Churchville, VA - Just as congress is set to tax fossil fuels out of the U.S. economy, the New York Times has reasserted its utterly foolish demand that we tear out existing hydroelectric dams - the dams that provide most of our renewable energy in the form of water-generated electricity.

Hydroelectric dams produce 8.5 percent of our power, and it’s all carbon-free. That’s nearly five times the deliveries from our erratic solar panels and wind turbines. Now we’re supposed to tear out hydroelectric dams just as every other key energy source is ripped away by a rapacious congress?
What in the name of glitzy/ditzy Manhattan is the former “national paper of record” trying to do to the American people?

The Times anguished on July 3rd that we’ve only torn out “only” 430 of the nation’s evil river-killing dams. It specifically mentions tearing down four power dams on the lower Snake River. The reason? The Times says that will “protect salmon on the West Coast.”

Nonsense. Hasn’t Andrew Revkin, the Times’ science writer, heard yet about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation discovered in 1996? Salmon numbers dropped radically in the Columbia after 1977 - as the salmon catch surged upward in the Gulf of Alaska. The ocean currents had redistributed the fish food in the open ocean, delivering the food species to different destinations in a 50–60 year cycle that shows up brilliantly in the salmon catch records of both fisheries. The PDO also impacts catches of halibut, sardines, anchovies and other fish Pacific-wide. The fish species weren’t in danger, though some of the fishermen’s livelihoods were. The PDO is highly correlated with sea temperatures in the northern California Current, and linked with prevailing winter wind direction in the northern Pacific. Southeast winds are warming. Northeastern winds cool.

Mr. Revkin should be up on this, because the PDO has also dictated recent global temperatures; the Pacific is the planet’s largest heat sink. When the Pacific and Atlantic cycles are in sync, as they were from 1976-98, the earth’s temperatures soar.

What drives the cycles? Let’s take a wild guess that it might be the sun. The sunspots began predicting the 2007 global temperature decline eight years before it happened.

Since 2007, world temperatures have lost 30 years worth of their previous warming, snowpacks have increased, and ski seasons have lengthened.

* June in Manhattan averaged 3.7 degrees cooler than the recent norm - the coldest average since 1958.

* Phoenix was 8.5 degrees below the recent norm.

* New Zealand’s National Climate Center announced, “Temperature: Lowest ever for May for many areas, colder than normal for all.”

* The satellite temperatures? “June 2009 saw another - albeit small - drop in the global average temperature anomaly, from +0.04 deg. C in May to 0.00 degrees C in June, with the coolest anomaly in the Southern Hemisphere.”

* Global temperatures are down 0.74 degree C since Gore’s movie opened in 2006.

The PDO fell from 1890-1924, rose from 1925-1946, fell from 1947-1976, and rose strongly from 1976-1999. Global temperatures followed the shifts. Both the PDO and the Columbia salmon have been stuttering since 1999, but NASA’s Jason satellite confirmed last year the PDO has now shifted cool. These short-term shifts are superimposed on the moderate, solar-linked 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles that run back at least a million years.
The planet has been through all this before - without any cap-and-tax penalties on human endeavor. See PDF.

Dennis Avery is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

RESPONSIBLE LEADERSHIP FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

1. We, the Leaders of the Group of Eight meeting in L’Aquila, express our heartfelt solidarity to the people of Abruzzo affected by the tragic earthquake which struck the region on 6th April 2009, and to all those around the world who have been touched by natural disasters.

2. We are determined to ensure sustainable growth and to tackle the interlinked challenges of the economic crisis, poverty and climate change. These challenges require immediate action and long term vision.

Excerpts {Climate change and environment - Fighting climate change

63. This is a crucial year for taking rapid and effective global action to combat climate change (interpretation: we are running out of time as the earth cools and the people begin to notice). We welcome the decision taken within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Poznan to enter full negotiating mode, in order to shape a global and comprehensive post-2012 agreement by the end of 2009 in Copenhagen, as mandated by the Bali Conference in 2007. We must seize this decisive opportunity to achieve a truly ambitious global consensus.

64. We reconfirm our strong commitment to the UNFCCC negotiations and to the successful conclusion of a global, wide-ranging and ambitious post-2012 agreement in Copenhagen, involving all countries, consistent with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. In this context we also welcome the constructive contribution of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate to support a successful outcome in Copenhagen. We call upon all Parties to the UNFCCC and to its Kyoto Protocol to ensure that the negotiations under both the Convention and the Protocol result in a coherent and environmentally effective global agreement.

