There’s a new cost:benefit study from New York University Law School’s Institute for Public Integrity that, its authors claim, shows that, “From almost any perspective and under almost any assumption, H.R. 2454 [Waxman-Markey] is a good investment for the United States to make in our own economic future and in the future of the planet.” A good investment for the US? Really?

The authors recognize that the benefits they find are global, while the costs are located in the US.  So let’s see what benefits accrue to US citizens and at what cost. (I am working with the authors’ figures here, which derive from the EPA, and are significantly different from the figures provided by such groups as the Heritage Foundation or the American Council for Capital Formation, which find much, much higher costs.)

Highest possible benefit = $5.2 trillion / 6 billion people = benefits of $866 per person

Cost to US citizen = $660 billion / 300 million people = cost of $2200 per citizen

That means a best possible benefit to cost ratio for a US citizen of 0.4:1.

The report talks about thinking of the Waxman-Markey costs as a “highly effective, highly leveraged form of foreign aid.” One has to doubt that, given that the benefits that accrue to the developing world do so mostly in the far future, while the developing world is in desperate need of greater wealth - and better access to energy - today.  Even if it were true, however, one wonders whether the American public will accept a de facto tax increase of around $1300 per person, or $400 billion total, to pay for such climate aid.

Yet that’s assuming that the “high end” benefits scenario is what occurs.  The global low end benefits are actually far outweighed by the American costs, leading to a benefit:cost ratio to America of something in the order of 0.05:1 (or a cost:benefit ratio of 20:1).

And, of course, there’s no guarantee that a reduction in American emissions will amount to a reduction in global emissions.  We have seen the response to European cap-and-trade schemes being the relocation of facilities to other jurisdictions.  If so, the effective foreign aid program of Waxman-Markey might actually be a loss of American jobs to be replaced by developing world jobs, with no emissions reduction at all.  That would be very generous of us, but not quite what the authors of this study have in mind.

To summarize, the authors of the study have conclusively demonstrated that the Waxman-Markey bill is actually a very bad deal for the United States, and their attempts to claim otherwise are just spin. See post here. Please forward these Waxman Markey impact story links to all your friends and family and urge them to contact their congressmen/congresswomen and senators. 

First assume that, on behalf of the global community, you must spend $250-billion a year on something that, while not entirely worthless, promises to give you almost no bang for the buck. Something that came 10th in a list of 10 global challenges.

Next, take on the task of finding the least-worst ways to spend that $250-billion.

Then, unveil your list of least bads, as well as the very baddest bads to government leaders, knowing that they think you have it all upside down - they view your lowest priorities as their highest, and your baddest bads as the bestest goods.

The “you” in this tale of masochism is Denmark’s Bjorn Lomborg, a.k.a. The Skeptical Environmentalist, and the “something” that came dead last in his list of 10 global challenges was climate change. In 2004, Lomborg and his Copenhagen Consensus Center asked a distinguished panel of economists to weigh the usefulness of stepping up action on 10 global challenges: civil conflicts; climate change; communicable diseases; education; financial stability; governance; hunger and malnutrition; migration; trade reform; and water and sanitation. He then asked his panel to answer the following question: “What would be the best ways of advancing global welfare, and particularly the welfare of developing countries, supposing that an additional $50-billion of resources were at governments’ disposal?”

The panel decided that the money could be best spent on new measures to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, where $27-billion could avert nearly 30 million new infections by 2010. A close second on the list of priorities was hunger and malnutrition, where a mere $12-billion spent on food supplements would work wonders reducing iron-deficiency anaemia.

Dead last on the panel’s list was climate change: No matter how the panel looked at the proposals on the table, it found no way to spend money intelligently to solve climate change, even though it accepted as given that climate change was a bona fide concern.

Government leaders, unimpressed, decided to press on with their plans to spend billions on their climate change priorities. So, Lomborg, in an attempt to minimize the damage they could do, decided to make the best of a bad bargain. He would again assemble a panel, this time accepting as given that $250-billion a year must be spent on climate change.

