At first glance, Maine’s wind energy business may seem to bear little resemblance to the plot of the movie “The Shawshank Redemption” but stick with me for just a minute.

The movie, based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name, focuses on Andy Dufree (played by Tim Robbins) who is convicted—on circumstantial evidence—of murdering his wife. Dufree is sentenced to two consecutive life sentences at Shawshank State Penitentiary, a fictional prison in Maine. After much noble suffering and struggle, Andy Dufree breaks out, leaving behind evidence of the warden’s corruption and brutality.

The wind industry’s strategy in Maine and in the rest of the US parallels the plot in the movie: Americans have been falsely condemned for global warming on circumstantial evidence by a stacked jury and without due process. The jury was stacked with biased climatologists, environmental groups, bureaucrat enforcers, and industry insiders. The verdict, declared without trial by the Environmental Protection Agency was something like this: “carbon dioxide is pollution. Since you can’t control yourselves, we will.”

The jurors then became our self-appointed judges, and wardens, and jailors.

We have been promised freedom, independence, and a “green” redemption, if we just put in the years and of course, payments. Only through renewable energy and wind power, they say, will come salvation.

Wind turbines are hailed as free, clean, and a provider of “green jobs.” In addition, they will provide “freedom and independence from foreigners who hate us!”.

But, those same turbines bring decades of torture and servitude, high cost and debt. America is headed to such a prison replete with sleep deprivation, heavy chains of cost on the “inmates,” and corrupt “jailers and wardens.”

Look at what is happening in Maine.

Recently, courageous journalists have written stories about health complaints from the people in Maine from Mars Hill, Freedom, and Vinalhaven. These people are victims of sleep deprivation caused by the low-frequency noise emitted by the wind turbines.

Maine’s legislators are ignoring the complaints. Meanwhile, the people suffering from the noise are literally “locked-in.” They now have difficulty selling their homes, because of the noise and visual pollution.

Others decry the betrayal and the destruction of Maine’s islands and hills. But they are put down as just “NIMBYs.”

The Maine “warden-legislators” are giving preferential treatment via expedited permitting for industrial turbines, and excessive compensation to developers and investors of massive wind turbine industrial parks. Permitting is fast. Appeal is shortened, stifled and silenced. Harmful health effects, and destructive environmental impacts are ignored.

The Maine wind power law, and announced offshore wind power law, will lock Maine people, and the people of the United States, into usurious long-term electricity costs. Contracts at almost double the current wholesale cost of electricity have been granted by Maine’s Public Utilities Commission to First Wind, the largest industrial wind developer in Maine.

Contracts amounting to $0.80 per kilowatt-hour have been given by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to First Wind’s subsidiary Deep Water Wind, in a 20-year contract for a planned offshore wind development.

For every onshore wind turbine installed in Maine, $1 million to $2 million is added to the national debt. Offshore wind turbines could add $15 to $20 million each to the deficit and debt. Those costs and debts are ones that our children and grandchildren will be forced to pay. Incentives given to industrial wind developers mean there will be scant additions to state or federal tax revenues.

Local property taxes are promised, but few are delivered. The town of Mars Hill for example, receives only a net $100,000 per year from First Wind, the company that owns the turbines installed in 2008. No other business is given such favorable treatment in the state of Maine, or for that matter in the United States.

Unfortunately, we don’t have documents like Andy Dufree to prove corruption. But we do have plenty of circumstantial connections that are easy for all to see:

Former Maine governor and his son: Angus King, developer of a $283 million wind project, whose son, Angus King III, is head of mergers and acquisitions at First Wind.

Former legal counsel and friend of current Governor John Baldacci, Kurt Adams, is now vice president of transmission development at First Wind.

Former employee of the Natural Resources Council of Maine and current chairman of the Energy and Utilities Committee, Jon Hinck, a Democrat from Portland, is married to Juliet Browne, who works as an attorney for the wind industry.

Former defenders of Maine’s mountains and water, The Natural Resources Council of Maine, have turned into promoters for the wind power industry, after receiving contributions and money for natural resources protection in a deal arranged by Juliet Browne.

The hedge fund owners of First Wind have connections high up in the Obama Administration. David E. Shaw, founder of D. E. Shaw (amajor investor in First Wind), was appointed to President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in 2009. Lawrence Summers, a former employee of D. E. Shaw, is now director of Obama’s National Economic Council.