65. We reaffirm the importance of the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and notably of its Fourth Assessment Report, which constitutes the most comprehensive assessment of the science. We recognise the broad scientific view that the increase in global average temperature above pre-industrial levels ought not to exceed 2C. Because this global challenge can only be met by a global response, we reiterate our willingness to share with all countries the goal of achieving at least a 50% reduction of global emissions by 2050, recognising that this implies that global emissions need to peak as soon as possible and decline thereafter. As part of this, we also support a goal of developed countries reducing emissions of greenhouse gases in aggregate by 80% or more by 2050 compared to 1990 or more recent years. Consistent with this ambitious long-term objective, we will undertake robust aggregate and individual mid-term reductions, taking into account that baselines may vary and that efforts need to be comparable. Similarly, major emerging economies need to undertake quantifiable actions to collectively reduce emissions significantly below business-as-usual by a specified year.

REALITY CHECK:
The data from EIA indicating global emissions target is 10.75 billion mt in 2050. Small problem, the emissions are projected to grow to 40 Bmt by 2030!

Icecap Note: In a story Gaia’s Right, Mark Steyn notes “According to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, we only have 96 months left to save the planet.” Really? Ten years ago, we had a lot of time? Funny, that’s not the way I remember it. ("Time is running out for the climate,” said Chris Rose of Greenpeace in 1997.) So what’s to blame for this eternally looming rendezvous with the iceberg of apocalypse?

The good news is that, at this week’s G8 summit, America’s allies would commit only to the fuzziest and most meaningless of environmental goals. Europe has been hit far harder by the economic downturn. When your unemployment rate is 17 percent (as in Spain), “unsustainable growth” is no longer your most pressing problem. The environmental cult is itself a product of what the prince calls the “Age of Convenience”: It’s what you worry about it when you don’t have to worry about jobs or falling house prices or collapsed retirement accounts. Today, as European prime ministers are beginning to figure out, a strategic goal of making things worse when they’re already worse is a much tougher sell.” [End Steyn excerpts]

This doomsday cultism is not new. Some of the same people decades ago believed time to save the world was running out.” This story captures some from Earth day 1970.

Here are some of the hilarious, spectacularly wrong predictions made on the occasion of Earth Day 1970.

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.” Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind. George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By...[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.” Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions...By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.  Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support...the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution...by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half...” Life Magazine, January 1970

Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich announces that the sky is falling. “Air pollution...is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate...that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 39 years. And they’re going to continue making them until...well...forever.

Here we are, 39 years later and the economy sucks, but the ecology’s fine. In fact this planet is doing a lot better than the planet on which those green lunatics live.

To help you respond to the ‘faithful’, this Q&A Global Warming Primer by Dr. Ed Blick may be helpful

Award-winning Princeton University Physicist Dr. Will Happer, who has published over 200 scientific papers, warned Congress that it has been “badly misinformed” about man-made global warming fears. “Congress has been getting bad intelligence,” Happer, who was reportedly fired by former Vice President Al Gore in 1993 for failing to adhere to Gore’s scientific views, declared in a July 6, 2009 in an interview.

“Congress has been badly misinformed about the so-called science that supports the claim that increasing CO2 levels will bring about catastrophic climate change,” Happer explained to Newsmax.com. (Full audio of interview with Happer here.) Happer did not mince words, calling the movement to promote man-made global warming fears a “climate change cult” and noted that “zealots” promoting climate fears “are actually extremely ignorant.”

“The idea that Congress can stop climate change would be just hilarious if the actions they propose were not so damaging to the American people and even more [damaging] to the poorer people of the world,” Happer said.

“The so-called facts they are getting are just not true,” Happer explained. “This is not a Democrat or Republican issue. As our Congressman learn more about the facts, they will change their minds” and reject man-made climate fears.

‘CO2 is not a pollutant’ - Earth in ‘CO2 famine’

Happer noted that “CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is essential for life.” He added that the Earth will “be a better place with more CO2.”

Happer testified before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on February 25, 2009 and noted that the Earth was currently in a “CO2 famine.” Happer requested to be added to the U.S. Senate Report of over 700 dissenting scientists on December 22, 2008. Happer also co-authored an Open Letter to Congress with a team of scientists on July 1, 2009 warning: ‘You Are Being Deceived About Global Warming’—‘Earth has been cooling for ten years.’

