Legislation pending in the Senate might warm environmentalists’ hearts, but not because of potential cuts in carbon emissions. Their interest is in the heavy economic costs the plans would inflict. Each bill uses the cap-and-trade scheme to control carbon dioxide emissions. Each establishes limits, then prescribes how to distribute or sell to the private sector the rights to emit specific amounts of greenhouse gases under the cap.The bill sponsored by Sens. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., is the least egregious. It would force greenhouse gas emissions to be cut to about 3% below last year’s level. The others, one from Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Independent from Connecticut, and Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, another from Lieberman and Sen. John Warner, Republican of Virginia, are more draconian. The former would cut emissions to 16% below the 2007 output, the latter 44%.None would affect climate change. All, however, would carry heavy economic losses. Naturally, the environmentalists, having pushed the environment down their list of concerns, like that.

It’s no surprise that the most expensive of the three is the Warner-Lieberman bill. The Environmental Protection Agency reckons it could cost as much as $3 trillion a year in lost GDP. In an economy of roughly $14 trillion, that’s a significant loss.But even the Bingaman-Specter legislation, the least costly of the three, would hit the economy for about $1 trillion a year. Much of the pain would be caused by increases in gasoline and electricity prices. The Science Applications International Corporation calculates that Lieberman-Warner by 2030 would boost gasoline prices from 60% to 144% while electricity prices would be up 77% to 129%. Hit hardest by higher energy prices: The poor. The National Center for Policy Analysis points out that energy costs consume 15% of the poorest households’ income while the average household spends 3% on energy. Who is going to feel the pinch more?The Congressional Budget Office estimates that even a 15% reduction in carbon emissions by 2010 - a third of the cut required by Lieberman-Warner - through a cap-and-trade scheme would trim the disposable income of the poor by an additional 3.3%. The hit for the richest Americans: 1.7%. All this economic wreckage done in the name of reducing environmentally benign greenhouse gases by men who should know better - and likely do.

But they have politics to think about, as well as invitations to Georgetown cocktail parties that probably are not being sent to GOP Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, who in his skepticism of global warming is performing a valuable public service. Read more here.

This week, TV6 is airing a three-part series on Global Warming (GW), also referred to as “Climate Change.” Meteorologist Nick Kanczuzewski has put together an excellent, balanced look at both sides of the issue and what it means for Upper Michigan. The time constraints imposed by television news will only allow him to survey the topic.  For that reason, I will use this blog to occasionally delve deeper into this controversial subject.

First of all, here is my disclaimer. I do not side with one political party - I am appalled that this branch of science has become so political. My views are counter to the consensus view that “mainstream” media repeatedly bombards us with. That does NOT mean I do not care about the environment.

For many years I kept silent on this issue; no more. The misinformation, exaggeration and alarmist tone to network news stories about GW has, in my opinion, gone over the line from objective journalism to advocacy. The derogatory labels and downright libelous characterization of scientists with views counter to the “consensus” is appalling. 

No matter what you hear or see on the NBC Nightly News or any other major news outlet, there is another, legitimate side to this topic.  And there are renowned scientists in this field who hold counter or “skeptical” views. Read more here.

On May 18, 1980, the once bucolic ice-cream cone shape that defined Mount St. Helens in Washington state disappeared in monstrous blast of ash, rock, gas, and heat. It was one of the most powerful explosions ever witnessed by humans and the force of the blast leveled hundreds of square miles of forestland, devastated wildlife and killed over 50 people.

Almost three decades later, the effects of the eruption are readily apparent to the thousands of visitors to the observation points in the sprawling Mount St. Helens volcanic monument. But time has also muted the effects to some degree. Trees are growing back in some areas, plants have poked up through the ash, animals move through the devastated plains once again.

And inside the volcano, which was once a soft dome of snow but is now a gaping, steaming menace with an unpredictable streak, an unexpected phenomenon is taking place: a glacier is growing. Over the years since the huge eruption, the snowfall has condensed and compacted to form a horseshoe-shaped glacier inside the crater. Researcher Joseph Walder with the U.S. Geological Survey says the shade from the crater wall is allowing the glacier to grow in height by about 15 feet per year. Read more here.

SCARVES and coats can already be seen on the city streets. Warming pumpkin soups are featuring on cafe menus - and skiers everywhere have begun the countdown to winter, when snowmen will fall, unassembled, from heaven.

The ski buzz is upon us and, with the highest peaks of Australia and New Zealand already pulling on their white winter beanies after heavy early snowfalls, expectations are sky-high among the one million Aussie skiers and snowboarders.

The signs have rarely looked so good. A snowy northern ski season has been followed by an early trend towards a winter weather pattern across south-eastern Australia and the Shaky Isles. Heavy snow fell across the mountains in the last days of April, a month that was also the wettest in Sydney in 80 years and the coldest in nine years. Meteorologist James Luffman, of weatherzone.com.au, says of the season ahead: “The seasonal forecast indicates we can expect plenty more snow-bearing systems through the coming winter.”

There’s nothing quite like early snow to set up the season, which gets under way on June 7, sliding on through until the first week of October. Patterns run right through the ski seasons of the past: 1960, 1964 and 1968 were all whopping seasons. So too 2000 and 2004. Now 2008 looms large. Read more here.

Meanwhile the National Climate Centre, seemingly annoyed at the second cold season and early snow disrupting their “global warming”, admonished SKIERS banking on a La Nina-delivered bumper season after the weekend’s falls in Victoria and NSW to find another talisman in this story.