In 2009 First Wind was given $115 million in stimulus funds. The company was just granted a $117 loan guarantee to build a project in Hawaii.

But, according our warden-legislators and jailors, there are no problems here. All this for being falsely convicted on circumstantial evidence? Where is the justice in that? See post here.

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Christie Takes Down Global Warming Paranoia
By Paul Chesser, the Spectator

New Jersey’s new Republican governor, Chris Christie, is dismantling the global warming alarmists’ infrastructure that was installed by his predecessor, Democrat Jon Corzine, and progressive Web site Commondreams.org is deeply saddened:

Apparently by mutual agreement of the outgoing Corzine and incoming Christie administration, a proposed rule to require monitoring and reporting of emissions of greenhouse gases was allowed to quietly die on January 20, 2010 - one year after it was first proposed. This emission monitoring regime is a key mandate of the state’s Global Warming Response Act. Without monitoring and reporting, New Jersey cannot track emissions or develop a regulatory program to meet the reduction milestones set forth in the Act....

Sweeping executive orders imposing a regulatory moratorium, cost-benefit analysis requirements, and a policy of rolling back to minimum federal standards in the first weeks of the Christie administration make it unlikely that any new plan for greenhouse gas monitoring will ever emerge again from DEP. Several other major environmental and public health policies, such as the recently shelved drinking water standard for perchlorate, a chemical used in rocket fuel, are apparently also destined for the scrap heap.

This Christie anti-regulatory stance is compounded by diversions of $300 million in Clean Energy Funds dedicated to energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. In addition, Governor Christie’s proposed budget for FY 2011, beginning this July, will eliminate funding for the Office of Climate Change and Energy--the office responsible for implementing the Global Warming Response Act--even diverting revenue from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) emission credit auctions to the General Fund.

Commondreams characterized Christie’s actions as a “shredding” of New Jersey’s climate change programs. I like it!

It looks as if the tottering IPCC has just made its biggest mistake yet. Twenty-four hours after the announcement of an “independent” inquiry into certain aspects of its activities it is possible to make a considered assessment of its significance. By any reasoned analysis, it is not only a whitewash but one in which the paint is spread so thinly as to be transparent.

First, who appointed this review body? Those two iconic standard bearers of climate science objectivity, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and IPCC head (still!) Rajendra Pachauri. There is nothing like being judge in your own cause - it secures a less damaging verdict. Ban Ki-moon is the clown who, on a visit to the Arctic last September, despairingly proclaimed that “100 billion tons” of polar ice were melting each year, when the sea-ice around him had just extended itself by half a million square kilometres more than at the same time the previous year. Pachauri, among many other solecisms, is also the buffoon who denounced criticism of the IPCC’s absurd claims about melting Himalayan glaciers as “voodoo science”.

Then there is the review’s terms of reference. It has four remits: to analyse the IPCC process, including links with other UN agencies; to review use of non-peer reviewed sources and data quality control; to assess how procedures handle “the full range of scientific views” and to review IPCC communications with the public and the media. So, most of its activity will relate to reorganisation of the IPCC’s propaganda operation and how it can be beefed up.

Nowhere are there proposals for it to revisit, in depth, the IPCC’s 3,000-page 2007 report and repudiate the vast range of inaccuracies and downright fabrications it contains. Instead, the review panel has to report by August so that its meaningless conclusions on a variety of irrelevant issues can be used to sanitise the IPCC’s next report, to be prepared at a meeting in October.

As for the personnel, the review will be conducted by the Inter-Academy Council and headed by its co-chairman Professor Robbert Dijkgraaf, who recently broadcast on Dutch radio a complacent statement about the “consensus” on climate science. The Inter-Academy Council is a representative body for a number of national academies of science, most of which are committed to the climate change cause.

So, a very obvious whitewash and presumably very satisfactory to the IPCC camp. Nevertheless, I repeat, it is probably the most serious mistake the AGW fanatics have so far made. This is because they have seriously underestimated the amount of trouble they are in. Any competent political spin doctor (and the AGW scam is pure politics, not science) would have told them that, as things stand in 2010, they had one last chance - and only one chance - to salvage their bogus crusade.