In addition, Happer has led a group of 54 prominent physicists to demand the American Physical Society (APS) revise its global warming position. The 54 physicists wrote to APS governing board: “Measured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20th - 21st century changes are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today.” (Note: Both Nature and Science magazines refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)

In the July 6, 2009 interview, Happer noted that many are poised to benefit from the proposed Congressional carbon trading bill. “History shows you really can get rich on a cult. Some of big pushers of cap-and-trade were Enron before it went belly up,” Happer said.

See post here.

On June 23, 2009, The Heartland Institute urged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw its proposed “Endangerment Finding” for emissions of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles. Heartland submitted Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change in opposition to this proposed rule as well as a 68-page legal analysis by Maureen Martin, Heartland’s senior fellow for legal affairs.

The specific issue involved is whether the EPA Administrator should make a positive finding that six greenhouse gases “cause” or “contribute to” “air pollution” that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare” under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act. This proposed finding has ramifications well beyond this rulemaking because it will trigger a cascade of regulation of these greenhouse gas emissions under other sections of the act.

Federal law prohibits enactment of regulations that are unreasonable or arbitrary and capricious. The law requires that regulations be based on scientific information that is (1) “accurate, clear, complete, and unbiased,” (2) the most recent available, and (3) collected by the “best available methods.” EPA’s proposal violates all of these requirements.

EPA’s proposal relies almost entirely on the reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which include data only through 2006 and which are thoroughly discredited in Climate Change Reconsidered. EPA failed to consider the vast body of peer-reviewed academic research cited in Climate Change Reconsidered. That research demonstrates, among other things, that EPA bases the regulation on computer models that are incapable of accurately simulating past temperatures and thus cannot be used to predict future temperatures. EPA admits there are substantial uncertainties in these models.

EPA’s contentions that the global warming of the twentieth century was caused by human activity and that human emissions will cause future warming are undermined by an extensive body of scientific research pointing to natural forcings and feedback effects that are not taken into account by computer models. Some of these forcings and effects are sufficiently large to entirely explain the warming of the twentieth century or to entirely offset any human effect due to carbon dioxide emissions. Similarly, extensive observational data contradict EPA’s contentions that there has been a human effect on the rate at which glaciers have melted since the last Ice Age, sea levels have risen, or precipitation has increased or become more extreme. EPA also fails to consider research by solar scientists who find temperatures correlate more closely with solar cycles than with anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

See list of EPA submissions on the Heartland website here.

Two prominent U.S. Government scientists made two separate admissions questioning the reliability of climate models used to predict warming decades and hundreds of years into the future.

Gary Strand, a software engineer at the federally funded National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), admitted climate model software “doesn’t meet the best standards available” in a comment he posted on the website Climate Audit.

“As a software engineer, I know that climate model software doesn’t meet the best standards available. We’ve made quite a lot of progress, but we’ve still quite a ways to go,” Strand wrote on July 5, 2009, according to the website WattsUpWithThat.

Strand’s candid admission promoted WattsUpWithThat’s skeptical Meteorologist Anthony Watts to ask the following question: “Do we really want Congress to make trillion dollar tax decisions today based on ‘software [that] doesn’t meet the best standards available?’” Meteorologist Watts also critiqued the current climate models, noting, “NASA GISS model E written on some of the worst FORTRAN coding ever seen is a challenge to even get running. NASA GISTEMP is even worse. Yet our government has legislation under consideration significantly based on model output that Jim Hansen started. His 1988 speech to Congress was entirely based on model scenarios.”

Another government scientist—NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt—admitted last week that the “chaotic component of climate system...is not predictable beyond two weeks, even theoretically.” Schmidt made his admission during a June 29, 2009 interview about the shortcomings of climate models. Schmidt noted that some climate models “suggest very strongly” that the American Southwest will dry in a warming world. But Schmidt also noted that “other models suggest the exact opposite.” “With these two models, you have two estimates - one says it’s going to get wetter and one says it’s going to get drier. What do you do? Is there anything that you can say at all? That is a really difficult question,” Schmidt conceded.

“The problem with climate prediction and projections going out to 2030 and 2050 is that we don’t anticipate that they can be tested in the way you can test a weather forecast. It takes about 20 years to evaluate because there is so much unforced variability in the system which we can’t predict - the chaotic component of the climate system - which is not predictable beyond two weeks, even theoretically. That is something that we can’t really get a handle on,” Schmidt lamented.

The credibility of these computer model predictions—used by governments to determine global warming policy based on future climate risks—have been under increasingly intense scrutiny for years.

In June 2007, Dr. Jim Renwick, a top UN IPCC scientist, admitted that climate models do not account for half the variability in nature and thus are not reliable. “Half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don’t expect to do terrifically well,” Renwick conceded.