Yesterday, his new panel came out with recommendations for how governments can minimize the harm they’re planning to inflict on the globe in pursuit of alleviating harm from climate change. The least bad thing governments can do involves geo-engineering the planet, possibly by spraying salt water over the oceans at a cost of a mere $9-billion, in the process creating cloud cover that will help cool the Earth. To guard against the potential for inadvertently damaging the planet in the process, and to see if the spraying technology could actually work, it would be preceded by 10 years of research. The panel’s next least bad recommendation is R&D into carbon-free energy technologies that are immature, such as nuclear, fusion and geothermal.

Just about the worstest of the baddest ideas of all, the panel found, are exactly what attract many governments - carbon taxes. The very worstest of all - cap and trade schemes of the kind Europe has in place and the U.S. is planning - were too terrible to even consider seriously.

Lomborg deserves his reputation as The Skeptical Environmentalist - his books poke holes in many dogmas society holds dear, often through the use of statistics. But I find he’s not skeptical enough. While he has expended great effort over many years questioning proposed solutions to climate change, he has yet to apply skeptical thinking to the very premise that manmade climate change even belongs on his list of global challenges. He claims, without an iota of skepticism, that “almost all researchers are telling us this is manmade.” This statistician should test this belief, which is at the core of his work, in the same way that he tests the dogmas of those he takes on. A truly skeptical environmentalist would.

Read more here.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

HOLDEN, W.Va. (AP) - The chief executive of coal mining giant Massey Energy blasted supporters of climate-change legislation and other environmental issues affecting the coal industry at a free Labor Day concert and rally in southern West Virginia.

CEO Don Blankenship said he wanted to show people at the event how government regulation is hurting the coal industry, driving up energy prices and making the country less competitive.

“We’re hopeful that through networking that they will educate their neighbors and that they’ll all begging to speak out,” Blankenship said. “We think that will make a difference.” Richmond, Va.-based Massey, which operates mines in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia, is the lead sponsor of the rally, which Blankenship said cost about $1 million to stage. Organizers had predicted the event, headlined by country star Hank Williams Jr., could draw as many as 100,000 people to a reclaimed Logan County strip mine. An attendance estimate was expected in the afternoon, but the morning crowd appeared to be smaller.

Headlining the event are Fox News personality Sean Hannity and country singer Hank Williams Jr. Rocker Ted Nugent is master of ceremonies. Also expected to speak is Lord Christopher Monckton, a science adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. “Today’s the day when the American worker takes back this country,” Nugent said.

Some came to support coal mining, while others were more interested in the music. “This is like the backbone of this area, I mean whether you’re a miner or not,” said Joe Walters, an electrician who drove an hour from Kentucky. Miner Dennis Blankenship, no relation to Don Blankenship, drove from southwestern Virginia to show support for mining. “The industry is being attacked by the Obama administration,” said Dennis Blankenship. “We don’t mine coal, we don’t live.”

Hurricane resident Walter Neal came toting signs opposing climate-change legislation because it would increase energy prices and force more U.S. jobs overseas. “It’s cap and tax,” Neal said. “What concerns us is China and India further gaining the advantage.”

Others were less politically motivated.

Chapmanville resident Roger Dalton said he came mostly for the music. So, too, did Jason Bolling."More or less for the coal miners, plus the show,” said Bolling, who works at a Massey mine in eastern Kentucky.

For Massey, however, the event was an opportunity for Blankenship to highlight what he calls attacks on American workers. “Let’s send the message to Washington that the politicians have to stop giving our jobs away. If they don’t, it’s the politicians that need to retrain and relocate,” he said.

“We don’t need a government that wants to shut down our coal mines. We don’t want a government that wants to increase our power bills. ... We don’t want a government that is run by people who believe they can change the earth’s temperature when they can’t balance a budget.”

Richmond, Va.-based Massey, which operates mines in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia, is the lead sponsor of the rally, which organizers say could draw up to 100,000 people to a reclaimed Logan County strip mine. Also involved are some 100 associations and businesses from the energy, machinery and trucking industries, including Scott Depot-based mine operator International Coal Group.

September 3, 2009: The sun is in the pits of the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century. Weeks and sometimes whole months go by without even a single tiny sunspot. The quiet has dragged out for more than two years, prompting some observers to wonder, are sunspots disappearing?

“Personally, I’m betting that sunspots are coming back,” says researcher Matt Penn of the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona. But, he allows, “there is some evidence that they won’t.”