That was to allow a genuinely independent investigation, including highly qualified sceptics, to analyse the 2007 report and expose all its fallacies - which are already in the public domain in any case. They could then have apologised, sacked Pachauri (which they will probably do anyway) and prepared an equally mendacious but more sophisticated report, jettisoning the more extravagant scare-mongering for the time being, and so clawed back wavering support among the public.

Instead, they have opted for a very obvious whitewash, discredited from the day of its launch, that will provoke hilarity and increased scepticism when it reports. After that, there will be no road back. We should be grateful that the arrogance and over-confidence engendered by their longstanding immunity from challenge (but not any more) prompted the AGW fraudsters to create so inadequate a smokescreen.

This investigation is very good news for sceptics - not because it will denounce any significant flaws in the AGW imposture, but because it will not. AGW credulity is already a minority faith; but there is a further constituency of waverers, ready to break off like a melting iceberg from the main floe, whose final defection will mean the AGW movement is deprived of critical mass. This pathetic attempt at a cover-up could well be the catalyst for that decisive departure. Think about it and be glad.

New Jersey’s new Republican governor, Chris Christie, is dismantling the global warming alarmists’ infrastructure that was installed by his predecessor, Democrat Jon Corzine, and progressive Web site Commondreams.org is deeply saddened:

Apparently by mutual agreement of the outgoing Corzine and incoming Christie administration, a proposed rule to require monitoring and reporting of emissions of greenhouse gases was allowed to quietly die on January 20, 2010 - one year after it was first proposed. This emission monitoring regime is a key mandate of the state’s Global Warming Response Act. Without monitoring and reporting, New Jersey cannot track emissions or develop a regulatory program to meet the reduction milestones set forth in the Act....

Sweeping executive orders imposing a regulatory moratorium, cost-benefit analysis requirements, and a policy of rolling back to minimum federal standards in the first weeks of the Christie administration make it unlikely that any new plan for greenhouse gas monitoring will ever emerge again from DEP. Several other major environmental and public health policies, such as the recently shelved drinking water standard for perchlorate, a chemical used in rocket fuel, are apparently also destined for the scrap heap.

This Christie anti-regulatory stance is compounded by diversions of $300 million in Clean Energy Funds dedicated to energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. In addition, Governor Christie’s proposed budget for FY 2011, beginning this July, will eliminate funding for the Office of Climate Change and Energy--the office responsible for implementing the Global Warming Response Act--even diverting revenue from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) emission credit auctions to the General Fund.

Commondreams characterized Christie’s actions as a “shredding” of New Jersey’s climate change programs. I like it!

Keeping the public looped in on what scientists are discovering has never been easy. For one thing, the traditional explainers - journalists - can distort, hype, or oversimplify the latest breakthroughs. But the need to communicate science broadly and clearly has never been more urgent.

Understanding science helps people know “where the truth speakers are on an issue” such as climate change, says Robert Semper, the executive associate director of the Exploratorium, a hands-on science center in San Francisco.

“The more educated and knowledgeable the public is about science ... the more responsible they can be when it comes time for voting or expressing opinions about public policy,” adds Leslie Fink, a public affairs specialist at the National Science Foundation in Washington.

The importance of getting the word out has science organizations scrambling to explore new channels, from souped up websites to asking Hollywood for help.

The current climate-change furor has become the poster child for what happens when there’s a communications gap between scientists and the public. The vast majority of scientists see compelling evidence that the world’s climate is about to change significantly, and that the change is largely driven by human activity. Yet polls show public opinion becoming more skeptical about climate change.

Contributing to that swing have been efforts by skeptics to point out flaws in specific portions of the landmark 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and question whether other findings might have been manipulated. An usually snowy winter in parts of the United States has also brought scorn from critics, who ask, “Where is the global warming?” (Data tell another story: Worldwide, last January was one of the warmest on record, and the decade 2000-2009 was the hottest on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization.)

The result has been a “corrosion” of public confidence in climate science, says Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). That “damage,” he says, “has spilled over into other fields of science.”

At the same time, traditional news media outlets have been cutting back on science writers. In 2008, CNN dismantled its entire science reporting staff. While few newsroom cuts have targeted science coverage so directly, countless examples of thinning ranks - including ABC News announcing in February that it will shed about 25 percent of its news division - have displaced many specialist reporters.