Another high-profile UN IPCC lead author, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, echoed Renwick’s sentiments in 2007 about climate models by referring to them as “story lines.” “In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers ‘what if’ projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios,” Trenberth wrote in journal Nature’s blog on June 4, 2007.

IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr Vincent Gray, of New Zealand, an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports going back to 1990, author of more than 100 scientific publications and author of The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of “Climate Change 2001,” declared “The claims of the IPCC are dangerous unscientific nonsense” in an April 10, 2007 article. “All [UN IPCC does] is make ‘projections’ and ‘estimates’. No climate model has ever been properly tested, which is what ‘validation’ means, and their ‘projections’ are nothing more than the opinions of ‘experts’ with a conflict of interest, because they are paid to produce the models. There is no actual scientific evidence for all these ‘projections’ and ‘estimates,’” Gray noted.

In addition, atmospheric scientist Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, a scientific pioneer in the development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at The Netherlands’ Royal National Meteorological Institute, recently compared scientists who promote computer models predicting future climate doom to unlicensed “software engineers.” “I am of the opinion that most scientists engaged in the design, development, and tuning of climate models are in fact software engineers. They are unlicensed, hence unqualified to sell their products to society,” Tennekes wrote on February 28, 2007.

On a New Zealand radio interview in 2007, the late Atmospheric Scientist Augie Auer ridiculed climate model predictions: “Most of these climate predictions or models, they are about a half a step ahead of PlayStation 3 [video games]. They’re really not justified in what they are saying. Many of the assumptions going into [the models] are simply not right.” Atmospheric physicist James Peden ridiculed climate models in October 2008, calling them “computerised tinker toys with which one can construct any outcome he chooses.” (LINK)

In addition, top forecasting experts now say the models violate the basic principles of forecasting. Ivy League forecasting pioneer Dr. Scott Armstrong “Of 89 principles [of forecasting], the UN IPCC violated 72.” - January 28, 2009. Forecast Pioneers: Climate modelers violated 49 principles of forecasting - June 16, 2009. In addition, Prominent Physicist Freeman Dyson has referred to climate models as “rubbish.” See much more with links here. See also more still in this EPA comment.

TO THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES

YOU ARE BEING DECEIVED ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING

You have recently received an Open Letter from the Woods Hole Research Center, exhorting you to act quickly to avoid global disaster. The letter purports to be from independent scientists, but that Center is the former den of the President[s science advisor, John Holdren, and is far from independent. This is the same science advisor who has given us predictions of “almost certain” thermonuclear war or eco-catastrophe by the year 2000, and many other forecasts of doom that somehow never seem to arrive on time.

The facts are:

The sky is not falling; the Earth has been cooling for ten years, without help.

The present cooling was NOT predicted by the alarmists’ computer models, and has come as an embarrassment to them.

The finest meteorologists in the world cannot predict the weather two weeks in advance, let alone the climate for the rest of the century. Can Al Gore? Can John Holdren?

We are flooded with claims that the evidence is clear, that the debate is closed, that we must act immediately, etc, but in fact THERE IS NO SUCH EVIDENCE; IT DOESN’T EXIST.

The proposed legislation would cripple the US economy, putting us at a disadvantage compared to our competitors. China and India are committing no such self-destruction. For such drastic damage, it is only prudent to demand genuine proof that it is needed, not just computer projections, and not false claims about the state of the science.

SCIENCE IS GUIDED BY PROOF, NOT CONSENSUS
Finally, climate alarmism pays well. Alarmists are rolling in wealth from the billions of dollars floating around for the taking, and being taken. It is always instructive to follow the money.

Robert Austin Professor of Physics, Princeton University
Roger Cohen retired physicist, former Manager, Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil
Laurence Gould Professor of Physics, University of Hartford
William Happer Professor of Physics, Princeton University
Hal Lewis emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara
Richard Lindzen Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
S. Fred Singer emeritus Professor of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia

Icecap Note: Joe Bast of the Heartland Instutute also provided an open letter to the senators this past week. See the letter here.

The vote on the Climate Change Bill, otherwise known as House Resolution 2454, has been rushed through so fast in order to pull the wool over our eyes.  The debate is not over and the science is not settled...not by a long shot!  There is no doubt that the increasing population and extent of technology requires more efficient, cleaner energy.  But politics is replacing, not embracing, science on this issue.  Is cap and trade the answer?  Is a war on carbon dioxide the answer? Keep reading to see just some of the flaws in this approach.