Penn’s colleague Bill Livingston of the NSO has been measuring the magnetic fields of sunspots for the past 17 years, and he has found a remarkable trend. Sunspot magnetism is on the decline:

Above: Sunspot magnetic fields measured by Livingston and Penn from 1992 - Feb. 2009 using an infrared Zeeman splitting technique. [more]

“Sunspot magnetic fields are dropping by about 50 gauss per year,” says Penn. “If we extrapolate this trend into the future, sunspots could completely vanish around the year 2015.”

This disappearing act is possible because sunspots are made of magnetism. The “firmament” of a sunspot is not matter but rather a strong magnetic field that appears dark because it blocks the upflow of heat from the sun’s interior. If Earth lost its magnetic field, the solid planet would remain intact, but if a sunspot loses its magnetism, it ceases to exist.

“According to our measurements, sunspots seem to form only if the magnetic field is stronger than about 1500 gauss,” says Livingston. “If the current trend continues, we’ll hit that threshold in the near future, and solar magnetic fields would become too weak to form sunspots.”

“This work has caused a sensation in the field of solar physics,” comments NASA sunspot expert David Hathaway, who is not directly involved in the research. “It’s controversial stuff.”

The controversy is not about the data. “We know Livingston and Penn are excellent observers,” says Hathaway. “The trend that they have discovered appears to be real.” The part colleagues have trouble believing is the extrapolation. Hathaway notes that most of their data were taken after the maximum of Solar Cycle 23 (2000-2002) when sunspot activity naturally began to decline. “The drop in magnetic fields could be a normal aspect of the solar cycle and not a sign that sunspots are permanently vanishing.”

Penn himself wonders about these points. “Our technique is relatively new and the data stretches back in time only 17 years. We could be observing a temporary downturn that will reverse itself.”

The technique they’re using was pioneered by Livingston at the McMath-Pierce solar telescope near Tucson. He looks at a spectral line emitted by iron atoms in the sun’s atmosphere. Sunspot magnetic fields cause the line to split in two—an effect called “Zeeman splitting” after Dutch physicist Pieter Zeeman who discovered the phenomenon in the 19th century. The size of the split reveals the intensity of the magnetism.

Zeeman splitting of spectral lines from a strongly-magnetized sunspot. [more]

Astronomers have been measuring sunspot magnetic fields in this general way for nearly a century, but Livingston added a twist. While most researchers measure the splitting of spectral lines in the visible part of the sun’s spectrum, Livingston decided to try an infra-red spectral line. Infrared lines are much more sensitive to the Zeeman effect and provide more accurate answers. Also, he dedicated himself to measuring a large number of sunspots—more than 900 between 1998 and 2005 alone. The combination of accuracy and numbers revealed the downturn.

If sunspots do go away, it wouldn’t be the first time. In the 17th century, the sun plunged into a 70-year period of spotlessness known as the Maunder Minimum that still baffles scientists. The sunspot drought began in 1645 and lasted until 1715; during that time, some of the best astronomers in history (e.g., Cassini) monitored the sun and failed to count more than a few dozen sunspots per year, compared to the usual thousands.

“Whether [the current downturn] is an omen of long-term sunspot decline, analogous to the Maunder Minimum, remains to be seen,” Livingston and Penn caution in a recent issue of EOS. “Other indications of solar activity suggest that sunspots must return in earnest within the next year.”

Whatever happens, notes Hathaway, “the sun is behaving in an interesting way and I believe we’re about to learn something new.” Read release here.

"The climate hysteria created and perpetuated by Western government officials has opened Pandora’s Box. What looked to be a valuable policy tool for green protectionism is now threatening to unleash political chaos and economic misery on its creators and their nations. Climate alarmism has turned into a Frankstein monster that threatens to devour its own designers.” Benny Peiser, CCNet - 4Sept09

There are two ways to cope with possible “global warming” - you can try to control the climate and thus change the future, or you can be prepared to adapt to or cope with whatever the future brings. The choice is “Control the Climate” or “Adapt to the Climate”.

The Carbon Sense Coalition based in Australia today accused western politicians of creating a man-made disaster by destroying the ability of the world to cope with real natural disasters.

The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that an invading enemy could hardly do more damage to our ability to cope with future natural disasters than we are inflicting on ourselves.