“Professional journalism has been cut to the bone. And the first people to go are science journalists,” says Bora Zivkovic, who writes the science blog “A Blog Around the Clock” from Chapel Hill, N.C., and serves as online community manager for PLoS One, a peer-reviewed science journal. With fewer authorities in the media, “scientists have to take that over,” he says. Mr. Zivkovic spoke as part of a panel on how to better communicate science at the annual convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego last month.

One effort, announced at the meeting, will recruit Hollywood to help scientists tell their stories. NAS and the University of Southern California will team up to draw on USC’s expertise in film, TV, websites, and video games. The partnership will be the first between a federal agency and a film school.

“Entertainment media has been pretty much untapped as far as science literacy goes,” Dr. Fink says. A huge portion of the public doesn’t go to science museums or watch science programming on TV, she says. “Those are the eyeballs we’re trying to capture.”

Feature films such as “Apollo 13” and “Contact” show that movies can be both box-office successes and inspire careers in science, says Elizabeth Daley, dean of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, whose graduates are used to winning Oscars, not Nobel Prizes. She hopes the program will provide screenwriters, producers, and directors with knowledgeable science sources to advise them.

The short cartoon within the 1993 film “Jurassic Park” that showed how one might clone dinosaurs provides a terrific example of what could be produced, Dr. Daley says. “It’s a very clear, simple explanation of DNA that people can understand.” As news outlets scale back science coverage, the Exploratorium’s Dr. Semper says that “nonprofits are actually becoming the intermediary between science and the public more than in the past.”

Semper’s center has reached out directly to scientists to help them tell their stories online. For example, the Exploratorium’s online feature “Ice Stories” was the result of giving polar scientists cameras and blogs to report back on what they learned in the field. Young scientists in particular are “very excited about talking about their work to the public,” he says.

Some might look for today’s Carl Sagan, the scientist who popularized astronomy through books and TV shows decades ago. Dr. Sagan had a way of engaging people by explaining the wonder of space - a very positive message, Semper says.

Today’s climate story is often framed as a sober warning, not as an exciting adventure. Some of that is by necessity. “It’s important for the public to know that scientists are coming across this evidence [of climate change] - it’s real evidence - that there may be some disagreements among the details but that doesn’t negate the entire picture,” Semper says. But the effort to better understanding earth’s climate is also exciting, a message that has been lost, he says. “The scientific questions are absolutely fascinating.”

Universities have stepped up their communication efforts as well. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., the paper-and-ink campus newspaper is long gone. But in September, the MIT News Office unveiled a new website aimed not just at the college community but at readers around the world, says Nathaniel Nickerson, editorial director of the news office. Five full-time science writers don’t try to “hype” the work of MIT scientists, he says. Instead, as journalists would do, they seek sources outside MIT to critique the research. The new website is attracting 350,000 to 400,000 unique visitors per month, Mr. Nickerson says, more than expected and accomplished “without any marketing whatsoever.”

Even the US government has joined in with a new site called climate.gov, aimed at being a reliable source of data and facts on climate change. “It’s clear that there’s been an insufficient job of communicating climate information to the public,” says Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which runs the website. “I think much more needs to be done to communicate to policymakers and citizens everywhere how important this issue is, what’s at stake, and what the opportunities are for addressing climate change.”

Scientists must learn that in the online era, sharing with the public is now a two-way conversation, not a one-way broadcast, blogger Zivkovic says. “Talking ‘one to many’ is now seen as talking down,” he says. Scientists today also need to know how to produce compelling videos and still images that explain their work. “We don’t need one Sagan,” Zivkovic says. “We need several hundred of them, each in a different place.”

A new NASA-funded study has concluded that Amazon rain forests were remarkably unaffected in the face of once-in-a-century drought in 2005, neither dying nor thriving, contrary to a previously published report and claims by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“We found no big differences in the greenness level of these forests between drought and non-drought years, which suggests that these forests may be more tolerant of droughts than we previously thought,” said Arindam Samanta, the study’s lead author from Boston University.

The comprehensive study published in the current issue of the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters used the latest version of the NASA MODIS satellite data to measure the greenness of these vast pristine forests over the past decade.

