Article from: Agence France-Presse
Climate change has caused a flock of wild sheep on a remote northern Scottish island to become smaller, according to an unusual investigation published on Thursday. The study explains a mystery that has bedevilled scientists for the past two years.
The wild Soay sheep live on Hirta, in the St. Kilda archipelago in the storm-battered Outer Hebrides, and have been closely studied for nearly a quarter of a century. The law of evolutionary theory says the brown, thick-coated ungulates should have gotten progressively bigger.
Tough winters mean that bigger sheep have a better chance of survival and of reproducing than smaller ones, and eventually they would dominate in the flock’s numbers. But in 2007, stunned researchers realised that the average size of the Hirta sheep, instead of rising, had been progressively falling.
The answer, British biologists said on Thursday, lies in climate change. A team led by Tim Coulson, a professor at Imperial College London, pored over data for the animals’ body size and life history over 24 years. They found that the sheep were not growing as fast as they once did and smaller sheep were likelier to survive into adulthood instead of perishing as lambs. This gives smaller sheep a shot at reproduction, which means that the average sheep size has fallen - by 81gram per year on average.
Coulson believes that shorter, milder winters mean that lambs do not need to put on as much weight in the first months of life in order to survive to their first birthday, as they did when winters were colder. “In the past, only the big, healthy sheep and large lambs that had piled on weight in their first summer could survive the harsh winters on Hirta,” he said.
“But now, due to climate change, grass for food is available for more months of the year and survival conditions are not so challenging - even the slower-growing sheep have a chance of making it, and this means smaller individuals are becoming increasingly prevalent in the population.”
Another factor in the sheep shrinkage is a so-called “young mum effect.” Ewes that give birth earlier tend to produce smaller sheep, thus adding to the smaller average size. Man-made climate change is already having an impact on species in terms of habitat and migratory patterns.
But scientists say it is hard to predict which will be winners and losers from the change, partly because of the complexity of separating out evolutionary pressures from environmental factors. The new study, published in the US journal Science, could help, said Coulson. {Biologists have realised that ecological and evolutionary processes are intricately intertwined, and they now have a way of dissecting out the contribution of each,” he said.
“Unfortunately, it is too early to tell whether a warming world will lead to pocket-sized sheep.”
By David A. Fahrenthold and Steven Mufson, Washington Post
The climate bill approved by the House last month started out as an idea—fight global warming—and wound up looking like an unabridged dictionary. It runs to more than 1,400 pages, swollen with loopholes and giveaways meant to win over un-green industries and wary legislators. Here are answers to some key questions about the bill.
How would it work?
The legislation sponsored by Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) would set a limit on greenhouse gas emissions and gradually tighten it. Major emitters of greenhouse gases—including any business that burns fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas or coal—would have to reduce their emissions or buy allowances, which would be traded on markets like commodities. This would be the first economy-wide limit on greenhouse gases in the United States; Europe has had a similar system in place for years.
Would this bill stop climate change?
No. Even if it works exactly as planned—delivering a 17 percent reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 compared with 2005 levels—it might not slow down the rate of climate change by very much.
That is because emissions are a global problem: Greenhouse gases contribute to the Earth’s warming whether they are emitted in China or in Chevy Chase. Even if the United States meets the legislation’s goals for 2020, the world’s total emissions would be reduced by about 3 percent, according to Energy Department projections.
That would be a start, environmentalists say. Usually emissions grow as the economy grows, so a 17 percent cut would be a huge feat for the energy industry. But scientists say that far deeper cuts are needed to head off disaster from warming temperatures, rising sea levels and other climate changes. The legislation would require reductions of 42 percent by 2030 and 83 percent by 2050.
What will all this change cost, and who will pay?
Less than 50 cents per household per day, according to estimates by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Congressional Budget Office. And that does not take into account benefits from avoiding hard-to-calculate costs associated with accelerating climate change.
According to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, the cost would be much steeper: $11.78 per day in the coming decades. According to House Republicans, the costs would cripple the U.S. economy and drive American jobs to countries that do not have climate regulations.
These costs are a mix of higher prices for carbon-based fuels—the whole idea of a cap-and-trade system—offset by a complex series of tax breaks and free allowances, new technologies and behavioral changes, and impacts on corporations and their profits.
Read more here.
See larger image here.
By Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe
In his weekly address on Saturday, President Obama saluted the House of Representatives for passing Waxman-Markey, the gargantuan energy-rationing bill that would amount to the largest tax increase in the nation’s history. It would do so by making virtually everything that depends on energy - which is virtually everything - more expensive.