First, Climate Change and Global Warming are buzz terms that are still quite subjective.  While we have been overwhelmed by the media coverage of Al Gore and the IPCC report, there is a lot lost in the translation.  Recovering sea ice has been under reported...I could write a book on it, and many people have.  However, for the purpose of this story, I want to be more fair than Congressional leaders.  I want you to read this, with plenty of time to spare.

The Skeptic’s Handbook

A skeptic is a person who will not subject himself to popularity or authority in order to accept the truth of opinion.  I have always followed the motto that proof of warming is not proof that greenhouse gasses caused it.  Joanne Nova recently put together, “The Skeptic’s Handbook”, with four distinct points to support this argument.  She was an advocate for greenhouse gas reduction from 1990 until 2007. Who better than a recent convert to the skeptic side to make these points below? (Supporting images can be found in the slide show here.)

1. The Greenhouse signature is missing.
The computer modeling just doesn’t fit what was expected and what has occurred - not whether or not it’s warmer, but that other levels of the atmosphere are much cooler than expected.  Check out the first two images in the slide show.  The science on this is still young, and we don’t know everything.  Mistakes have been made in expectation of warming.

2. The strongest evidence was the ice cores, but newer, more detailed data turned the theory inside out.
Look at the charts of the Vostok Ice Cores from 150,000 years ago.  The CO2 from the atmosphere is measured in trapped air bubbles.  It turns out that the temperature increased about 800 years before CO2 increased.  Think of how a warm bottle of soda will explode when you open it.  The oceans give off more trapped CO2 when they warm.  El Nino events can do the same thing.

If you look at the charts more closely, I have identified times when CO2 went up but temperature went down.  Some other force must have been involved in climate change and may very well be governing it today.

3. Temperature is not rising.
The year 1998 was the second warmest on record.  In fact, 1934 still ranks as the hottest. High temperatures must have been due to factors other than rising CO2 since 64 years span between the two warmest years with many cool spells. The chart of temperature and CO2 in recent years shows that since 2001, both satellite and surface data do not indicate warming.  In fact, since 2003, temperatures have actually gotten cooler on average.

There is also a flaw among the reporting stations.  Many NOAA weather stations do not comply with their own standards.  The well- know phenomenon of the urban heat island does much more than keep the cities warmer at night.  The same conditions of concrete, asphalt, and brick buildings that hold in heat are too close to these weather stations. In some cases, official weather stations have been moved next to exhaust fans of buildings.  That hardly seems accurate and legitimate when they should be in open fields, away from tall objects and raised six feet off the ground!

4. Carbon Dioxide is already doing almost all of the warming it can do.
The influence of CO2 has peaked out.  Adding more will not necessarily produce more heat.  It’s like adding too much sugar to your coffee. At some point, the sugar will just collect on the bottom.  The sweetness has been maxed out.  It should also be noted that CO2 is found in soda, and it makes up the gas we exhale.  Will these sources be subject to cap and trade?  That is a fiscally conservative question, but it does apply for all.  The war declared on carbon dioxide does not have the best science to support it.  Perhaps war should be declared on methane.  It has 20 times the capacity to absorb heat per molecule; therefore, taxing flatulence seems much more appropriate.  It could be linked in with a smoking tax and considered second hand smoke.

Clean Energy vs. Cap and Trade
When the Heritage Foundation did its analysis of Waxman-Markey, it broadly compared the economy with and without the carbon tax. Under this more comprehensive scenario, it found Waxman-Markey would cost the economy $161 billion by the year 2020, which is $1,870 for a family of four. As the bill’s restrictions kick in, that number rises to $6,800 for a family of four by 2035. I support clean energy.  I support solar panels that are more efficient than those that are on the market today.  I support off-shore wind turbines, but these are opposed by NIMBY activists on many coastal areas.  There is no clear plan to make a transition to alternative energy.  Look how corn for ethanol turned out.  It’s better that we figure out a proper way to progress rather than make a rushed judgment on poorly explained science.

See this post here. For the complete information from Joanne Nova : most NOAA weather stations are inaccurate because of poor siting: See more. See Justin Berk’s story: Global Warming may stop for years or decades. See also this post by Scott Sumner on the Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age. It is correct as history has shown most interglacial periods last 10-12,000 years and we this one has lasted that long. Th major glaciations develop rapidly and last 100,000 years or so. No one can say whether that will happen in decades or many centuries from now but it will happen and unlike the gentle warming of the 1980s and 1990s, the average global cooling of 18F is something that would impact life as we know it when it comes.