A study published in the journal Science in 2007 claimed that these forests actually thrive from drought because of more sunshine under cloud-less skies typical of drought conditions. The new study found that those results were flawed and not reproducible.

Canopy of the Amazon rain forest. A new study has concluded that Amazon rain forests were remarkably unaffected in the face of once-in-a-century drought in 2005, neither dying nor thriving, contrary to a previously published report and claims by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“This new study brings some clarity to our muddled understanding of how these forests, with their rich source of biodiversity, would fare in the future in the face of twin pressures from logging and changing climate,” said Boston University Prof. Ranga Myneni, senior author of the new study.

The IPCC is under scrutiny for various data inaccuracies, including its claim—based on a flawed World Wildlife Fund study—that up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically and be replaced by savannas from even a slight reduction in rainfall.

“Our results certainly do not indicate such extreme sensitivity to reductions in rainfall,” said Sangram Ganguly, an author on the new study, from the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute affiliated with NASA Ames Research Center in California.

“The way that the WWF report calculated this 40% was totally wrong, while [the new] calculations are by far more reliable and correct,” said Dr. Jose Marengo, a Brazilian National Institute for Space Research climate scientist and member of the IPCC. See report here.

Journal Reference: Samanta et al. Amazon forests did not green-up during the 2005 drought. Geophysical Research Letters, 2010; 37 (5): L05401 DOI: 10.1029/2009GL042154

It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago - changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media - even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC - are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying ‘It is too so!’ In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.

The body blows to the climate campaign did not end with the Climategate emails. The IPCC - which has produced four omnibus assessments of climate science since 1992 - has issued several embarrassing retractions from its most recent 2007 report, starting with the claim that Himalayan glaciers were in danger of melting as soon as 2035. That such an outlandish claim would be so readily accepted is a sign of the credulity of the climate campaign and the media: Even if extreme global warming occurred over the next century, the one genuine scientific study available estimated that the huge ice fields of the Himalayas would take more than 300 years to melt - a prediction any beginning chemistry student could confirm with a calculator. (The actual evidence is mixed: Some Himalayan glaciers are currently expanding.) The source for the melt-by-2035 claim turned out to be not a peer-reviewed scientific assessment, but a report from an advocacy group, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which in turn lifted the figure from a popular magazine article in India whose author later disavowed his offhand speculation.

But what made this first retraction noteworthy was the way in which it underscored the thuggishness of the climate establishment. The IPCC’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri (an economist and former railroad engineer who is routinely described as a ‘climate scientist’, initially said that critics of the Himalayan glacier melt prediction were engaging in “voodoo science,” though it later turned out that Pachauri had been informed of the error in early December- in advance of the U.N.’s climate change conference in Copenhagen - but failed to disclose it. He’s invoking the Charlie Rangel defense: It was my staff’s fault.

The Himalayan retraction has touched off a cascade of further retractions and corrections, though the IPCC and other organs of climate alarmism are issuing their corrections sotto voce, hoping the media won’t take notice. The IPCC’s assessment that 40 percent of the Amazonian rain forest was at risk of destruction from climate change was also revealed to be without scientific foundation; the WWF was again the source. The Daily Telegraph identified 20 more claims of ruin in the IPCC’s 2007 report that are based on reports from advocacy groups such as Greenpeace rather than peer-reviewed research, including claims that African agricultural production would be cut in half, estimates of coral reef degradation, and the scale of glacier melt in the Alps and the Andes. Numerous other claims were sourced to unpublished student papers and dissertations, or to misstated or distorted research.

Peer reviewers in the formal IPCC process had flagged many of these errors and distortions during the writing of the 2007 report but were ignored. For example, the IPCC claimed that the world is experiencing rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather related events brought on by climate change. But the underlying paper, when finally published in 2008, expressly contradicted this, saying, “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.” Perhaps the most embarrassing walkback was the claim that 55 percent of the Netherlands was below sea level, and therefore gravely threatened by rising sea levels. The correct number is 26 percent, which Dutch scientists say they tried to tell the IPCC before the 2007 report was published, to no avail. And in any case, a paper published last year in Nature Geoscience predicting a 21st-century sea level rise of up to 32 inches has been withdrawn, with the authors acknowledging mistaken methodology and admitting “we can no longer draw firm conclusions regarding 21st century sea level rise from this study without further work.” The IPCC ignored several published studies casting doubt on its sea level rise estimates.