The president doesn’t describe the legislation in those terms now, but he made no bones about it last year. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2008, he calmly explained how cap-and-trade - the carbon-dioxide rationing scheme that is at the heart of Waxman-Markey - would work:
“Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket . . . because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, natural gas, you name it. Whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money, and they will pass that [cost] on to consumers.”
In the same interview, Obama suggested that his energy policy would require the ruin of the coal industry. “If somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant, they can,” he told the Chronicle. “It’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”
The justification for inflicting this financial misery, of course, is the onrushing catastrophe of human-induced global warming - a catastrophe that can be prevented only if we abandon the carbon-based fuels on which most of the prosperity and productivity of modern life depend. But what if that looming catastrophe isn’t real? What if climate change has little or nothing to do with human activity? What if enacting cap-and-trade means incurring excruciating costs in exchange for infinitesimal benefits?
Hush, says Obama. Don’t ask such questions. “There is no longer a debate about whether carbon pollution is placing our planet in jeopardy,” he declared Saturday. “It’s happening.”
No debate? The debate over global warming is more robust than it has been in years, and not only in America. “In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming,” Kimberly Strassel noted in The Wall Street Journal the other day. “In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the ‘new religion.’”
Closer to home, the noted physicist Hal Lewis (emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara) e-mails me a copy of a statement he and several fellow scientists, including physicists Will Happer and Robert Austin of Princeton, Laurence Gould of the University of Hartford, and climatologist Richard Lindzen of MIT, have sent to Congress. “The sky is not falling,” they write. Far from warming, “the Earth has been cooling for 10 years” - a trend that “was not predicted by the alarmists’ computer models.”
Fortune magazine recently profiled veteran climatologist John Christy, a lead author of the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. With his green credentials, Fortune observed, Christy is the warm-mongers’ “worst nightmare - an accomplished climate scientist with no ties to Big Oil who has produced reams and reams of data that undermine arguments that the earth’s atmosphere is warming at an unusual rate and question whether the remedies being talked about in Congress will actually do any good.”
No one who cares about the environment or the nation’s economic well-being should take it on faith that climate change is a crisis, or that drastic changes to the economy are essential to “save the planet.” Hundreds of scientists reject the alarmist narrative. For non-experts, a steadily-widening shelf of excellent books surveys the data in laymen’s terms and exposes the weaknesses in the doomsday scenario - among others, “Climate Confusion” by Roy W. Spencer, “Climate of Fear” by Thomas Gale Moore, “Taken by Storm” by Christopher Essex and Ross McKitrick, and “Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years” by S. Fred Singer and Dennis Avery.
If the case for a war on carbon dioxide were unassailable, no one would have to warn against debating it. The 212 House members who voted against Waxman-Markey last week plainly don’t believe the matter is settled. They’re right.
By Kenneth P. Green, AEI
As people continue to resist draconian greenhouse gas control schemes that would virtually re-order society around energy rationing and technocratic authoritarianism, proponents of such an eco-revolution are ratcheting up the rhetoric of hate.
People such as James Hansen and Al Gore have long been at the forefront of slandering those who oppose them. As my colleague and I wrote in “Scenes from the Climate Inquisition”:
Anyone who does not sign up 100 percent behind the catastrophic scenario is deemed a “climate change denier.” Distinguished climatologist Ellen Goodman spelled out the implication in her widely syndicated newspaper column last week: “Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.” One environmental writer suggested last fall that there should someday be Nuremberg Trials - or at the very least a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission - for climate skeptics who have blocked the planet’s salvation.
Former Vice President Al Gore has proposed that the media stop covering climate skeptics, and Britain’s environment minister said that, just as the media should give no platform to terrorists, so they should exclude climate change skeptics from the airwaves and the news pages. Heidi Cullen, star of the Weather Channel, made headlines with a recent call for weather-broadcasters with impure climate opinions to be “decertified” by the American Meteorological Society.
At the time, we thought that this jihad against skepticism had peaked. But a column by Paul Krugman in the New York Times today shows that we were being overly optimistic. Not content with calling critics of the abominable Waxman-Markey energy and climate plan skeptics (or even just “deniers,” the previously favored slander of the eco-topians), Krugman suggests that the very act of questioning whether or not climate change science may still have a few bugs in it, or questioning draconian greenhouse gas control schemes such as Waxman-Markey, is outright treason.
Regarding the “debate” over Waxman-Markey, Krugman says:
And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason - treason against the planet.