“We are being forced to waste our savings and investment capital on futile political gestures such as the Cap-n-Tax Schemes, on horrendously expensive and wasteful ideas like carbon capture and burial, and on costly and totally inadequate and unreliable energy sources such as solar and wind. And in Australia, a leading world food supplier, our policies on woody weeds, water conservation, carbon forests and bio-fuels are deviously destroying our ability to produce food.

All of this stupidity is based on two fallacies. Firstly, the Cap-n-Tax Schemes rely on some totally unproven theory that man can control the climate. Secondly, the urgency is justified by doomsday global warming forecasts from computer models that have never produced a correct forecast for even two years ahead, let alone for the 50-100 years they are projecting.

Despite the expenditure of billions of dollars on computer models, international junkets and climate “research”, not one of the computer models or greenhouse theories predicted the last 10 years of global cooling despite continually rising carbon dioxide levels.

The world has always suffered from recurring natural disasters such as droughts, floods, bush fires, water shortages and crop failures. But never before have we faced a man-made energy and food disaster with the destructive potential of current policies and proposals.

Only rich societies with plenty of tools, machinery, food stocks and savings can cope with natural disasters. When disaster strikes, it is not Cuba, Zimbabwe, Somalia or Bangladesh who send ships, helicopters, trucks, generators, refrigerators, medical supplies, tents, manpower and food to the stricken area. In our corner of the world, what the refugees see arriving are US military helicopters, Canadian fire fighters, Australian aid workers or bags of rice from Japan.

In the past, government policies have always encouraged Australians to save their money and invest it in efficient machinery, tools, food capability and energy sources. Such a policy best equips us to be able to cope with whatever disaster the future may hold.

A study of climate history shows clearly that we are at least as likely to face global cooling with destructive frosts, snow, drought and crop failures, as the opposite and more benign scenario of global warming, with more precipitation and better plant growth.

If the current cooling trend continues or accelerates, the world will need every bit of food and energy we can produce. Money wasted on futile attempts to predict and control future climate would be better spent on improving our mines, factories and farms, and building machinery, tools, roads, dams, railways, airstrips, helicopters and efficient modern power stations.

Our ancestors coped with mammoth ice ages, droughts which depopulated whole countries, spreading deserts of Saharan magnitude and floods of biblical proportions. Those who sat and sacrificed their substance on fantasies such as “Global Warming” perished and left no descendants. Those with the sense to adapt to the changed climates by migration, new food sources, better technology and more productive lifestyles survived.

None of our ancestors were led to survival by high priests in green robes with computer models chanting anti-energy and anti-food slogans.

Never before have we seen a whole generation of western leaders in politics, media, education, academia and big business so cushioned by prosperity, and so mesmerised by pagan nature-worship that they have lost sight of what created and maintains human existence.” Read more here.

See also this essay The Age of Catastrophic Thinking on Azure here.

The global-warming bill moving through Congress would cost the nation nearly $10 trillion—while doing virtually nothing to stop warming. The Waxman-Markey “cap and trade” bill passed the House in late June; the Senate’s due to take it up late this month. Its biggest problem (among many) is that it relies on the myth that we understand exactly what causes warming and what to do about it—that the only issue is finding the political will.

Yet a major new study published in the American Geophysical Union’s official publication, the Journal of Geophysical Research, indicates that most warming isn’t man-made.

The party line is that manmade “greenhouse gas” emissions are clearly the greatest contributor to warming, with the major culprit being carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels that heat and cool our homes and power our vehicles.

But that assumption appears false. “We have shown that internal global-climate-system variability accounts for at least 80 percent of the observed global-climate variation over the past half-century,” says study co-author Christopher de Freitas.

De Freitas, a climatologist at New Zealand’s Auckland University and former editor of the prestigious international journal Climate Research, performed the study with his colleagues Robert Carter (an environmental scientist at two Australian universities) and John McLean (a climate consultant in Victoria, Australia). They found that the major cause of increased global surface temperatures since 1950 are El Nino and La Nina—the abnormal Pacific surface-water heating and cooling phenomena.

Even the remaining 20 percent of observed warming isn’t necessarily related to greenhouse-gas emissions, the researchers say. They point to other natural conditions, such as an increase in solar radiation that’s part of the sun’s normal cycle, called solar variation. The major media ignored the study, as they do virtually all research that doesn’t fit their preconceptions. Yet it “is just one of several papers over the past six years that have shown that observed [increased] temperatures can be accounted for by natural phenomena” notes MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen (who has been critical of both global-warming skeptics and alarmists over the years).