This central pillar of the climate campaign is unlikely to survive much longer, and each repetition of the “science-is-settled” mantra inflicts more damage on the credibility of the climate science community. The scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal at East Anglia University, Phil ("hide the decline") Jones dealt the science-is-settled narrative a huge blow with his candid admission in a BBC interview that his surface temperature data are in such disarray they probably cannot be verified or replicated, that the medieval warm period may have been as warm as today, and that he agrees that there has been no statistically significant global warming for the last 15 years- all three points that climate campaigners have been bitterly contesting. And Jones specifically disavowed the “science-is-settled” slogan.

Read much more here.

"The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot,” according to a Commerce Department report published by the Washington Post. Writes the Post: “Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers. . . all point to a radical change in climate conditions and . . . unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone . . . Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones . . . while at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared.”

More evidence of human-caused global warming? Hardly.

The above report of runaway Arctic warming is from a Washington Post story published Nov. 2, 1922 and bears an uncanny resemblance to the tales of global warming splattered across the front pages of today’s newspapers. It is one of many historical accounts published during the past 140 years describing climate changes and often predicting catastrophic cooling or warming.

Here are excerpts from a few of those accounts, appearing as early as 1870:

“The climate of New-York and the contiguous Atlantic seaboard has long been a study of great interest. We have just experienced a remarkable instance of its peculiarity. The Hudson River, by a singular freak of temperature, has thrown off its icy mantle and opened its waters to navigation.” - New York Times, Jan. 2, 1870

“Is our climate changing? The succession of temperate summers and open winters through several years, culminating last winter in the almost total failure of the ice crop throughout the valley of the Hudson, makes the question pertinent. The older inhabitants tell us that the winters are not as cold now as when they were young, and we have all observed a marked diminution of the average cold even in this last decade.” - New York Times, June 23, 1890

“The question is again being discussed whether recent and long-continued observations do not point to the advent of a second glacial period, when the countries now basking in the fostering warmth of a tropical sun will ultimately give way to the perennial frost and snow of the polar regions.” - New York Times, Feb. 24, 1895

Professor Gregory of Yale University stated that “another world ice-epoch is due.” He was the American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress and warned that North America would disappear as far south as the Great Lakes, and huge parts of Asia and Europe would be “wiped out.” - Chicago Tribune, Aug. 9, 1923

“The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to the conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age” - Time Magazine, Sept. 10, 1923

Headline: “America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-year Rise” - New York Times, March 27, 1933

“America is believed by Weather Bureau scientists to be on the verge of a change of climate, with a return to increasing rains and deeper snows and the colder winters of grandfather’s day."- Associated Press, Dec. 15, 1934

Warming Arctic Climate Melting Glaciers Faster, Raising Ocean Level, Scientist Says - “A mysterious warming of the climate is slowly manifesting itself in the Arctic, engendering a “serious international problem,” Dr. Hans Ahlmann, noted Swedish geophysicist, said today. - New York Times, May 30, 1937

“Greenland’s polar climate has moderated so consistntly that communities of hunters have evolved into fishing villages. Sea mammals, vanishing from the west coast, have been replaced by codfish and other fish species in the area’s southern waters.” - New York Times, Aug. 29, 1954

“An analysis of weather records from Little America shows a steady warming of climate over the last half century. The rise in average temperature at the Antarctic outpost has been about five degrees Fahrenheit.” - New York Times, May 31, 1958

“Several thousand scientists of many nations have recently been climbing mountains, digging tunnels in glaciers, journeying to the Antarctic, camping on floating Arctic ice. Their object has been to solve a fascinating riddle: what is happening to the world’s ice? - New York Times, Dec. 7, 1958

“After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder.” - New York Times, Jan. 30, 1961

“Like an outrigger canoe riding before a huge comber, the earth with its inhabitants is caught on the downslope of an immense climatic wave that is plunging us toward another Ice Age.” - Los Angeles Times, Dec. 23, 1962

“Col. Bernt Balchen, polar explorer and flier, is circulating a paper among polar specialists proposing that the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two.” - New York Times, Feb. 20, 1969

“By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half ...” - Life magazine, January 1970

“In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” - Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day, 1970

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind. 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), Earth Day, 1970