Yes, you read that correctly. Paul Krugman, a Nobel Laureate, writing in America’s paper of record, just accused nearly half of the House of Representatives, including both Republicans and Democrats, as guilty of treason against the very planet- along, presumably with the many thousands of scientists, policy analysts, economists, and environmentalists who have raised objections to the Waxman-Markey energy bill.
Al Gore launched the drive to remake society into an eco-theocracy in his 1992 book Earth in the Balance. Gore stated the goal of these radical environmentalists quite plainly, saying that nothing less than a “wrenching transformation” of society would be necessary to prevent what he foresees as an eco-apocalypse brought on by our high-energy, technological lifestyle.
Eco-terrorists already engage in regular acts of arson, sabotage, and vandalism in the service of their radical eco-topian agenda. With his inflammatory rhetoric, Krugman gives such extremists still greater license to engage in the kind of personal violence that groups opposing animal research do in terrorizing university researchers, and that anti-abortion groups do in attacking physicians.
It is clear that those who hope to re-make America in the name of preventing climate change are growing frustrated with the public’s aversion to economic suicide. As they see their radical agenda slipping away, the Gore-ian revolutionaries are reaching for the torches and pitchforks. Krugman’s declaration that skepticism about climate science or policy constitutes treason is nothing less than an incitement to violence, and when the extremists of the environmental movement engage in ever greater acts of violence, responsibility for the damage will rest with people such as Paul Krugman. Read blog here.
By David Deming, Geophysicist and Associate Professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma
As the years pass and data accumulate, it is becoming evident that global warming is a fraud. Climate change is natural and ongoing, but the Earth has not warmed significantly over the last thirty years. Nor has there been a single negative effect of any type that can be unambiguously attributed to global warming.
As I write, satellite data show that the mean global temperature is the same that it was in 1979. The extent of global sea ice is also unchanged from 1979. Since the end of the last Ice Age, sea level has risen more than a hundred meters. But for the last three years, there has been no rise in sea level. If the polar ice sheets are melting, why isn’t sea level rising? Global warming is supposed to increase the severity and frequency of tropical storms. But hurricane and typhoon activity is at a record low.
Every year in the US, more than forty thousand people are killed in traffic accidents. But not one single person has ever been killed by global warming. The number of species that have gone extinct from global warming is exactly zero. Both the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets are stable. The polar bear population is increasing. There has been no increase in infectious disease that can be attributed to climate change. We are not currently experiencing more floods, droughts, or forest fires.
In short, there is no evidence of any type to support the idea that we are entering an era when significant climate change is occurring and will cause the deterioration of either the natural environment or the human standard of living.
Why do people think the planet is warming? One reason is that the temperature data from weather stations appear to be hopelessly contaminated by urban heat effects. A survey of the 1221 temperature stations in the US by meteorologist Anthony Watts and his colleagues is now more than 80 percent complete. The magnitude of putative global warming over the last 150 years is about 0.7C. But only 9 percent of meteorological stations in the US are likely to have temperature errors lower than 1C. More than two-thirds of temperature sensors used to estimate global warming are located near artificial heating sources such as air conditioning vents, asphalt paving, or buildings. These sources are likely to introduce artifacts greater than 2C into the temperature record.
Another cause of global warming hysteria is the infiltration of science by ideological zealots who place politics above truth. Earlier this month, the Obama administration issued a report that concluded global warming would have a number of deleterious effects on the US. In 1995, one of the lead authors of this report told me that we had to alter the historical temperature record by “getting rid” of the Medieval Warm Period.
The Obama report refers to - six times - the work of a climate scientist named Stephen H. Schneider. In 1989, Schneider told Discover magazine that “we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.” Schneider concluded “each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” Schneider’s position is not unusual. In 2007, Mike Hulme, the founding director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in Britain, told the Guardian newspaper that “scientists and politicians must trade truth for influence.”
While releasing a politicized report that prostitutes science to politics, the Obama administration simultaneously suppressed an internal EPA report that concluded there were “glaring inconsistencies” between the scientific data and the hypothesis that carbon dioxide emissions were changing the climate.