His own work shows that at most “about a third of the surface warming is associated with the greenhouse effect, and, quite possibly, not all of even this really small warming is due to man.” Lindzen says the insistence that man is the only reasonable explanation for global warming reflects “ignorance rather than logic.” Indeed, a simple observation of the recent yearly temperature trend bears that out. As Lindzen notes, “There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995.”

This, when we were belching more “greenhouse gases” into the atmosphere than ever before. Warming alarmists disingenuously label this period a mere “pause” in warming. But it doesn’t fit the definition of “pause” until the trend has changed again—and a study in Nature last year predicted that this “pause” may endure another decade and perhaps even show some cooling. Pause or no, the claim that “more greenhouse gases equals more warming” is clearly neither mathematical nor scientific—but merely ideological.

In any case, we have far cheaper ways to reduce global temperatures. For example, Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently advocated simply painting rooftops and roads a heat-reflecting white. Even the Natural Resources Defense Council calls it “a great idea.”

In contrast, the bill before Congress is neither cheap nor direct. An analysis by the conservative Heritage Foundation found it would cost the nation an average of $393 billion and over a million jobs a year from 2012 to 2035, with an ultimate price tag of $9.4 trillion. (The EPA and the Congressional Budget Office found much lower costs, though needing to use more tricks than a Las Vegas magician to do so.)

Moreover, the bill would merely launch indirect efforts to reduce temperatures by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. To whatever extent those gases don’t directly produce more warming (as, again, they haven’t for the last 15 years), trillions of dollars go right up the smokestack.

Actually, even if greenhouse gases do cause most warming, the bill’s supporters have admitted that it would “probably have only a tiny effect on rising temperatures,” as Kevin Drum, the blogger for the left-wing Mother Jones magazine, observed. Of course, all this isn’t so important if you see other benefits from warming legislation. Such as? Well, at a British forum on July 7, Al Gore crowed that Waxman-Markey is a step toward “global governance.” Woo-hoo—world government!  Too bad if you’re not sure that’s such a hot thing.

Michael Fumento is director of the Independent Journalism Project, where he specializes in health and science issues.

Ken Green was a Working Group 1 expert reviewer for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001.

For weeks now, we’ve been hearing an odd refrain from the Democrats who are pushing hardest for the Waxman-Markey climate bill. They are determined, it seems, not only to have such a bill drawn up before Copenhagen, but to have it signed into law. At the same time, the EPA is widely expected to issue its endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, triggering what will undoubtedly be a hotly disputed regulatory process.

President Obama, it is reported, wants to sign climate legislation before the critically important Copenhagen climate conference in December. And Senate Majority leader Harry Reid wants the President to sign a climate bill this fall as well. They both have plenty of company in the “act first, think later” brigade.
Read much more here.

One of the comments was from Dr. Charles Battig “Good Cop vs. Bad Cop Game Plan”.

The hapless public is witnessing the playing out of a classic “good cop” vs. “bad cop” energy drama. The “good cop” is the Obama Administration and its Congressional supporters of a tax-and-charade (cap-and-trade) make-energy-more-expensive scheme. The “bad cop” is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has managed to define the natural, trace gas, carbon dioxide as a legal “pollutant.” This bad cop threatens to come knocking at doors of all types throughout the land in enforcement of ill-defined new limits on emitters of a gas necessary to the life cycle off most all life, plant and animal. Humans emit about 800 pounds a year in the life sustaining process of food metabolism. Plant life needs it to live and thereby produce the oxygen we need.
The bad cop EPA threatens total bureaucratic control of carbon emissions at every level of U.S. economic activity, unencumbered by legislative oversight. Some might call that totalitarian.

To the rescue, comes the “good cop” in the form of the Obama Congressional leaders, such as Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey, offering the totally sweet deal of tax-and-trade. How can one refuse? In this process, little is mentioned as to why either choice is necessary. An enlightened Congress could revisit the Clean Air Act and correct the language which was used by the Supreme Court to make a legal, but not scientific, ruling.