Because of increased dust, cloud cover and water vapor, “the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” - Newsweek magazine, Jan. 26, 1970

“The United States and the Soviet Union are mounting large-scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid, why parts of the Arctic sea ice have recently become ominously thicker and whether the extent of that ice cover contributes to the onset of ice ages.” - New York Times, July 18, 1970

“In the next 50 years, fine dust that humans discharge into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel will screen out so much of the sun’s rays that the Earth’s average temperature could fall by six degrees. Sustained emissions over five to 10 years, could be sufficient to trigger an ice age.” - Washington Post, July 9, 1971

“It’s already getting colder. Some midsummer day, perhaps not too far in the future, a hard, killing frost will sweep down on the wheat fields of Saskatchewan, the Dakotas and the Russian steppes. . . .” - Los Angles Times, Oct. 24, 1971

“An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.” - New York Times, Jan. 5, 1978

“A poll of climate specialists in seven countries has found a consensus that there will be no catastrophic changes in the climate by the end of the century. But the specialists were almost equally divided on whether there would be a warming, a cooling or no change at all.” - New York Times, Feb. 18, 1978

“A global warming trend could bring heat waves, dust-dry farmland and disease, the experts said… Under this scenario, the resort town of Ocean City, Md., will lose 39 feet of shoreline by 2000 and a total of 85 feet within the next 25 years.” - San Jose Mercury News, June 11, 1986

“Global warming could force Americans to build 86 more power plants—at a cost of $110 billion—to keep all their air conditioners running 20 years from now, a new study says...Using computer models, researchers concluded that global warming would raise average annual temperatures nationwide two degrees by 2010, and the drain on power would require the building of 86 new midsize power plants - Associated Press, May 15, 1989

“New York will probably be like Florida 15 years from now.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 17, 1989 (actually Florida was more like New York 20 years later)

“[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots . . . [By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers . . . The Mexican police will round up illegal American migrants surging into Mexico seeking work as field hands.” - “Dead Heat: The Race Against the Greenhouse Effect,” Michael Oppenheimer and Robert H. Boyle, 1990.

“It appears that we have a very good case for suggesting that the El Ninos are going to become more frequent, and they’re going to become more intense and in a few years, or a decade or so, we’ll go into a permanent El Nino. So instead of having cool water periods for a year or two, we’ll have El Nino upon El Nino, and that will become the norm. And you’ll have an El Nino, that instead of lasting 18 months, lasts 18 years,” according to Dr. Russ Schnell, a scientist doing atmospheric research at Mauna Loa Observatory. - BBC, Nov. 7, 1997 (followed immediately in late 1998 by three straight years of La Nina)

“Scientists are warning that some of the Himalayan glaciers could vanish within ten years because of global warming. A build-up of greenhouse gases is blamed for the meltdown, which could lead to drought and flooding in the region affecting millions of people.”—The Birmingham Post in England, July 26, 1999

“This year (2007) is likely to be the warmest year on record globally, beating the current record set in 1998.” - ScienceDaily, Jan. 5, 2007

Arctic warming has become so dramatic that the North Pole may melt this summer (2008), report scientists studying the effects of climate change in the field. “We’re actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time [in history],” David Barber, of the University of Manitoba, told National Geographic News aboard the C.C.G.S. Amundsen, a Canadian research icebreaker. - National Geographic News, June 20, 2008

“So the climate will continue to change, even if we make maximum effort to slow the growth of carbon dioxide. Arctic sea ice will melt away in the summer season within the next few decades. Mountain glaciers, providing fresh water for rivers that supply hundreds of millions of people, will disappear - practically all of the glaciers could be gone within 50 years. . . Clearly, if we burn all fossil fuels, we will destroy the planet we know . . . We would set the planet on a course to the ice-free state, with sea level 75 metres higher. Climatic disasters would occur continually.” Dr. James Hansen (NASA GISS), The Observer, Feb. 15, 2009.

Climate change? Yes, there has been plenty of that during the past 140 years. Despite warnings by “experts of the day” of approaching climate disasters, mankind somehow managed to survive. A decade or so from now, after earth’s climate changes once again, those who are old enough will recall with amusement the time, early in the 21st century, when the world went crazy over an imaginary threat called “global warming.”