If we had an appreciation for history, we would not be fooled so easily. It has all happened before, albeit on a smaller scale in an age where people had more common sense. On May 19, 1912, the Washington Post posed these questions: “Is the climate of the world changing? Is it becoming warmer in the polar regions?” On November 2, 1922, the Associated Press reported that “the Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the waters too hot.” On February 25, 1923, the New York Times concluded that “the Arctic appears to be warming up.” On December 21, 1930, the Times noted that “Alpine glaciers are in full retreat.” A few months later the New York Times concluded that there was “a radical change in climatic conditions and hitherto unheard of warmth” in Greenland. About the only thing that has changed at the Times since 1930 is that no one working there today is literate enough to use the word “hitherto.”
After the warm weather of the 1930s gave way to a cooling trend beginning in 1940, the media began speculating on the imminent arrival of a new Ice Age. We have now come full circle, mired in a hopeless cycle of reincarnated ignorance. H. L. Mencken understood this process when he explained “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” Read more here.
By Niger Innis, National Spokesman, Congress of Racial Equality
Washington, D.C. (June 25, 2009)—The Waxman-Markey climate bill is “an immoral assault on poor Americans” because it is designed to purposely raise the cost of energy in order to force the working poor to reduce their standard of living, according to one of the nation’s leading civil rights champions.
Roy Innis, Chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality—one of America’s oldest civil rights organizations—made the allegation in a letter to all members of Congress on Wednesday. CORE has been heavily engaged in the national energy policy debate since the publication of Innis’ 2007 book, ”Energy Keepers, Energy Killers.” The book was a Washington Post non-fiction best seller.
“In my 40-plus years as the Chairman of CORE, I have seen few federal bills that would do more harm to America’s working class and low-income citizens and families than the Waxman-Markey climate tax bill,” Innis wrote to Members of Congress.
“The Waxman-Markey bill is designed specifically to make the use of fossil fuels more costly,” Innis said. “That will have a disproportionate and negative impact on those who now benefit most from the affordable and reliable power that fossil fuels provide: poor and working-class families.”
“In fact, an underlying goal of this legislation is the morally repugnant concept that constricting sources of domestic energy and raising energy costs is a good thing because it will force conservation by consumers,” Innis said. “That elitist view assumes that poor, working class families have the ability to bear that ‘social cost.’”
“The plain truth is this: the poor and working families we represent cannot bear that luxury,” Innis told Congress.
“Americans don’t want ‘energy welfare’ payments from the government to help ease the sting of these government-driven cost increases,” Innis wrote. “They want continued affordable and reliable energy, which this bill will constrict.”
Innis concluded: “This is an explicitly anti-consumer package that will have huge impacts - both direct and indirect - on the struggling families we represent.”
CORE said it plans to launch a national public education campaign against the Waxman-Markey legislation. CORE has more than 100,000 members nationwide.
Media Contact: Niger Innis, National Spokesman, CORE, (702) 633-4464
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ALSO this TAXPAYER ALERT by the National Taxpayer’s Union reflects this same message, hopefully LOUD AND CLEAR to congress. Please help by calling your congressional office.
NTU urges all Representatives to vote “NO” on H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markey “American Clean Energy and Security Act.” This “cap-and-trade” legislation constitutes a mammoth $2 trillion energy tax hike on top of existing burdens and would crush our already-ailing economy. By placing a cap on carbon dioxide output, cap-and-trade would raise prices on gasoline, utilities, and virtually every consumer product Americans purchase. H.R. 2454 would cost the average family upwards of $3,000 per year. Estimates also predict the loss of 1.1 million jobs per year should the bill pass.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of cap-and-trade is the impact it would have on low-income families, who spend 26 percent of their income paying for energy, compared to just 4 percent for the median family. There is simply no justification for sticking these Americans with huge additional burdens in the midst of a very difficult economy.
Roll call votes on H.R. 2454 will be among the most heavily weighted votes of the year in our annual Rating of Congress, and we urge all Members to vote “NO.”
If you have any questions, please contact: NTU Director of Government Affairs Andrew Moylan at (703) 683-5700
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See also Pew poll of 800 African-Americans included 640 self-identified Democrats (80%) and 32 Republicans (4%) showed 76% of African-Americans Favor Delay on Climate Change Legislation - June 24, 2009 here.
New Haven Examiner
In an article I released yesterday,"News flash!the great global warming debate with James Hansen is now off”, I indicated I would inquire of Lord Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount of Brenchley, as to whether he would be interested in filling in for Don Blankenship in a debate on climate change with James Hansen of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies. In my experience with Lord Monckton he has always been willing to assist in the sceptic fight for good old fashioned science. He has also been willing to debate any of the advocates of anthropogenic global warming. Recently he was told he could debate Al Gore head to head in a Congressional committee hearing. It was not until he was getting off the plane that he was told the debate was off. Al Gore apparently wasn’t up to the task.
