necessarily a friend of the free market, James Dellinger, executive director of Greenwatch, a project of the Capital Research Center (CRC), told CNSNews.com.

“So long as corporate leaders can insulate their own lifestyles and score public relations points, they will continue to embrace green schemes that seek to mollify activists at the expense of investors,” Dellinger said. “The sad reality is corporate America now leans left and is a major funding source for pro-regulatory lawmakers,” he said. “Greater vigilance is needed on the part of shareholders to safeguard profitable enterprises that would otherwise succumb to costly political endeavors.” Read more here.

Earlier this month, while visiting a friend in San Francisco, I almost spilled my latte in my lap when I read this on the front page of the Chronicle: “S.F. Mayor Proposes Fines for Unsorted Trash.” The story began: “Garbage collectors would inspect San Francisco residents’ trash to make sure pizza crusts aren’t mixed in with chip bags or wine bottles under a proposal by Mayor Gavin Newsom.” Isn’t that what homeless people do—rooting around in other people’s garbage?

If Bay Area residents are caught failing to separate the plastic bottles from the newspapers, according to the newspaper story, they could face fines of up to $1,000. “We don’t want to fine people,” the mayor is quoted saying reassuringly. “We want to change behavior.” Translation: Do exactly as we say and no one gets hurt. And San Francisco considers itself one of the most progressive cities in America! When I was a kid, the environmentalists promoted their clean skies and antilittering agenda mostly through moral suasion—with pictures of an Indian under a smoggy sky with a tear rolling down his cheek or the owl who chanted on TV: “Give a hoot, don’t pollute.” Such messages made you feel guilty about callously throwing a candy bar wrapper on the ground or feeling indifferent toward car fumes. Back then I was a devoted recycler, but not for sentimental reasons. It was the financial incentive: You got up to a nickel for every bottle you brought back to the grocery store. So I would scavenge the landscape to find unredeemed bottles to buy baseball cards and candy.

But now the environmental movement has morphed into the most authoritarian philosophy in America. The most glaring example of course is the multitrillion-dollar cap-and-trade anti-global warming scheme that would mandate an entire restructuring of our industrial economy. This plan, endorsed by both presidential candidates, would empower climate-change cops to regulate the energy usage and carbon emissions of every industry in America. If we do this, the best estimates are that we could reduce global temperatures by 0.1 degrees by 2050 and save on average about one polar bear a year from early death. But no burden is too great when it comes to helping the planet—even if the progress to be made is infinitesimal. To weigh costs and benefits is regarded as sacrilege—the refuge of global warming “deniers.”

Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute notes with rich irony that “we now live in a society where Sunday church attendance is down, but people wouldn’t dream of missing their weekly trek to the altar of the recycling center.” These facilities, by the way, are increasingly called “redemption centers.” Which is fine except that now the greens want to make redemption mandatory. Oh, for a return to the days when someone stood up for the separation of church and state. Read more here.

Mr. Moore is the senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal editorial board.

Heavy rains have prompted flood watches and advisories on Colorado’s eastern plains and snow has closed Loveland Pass in the mountains west of Denver. The National Weather Service has issued a flood warning for the Arkansas River in La Junta and the Purgatoire River near Las Animas in southeastern Colorado.

In the mountains, the Colorado Department of Transportation has closed Loveland Pass because of snow and ice and is requiring chains on commercial vehicles on the westbound approach to the Eisenhower Tunnel.

Also Denver set a new record low high of 59 yesterday, breaking the old record of 68 degress set 129 years ago in 1880. It looks like today will also set a record low high. It only reached 49 yesterday in Chyenne, tying the record low high for the month set on August 28, 1892.

An upper low, unusually strong for August is responsible. Cold starts early here in the Rockies but usually not until September.

Photocam of Loveland Valley today (Saturday).

See some other cold stories from around the world on Watts Up with That here.

The upper low was propelled south by a strong ridge building near the northwest coast that brought a stifling brief record heat event with triple digit temperatures. Normal cool Pacific air will return this week.