Kirk Myers is one of the few environmental reporters who is bothering to look at actual data - not reading from the guidelines provided by the Society of Environmental Journalists. We applaud him for his boldness.

Environmentalists pressure the insurance industry.

Copenhagen was a flop. Congress’s cap-and-trade bill is stalled. The EPA has delayed its climate rules. If you think this means American business is escaping the threat of carbon restraints, think again.

Most of the climate debate focuses on Washington. This misses a more clever and committed force - environmental groups that impose their agenda on companies via pressure, legal threat and sympathetic regulators. A textbook example has been quietly unfolding in the insurance sector. The question is whether governors will stand by to let green activists effectively regulate their businesses.

Since the beginning of the climate debate, environmental lobbies such as Ceres (a coalition of activists and investors that pressures companies to go green) have expressed particular interest in insurers. Rather than nitpick every company to adopt climate-change policies, these organizations realized it would be more efficient to target a gatekeeper. Everybody needs insurance. If insurers could be bludgeoned into requiring policyholders adopt carbon-mitigation practices as a requirement for insurance, the activists would have imposed their will widely and quickly.

Enter the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the professional body for state regulators. Unlike, say, the National Governors Association, NAIC has a quasi-regulatory role. Insurance is complex, and the association develops model bills for state legislatures to vote on. This has at times been beneficial, but NAIC’S structure also means activist commissioners can drive its agenda.

No surprise then when several commissioners - with the prodding of outside green groups - several years ago dragged NAIC into the climate debate. It began innocently enough, with a task force charged with producing a “white paper.”

Yet under the direction of members such as Wisconsin Insurance Commissioner Sean Dilweg and Pennsylvania Commissioner Joel Ario - both climate crusaders - the task force turned itself into a national climate regulator. In particular, in unveiled its “Climate Risk Disclosure Survey,” a document insurers must complete and make public. This survey was not put forward for legislative approval, but rather presented as something state commissioners must issue unilaterally.

Among the questions: Does the company have a plan to assess, reduce or mitigate its emissions in its operations or organizations? Summarize steps the company has taken to encourage policyholders to reduce the losses caused by climate change-influenced events. Has the company considered the impact of climate change on its investment portfolio?

The survey - already issued in some states - flows from the tenuous position that climate change poses grave risks to business. As such it is designed to coerce insurers to adopt and require climate policies, or risk financial and legal fallout.

It’s also crafted to pressure insurers to shift their sizable investment portfolios away from, say, Exxon, and into the sort of “socially responsible” investments ballyhooed by Ceres. Companies that refuse will be prime targets for trial lawyers who claim they have failed to protect investors. It is, in effect, regulation via public and legal pressure.

The survey itself was crafted by the environmental lobby, using NAIC as its vehicle. Industry groups were amazed and horrified to see Ceres present at task force meetings, designing the survey language. It came out that the Rockefeller Family Fund - an ideologically green foundation - had provided grant money to fund “research assistance” for NAIC’s climate task force. Since when do state regulators require financial assistance from an outside advocacy organization?

Industry associations such as the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies have pushed back, and managed to have the survey cut to eight questions from its initial 23. The financial threshold of insurers that must take part is also higher, though will still encompass an estimated 70% of the industry by market share.

When I called the industry association CEO Chuck Chamness to ask him about this fight, he expressed the general frustration: “We are a good, green industry. What we don’t believe is that our industry should be made into an environmental traffic cop. If there is a need to change business behavior, go directly to the industry in question and regulate it. Don’t use us as leverage.”

Some states have already caught on to this end run around governors and legislatures. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels was the first to object, directing his insurance department to refrain from administering the survey. Officials in Mississippi and Missouri have followed suit; Rhode Island says the survey won’t be mandatory.

Activists groups have meanwhile sought to further spin this victory. Ceres went to Washington last year and made the argument to new Obama Securities and Exchange Commissioner Mary Schapiro that if even state insurance regulators were willing to act, surely so must the SEC? In January the agency issued new regulation requiring publicly listed companies to disclose their “climate risks” to investors.

Thus does an unaccountable political body, advised by unaccountable green groups, fundamentally rewrite the rules of business. Many state governors and politicians remain in the dark about this back door power grab. If they want a say in how their states enforce climate policy on the business community, they might want to intervene soon.