Will any of this affect the much proclaimed climate crisis? Four independent authoritative global temperature monitoring centers (the Hadley Centre, the U.S. National Climatic Data Center, Remote Sensing Systems, and the University of Alabama at Huntsville) all confirm a definite, significant, and continuing global cooling for the past six plus years.

Other actions by the Obama administration in the automobile industry, banking sector, health care, and even in the federalization of formerly voluntary public service all show the intrusive hand of government in attempting to exert near total control of large segments of our economy. If all these totals are totaled up, is the sum not approaching totalitarianism, or at least as the old saying goes: “(totally) close enough for government work”?

Assuming there are no sunspots today, a 96-year record will have been broken: 53 days without any solar blemishes, giant magnetic disruptions on the sun’s surface that cause solar flares. That would be the fourth-longest stretch of stellar solar complexion since 1849. Wait, it gets even more exciting.

During what scientist call the Maunder Minimum—a period of solar inactivity from 1645 to 1715—the world experienced the worst of the cold streak dubbed the Little Ice Age. At Christmastime, Londoners ice skated on the Thames, and New Yorkers (then New Amsterdamers) sometimes walked over the Hudson from Manhattan to Staten Island.

Of course, it could have been a coincidence. The Little Ice Age began before the onset of the Maunder Minimum. Many scientists think volcanic activity was a more likely, or at least a more significant, culprit. Or perhaps the big chill was, in the words of scientist Alan Cutler, writing in the Washington Post in 1997, a “one-two punch from a dimmer sun and a dustier atmosphere.”

Well, we just might find out. A new study in the American Geophysical Union’s journal Eos suggests that we may be heading into another quiet phase similar to the Maunder Minimum. Meanwhile, the journal Science reports that a study led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR, has finally figured out why increased sunspots have a dramatic effect on the weather, increasing temperatures more than the increase in solar energy should explain. Apparently, sunspots heat the stratosphere, which in turn amplifies the warming of the climate. Scientists have known for centuries that sunspots affected the climate; they just never understood how. Now, allegedly, the mystery has been solved.

Last month, in another study, also released in Science, Oregon state researchers claimed to settle the debate over what caused and ended the last Ice Age. Increased solar radiation coming from slight changes in the Earth’s rotation, not greenhouse gas levels, were to blame.

What is the significance of all this? To say I have no idea is quite an understatement, but it will have to do.

Nonetheless, what I find interesting is the eagerness of the authors and the media to make it very clear that this doesn’t have any particular significance for the debate over climate change. “For those wondering how the [NCAR] study bears on global warming, Gerald Meehl, lead author on the study, says that it doesn’t—at least not directly,” writes Moises Velasquez-Manoff of the Christian Science Monitor. “Global warming is a long-term trend, Dr. Meehl says. ... This study attempts to explain the processes behind a periodic occurrence.”

This overlooks the fact that solar cycles are permanent “periodic occurrences,” a.k.a. a very long-term trend. Yet Meehl insists that the only significance for the debate is that his study proves that climate modeling is steadily improving. I applaud Meehl’s reluctance to go beyond where the science takes him. And for all I know he’s right. But such humility and skepticism seem to manifest themselves only when the data point to something other than the mainstream narrative about global warming. For instance, when we have terribly hot weather, or bad hurricanes, the media see portentous proof of climate change. When we don’t, it’s a moment to teach the masses how weather and climate are very different things.

No, I’m not denying that man-made pollution and other activity have played a role in planetary warming since the Industrial Revolution. But we live in a moment when we are told, nay lectured and harangued, that if we use the wrong toilet paper or eat the wrong cereal, we are frying the planet. But the sun? Well, that’s a distraction. Don’t you dare forget your reusable shopping bags, but feel free to pay no attention to that burning ball of gas in the sky—it’s just the only thing that prevents the planet from being a lifeless ball of ice engulfed in total darkness. Never mind that sunspot activity doubled during the 20th century, when the bulk of global warming has taken place.

What does it say that the modeling that guaranteed disastrous increases in global temperatures never predicted the halt in planetary warming since the late 1990s? (MIT’s Richard Lindzen says that “there has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995.") What does it say that the modelers have only just now discovered how sunspots make the Earth warmer?

I don’t know what it tells you, but it tells me that maybe we should study a bit more before we spend billions to “solve” a problem we don’t understand so well. See more here.