But who is Lord Monckton? Back in the 80’s he was a technical policy adviser on a number of topics for Margaret Thatcher. He was intimately involved in the early investigation of CO2 caused global warming and presented at the Royal Society on the subject. The difference between Monckton and many others is that he realized that it couldn’t be true. Although I suspect his paycheck didn’t depend on AGW alarmism, I believe it would not have affected his conclusion. As he once commented to me in an email “As the temperature continues to fail to rise as the doomsayers suggest it will, fewer and fewer will believe them, and those who have nailed their colours to the mast of this particular ship will go down with it, with few to mourn their passing.” So eloquent. So true. He is currently the Chief Policy adviser for the Science & Public Policy Institute.
About 3 years ago I wrote Lord Monckton concerning a paper he had written. Being early in my climate education, I had several elementary questions. He was very patient with me and I was able to follow the thought progression and math to the conclusions, mostly. Last year I had the occasion to see his presentation at the 2008 International Climate Conference in New York City. A couple of days later at the University of Hartford, in a program advanced by Physics Professor Larry Gould, I had the privilege of seeing a second, different presentation suitable for policymakers. It was just down the road from the Capital and do you think one of our state officials would trot down the road to see an international figure in the climate debate. No sir. Not even one, despite a personal invitation to our Governor.
My point here is that I have seen him in action and he would be a formidable opponent for any of the AGW promoters. He is a big man in heart as well as stature presenting a powerful image. His accent gives a reassuring note to his excellent command of the science he offers. He also shares the Nobel Prize that Al Gore and the IPCC won last year for his part in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report and has the pin to prove it.
Well, I wrote him and 10 hours later I got my answer:
Monckton: “Dear Mr. Griffin - Of course I’d be delighted to debate Jim Hansen. In a democracy, that’s how things work - people debate one another in public, so that people get to hear both sides. One of the most disfiguring tactics of the group driving the “global warming” scare is to refuse to debate those who disagree, on the ground that that would give their opponents too much exposure .... So do suggest it to Hansen. He may decide to go ahead with it, and the debate would attract massive publicity precisely because it would be so rare. ... - M of B”
So, Dr. Hansen, you were prepared to debate Mr. Blankenship. Will you accept this challenge from Christopher Monckton? The venue should be large enough to allow those interested to attend. I am sure there is something in the New York area that could accommodate such an event. Say… Yankee Stadium or Madison Square Garden. We can work out the details to your satisfaction.
Marc Sheppard
The largest and most wasteful tax-hike in the history of this republic just passed the House by a vote of 219 to 212. And while 44 wise Democrats crossed party lines to vote against it, 8 Republicans actually forgave an unforgivable 3AM airdrop and voted for this abomination anyway, giving the numbskulls one more yea than they needed We’ll know their names, and perhaps their inducements, soon. (Update: Names and Phone Numbers at page Bottom)
The last minute chicanery was revealed to the public this morning on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, when Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ) announced that the Democrats had dropped a 300 page amendment into the cap-and-tax bill at 3AM this morning. The congressman had no idea what was contained within the eleventh hour changes, and assumed the bill would go to the floor with his fellow legislators equally ignorant. And the villains who crafted the last-ditch switch likely hit the sheets this morning anticipating a likewise uninformed vote.
But Minority leader John Boehner spent over an hour on the House floor this afternoon exposing the contents of the amendment. And he itemized its provisions for wealth realignment and government intervention into literally every miniscule aspect of American’s lives that are so implausible, so outrageous, so over-the-top insane, that it was hard to imagine that this bill - which was considered a toss-up all day - would have any chance of survival in a rational world.
Alas, we live in no such world.
It appears the Blue Dogs came through. The Yellow Skunks did not.
Had just two of these RINO reptiles voted the will of their constituents, Washington would be whistling a different tune tonight. If any of them happen to slink about your district, don’t wait for Election Day to express your outrage:
Bono Mack, Mary (CA-45) 202-225-5330
Castle, Mike (DE) 202-225-4165
Kirk, Mark (IL-10) 202-225-4835
Lance, Leonard (NJ-7) 202-225-5361
LoBiondo, Frank (NJ-2) 202-225-6572
McHugh, John (NY-23) 202-225-4611
Reichert, Dave (WA-8) 202-225-7761
Smith, Chris (NJ-4) 202-225-3765
Wanted Poster courtesy of Lubos Motl (enlarged here):