"May we live long and die out” is the unofficial motto of a movement that seeks to improve the Earth’s ecosystem by ensuring that the human species does not survive.

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, or VHEMT, consists of volunteers who have made active life decisions to remain childless for the benefit of the Earth, thereby preventing the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals.

While no one person takes credit for being the founder, Les U. Knight created its name and is the spokesperson for the movement. “We’ve already exceeded Earth’s carrying capacity for humans by quite a bit,” Knight told WND. “We are using up our resources. The best way to stop it is by not breeding. It’s really the best way because the people we don’t create don’t exist, and so there’s no impact on them.” VHEMT activists believe a smaller population will benefit the Earth by reducing human and environmental catastrophe.

“There is no problem on the planet that would be more easily solved by adding more people,” Knight said. “Everything that we like, including clean air and clean water and wilderness to go and visit, all of those will increase as there become fewer of us.” Knight said the greenest habit humans can have is to prevent creation of another member of the species, reducing humanity’s ecological footprint on the Earth. Read more here.

AUSTRALIAN agricultural output will double over the next 40 years, with climate change predicted to increase, rather than hinder, the level of production. A recent spate of reports forecasting the decline of Australian agriculture because of climate change have greatly exaggerated, and even completely misreported the threat of global warming, according to senior rural industry figures.

In a report published by the Australian Farm Institute, executive director Mick Keogh says agricultural output is projected to improve strongly through to 2050, with a growing global population and increased economic wealth boosting demand for Australian produce. If the sector adapts even modestly, production would increase rather than decrease as a result of climate change, the report says.  Predictions of a 20 per cent drop in farm production by mid-century were cited by Kevin Rudd and Agriculture Minister Tony Burke as justification for Australia’s signing of the Kyoto Protocol.

In fact, Mr Keogh says, if global warming does occur, some areas such as southeast Queensland will receive more rain, and as a result will greatly benefit. Recent research has shown increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lifts plant production by up to 30 per cent in a phenomenon known as carbon fertilisation. Mr Keogh, a well-respected industry figure, said much of the media reporting on the recent ABARE report Climate Change: Impacts On Australian Agriculture, was so misleading it risked eroding industry confidence in public research agencies. “The reporting claimed that agriculture would be absolutely devastated, when that is not what the research showed at all,” he said. “For a start the media consistently misreported the research results as a future reduction in agricultural output, rather than a slowing of future rates of growth in output.” He said the ABARE report chose a series of highly unlikely worst-case climate change scenarios and then projected them over a long period of time. Read more here.

Contrary to what Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio say, the global warming debate is not over. Hysterical warnings about flooded coastlines and boiled polar bears remain nothing more than hot-air predictions. Their belief in an approaching apocalypse is based on nothing more than theory and blind faith, when the measures they advocate—the dismantling of capitalist economies and making energy unaffordable for the masses—demand hard evidence.

Well, the latest data on climate change is in and, not surprisingly, it favors the “deniers.” The United Nations World Meteorological Organization, the body that provides climate models to the U.N.’s alarmist global warming panel, reported last week that not only have world temperatures remained stable for the past decade, but that global average temperatures for 2008 will be cooler than those of 2007. Call us crazy, but that has to make it hard to sell the public on giving up their cars and detached homes in favor of mass transit and high-rise tenements.

The global warming gurus assure us that a decade without, you know, global warming, has a perfectly rational explanation, and that humanity’s wasteful standard of living is still a sure bet to replace Canadian winters with Las Vegas summers by the end of the century. The Pacific Ocean’s La Nina current, a cooler-than-normal expanse of water, is responsible for milder temperatures in the normally balmy equatorial region. China and West Asia have cooled off as well, the WMO reported. But as Investor’s Business Daily wrote in a Friday editorial: “Why can’t the Pacific’s El Nino current, which played a large part in the warm reading for 1998, simply be seen as a ‘variability’ and not part of a greater warming trend?” Variability is code for “data that don’t support our cause.”

That won’t stop the greens from preaching the gospel of global warming. And it certainly won’t stop their media enablers from reporting it as truth—witness the lack of news reports on the WMO data. But bit by bit, cold, hard, scientific fact is deflating many assertions of the climate change alarmists. Read more here.

You may have wondered why there has been no Congressional effort to actually legislate the “global warming” policies that will supposedly save the planet from itself. For six years, the Democratic minority indulged in often nasty rhetoric, with the gist being: We know the problem. We know the solution. Your hearings are a delaying tactic. We. Must. Act. Now!

After winning the majority, Dems muttered for a while about how that mean George Bush would just veto their legi-salvation anyway: Why bother? We’ll just work for a bigger majority - and the White House. Though, as I have noted on Planet Gore before, Bush had threatened no veto - and on those occasions since January 2007 when he did threaten a veto, in other policy contexts, the Dems typically took it as a challenge to pass something. So there seemed to be something missing from their political calculation, or at least their public rhetoric.

Today’s E&E Daily (subscription required) has a hilarious apologia, “Sponsors lower expectations for Lieberman-Warner bill,” offering a walk-through of the phenomenon afflicting our crusaders. Here as in pretty much every country in the world (posturing notwithstanding), global warming is such a grave threat that other people need to “do something.” Given the inescapable price tag, lawmakers looked and discovered that anything they propose would actually be doing nothing - besides harming state economies. And if forced to choose, it seems they would prefer it be other states’ economies that are harmed. 

That mean George Bush and those nasty filibustering Republicans are blocking a climate bailout. Or, maybe not so much. As my CEI colleague Myron Ebell characterizes this: thieves fall out when it comes time to split up the loot. Read more here.