The Paris Climate Treaty is a heat-seeking missile aimed solely at American jobs that will do nothing to reduce global warming. Why would we deploy it?

Top officials in the Trump administration apparently are debating whether to withdraw from the Paris Climate Treaty, an agreement negotiated in the waning years of the Obama administration that would commit the United States to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent relative to 2005 levels by the year 2025.

The Heartland Institute has been studying climate change for nearly two decades. Our advice to the Trump administration is simple: Run, don’t walk, away from the Paris Climate Treaty! Here are our reasons for this recommendation. Sources for our statements are readily found here and here.

There Is No Scientific Basis for the Paris Climate Treaty

The Paris Climate Treaty is supposedly an attempt to keep global temperatures from increasing 2 degrees C, but this objective is based on political science, not climate science.

The goal is an arbitrary political target based on climate activists’ demands for a number, no matter how dubious or fake, to use in their fundraising letters and to appear on their signs at protests. There is no scientific evidence suggesting a warming of 1.9 degrees C is safe while 2.1 degrees C is not safe.

Climate models that forecast temperature increases of more than 1 or 2 degrees during the next century are not scientific. They flunk the objective requirements of scientific forecasting. They are educated guesses by activists whose credibility and livelihood depend on showing ever increasing certainty of impending doom, even as their data point in the opposite direction.

Climate models have greatly overestimated warming over the past two decades. The models have not matched observed temperatures from satellites, the only truly global and accurate way we have of measuring Earth’s temperature. Why should we imagine their forecasts of climate conditions 100 years from now and beyond are accurate?

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. More CO2 leads to faster, more robust plant growth, including staple food crops. Moderate warming, should it occur, would have a positive effect on humanity, since lower temperatures kill far more people than do warmer temperatures, and warming historically has been associated with economic growth, global peace, and prosperity.

The Paris Climate Agreement Puts America Last

The Paris Climate Agreement would require the United States to make massive reductions in emissions and pay billions of dollars in “climate reparations” to Third World dictators, while requiring no emission cuts from developing countries including India and China.

China’s only commitment in the Paris agreement is agreeing to reach peak carbon dioxide emissions “around 2030” and reducing emissions per unit of gross domestic product by 60 to 65 percent by that time from their 2005 level. This agreement is a gift to Chinese manufacturers and a slap in the face of American industry.

There is simply no justification for the United States to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to developing countries at a time when the U.S. government is running massive deficits, when economic growth is slower for a longer period of time than at any time since the Great Depression, and when American workers are competing against lower-paid workers in China and India.

Other countries are already failing to keep their pledges to help finance the United Nations Climate Fund, which means the United States will be asked to contribute even more money to make up the difference. Other countries are simply relabeling foreign aid to count toward their goals. And China will use the failure to fund the programs as “political cover” to continue to ignore its own climate targets.

The Paris Climate Treaty Is a Job Killer

Low coal, oil, and natural gas prices have fueled nearly all the economic growth that occurred during the Obama years. If Obama-era restrictions on developing natural resources are lifted, billions of dollars more in manufacturing investment in the United States will occur and millions of new jobs will be created.

Conversely, staying in the Paris Climate Treaty would mean increasing electricity prices and compromising the reliability of our electrical grid, which would drive manufacturing out of Midwestern states like Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to developing countries where coal and natural gas are still allowed.

The Paris Climate Treaty requires that the United States ratchet down its emissions every five years, despite economic growth, population growth, and opportunities to become a net energy exporter to the world. Every year, thousands more miners, drillers, engineers, pipeline workers, auto plant workers, and truck drivers would lose their jobs. The Paris Climate Treaty is a heat-seeking missile aimed solely at American jobs. Why would we do that?

What We Should Do Instead

The fastest, most efficient way to remove the United States from the Paris Climate Treaty is to withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), negotiated in 1992. Doing so would keep President Trump’s promise to defund the United Nations’ global warming projects, and it could be done in one year rather than the four years required to withdraw from the Paris treaty. Withdrawal from the UNFCCC would automatically mean leaving the Paris treaty.

If President Trump does not withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Treaty and, even better, from the UNFCCC, then the leaders of other countries will use the treaties as a huge stick with which to beat U.S. consumers and producers. American independence and prosperity - and greatness - will be impossible. The American people, and the middle class in particular, will once again have been betrayed by the political class in Washington DC.

The Paris Climate Treaty empowers enemies of American greatness at home, too. A future administration could use the treaty, just as the Obama administration began to do, to justify policies that transfer billions of dollars to Third World dictators, cripple the American economy, and hurt American workers. President Trump should fully withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Treaty and, better yet, from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Joseph Bast is president and CEO of The Heartland Institute. He can be reached at jbast@heartland.org.

Germany’s DWD national weather service just issued the preliminary results for the country’s January 2017 mean temperature.

According the DWD’s approximately 2000 stations scattered across the country, January’s mean temperature came in 2.7C colder than the 1981-2010 mean. Especially southern Germany was cold, as was its neighbor Austria, see below.

The lowest recorded temperature in Germany was measured in Reit im Winkl: -26.3C. Most of the precipitation this past January, which was 27% below normal, fell as snow.

The DWD attributed the colder temperatures to a wintry weather pattern.

No warming

The European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) has analyzed the German data for the Erfurt-Weimar station and has found that there has been no warming in January over the past 45 years (since 1973):

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Despite rising atmospheric CO2 concentration, January temperature at the Erfurt-Weimar station has remained flat since 1973. Chart: Stefan Kampfe, EIKE.

Josef Kowatsch also analyzed Germany’s January temperature trend and found that the month has in fact cooled almost 2C over the past 25 years. I’ll see if I can chase down his chart.

EIKE also looked at the Central England January temperature record and found that there has only been a slight warming over the past 105 years!

In fact the warmest years in Central England were recorded in the early part of the 20th century.

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Chart source: (EIKE)

Frigid Austria

Meanwhile Austria’s ZAMG national weather service reports that January 2017 in the country was “extraordinarily cold”, the second coldest in 30 years, with the preliminary mean coming in at 3.0C below the long term 1981-2010 mean.

The chart shows the temperature deviation from the mean.

Temperature January 2017: deviation from the 1981-2010 mean. Computed using SPARTACUS data through 29 January 2017. Source: ZAMG

President-Elect Trump has pierced the veils surrounding the holy of holies wherein reside the eco-dogmatists of the EPA and the U.N. and promises the rightful return of respect to the essence of scientific research...skepticism.  In 1746, philosopher Denis Diderot penned, “Skepticism is the first step towards truth.” Billions of taxpayer monies have been spent by our progressively bent government and its crony supplicants to turn that concept on its head.  Mass media acolytes wordsmithed “skeptic” into a dirty word.  Emulating the harsh but masterful government propaganda machine of 1930s Germany, they successfully convinced much of the public and ruling class that the life-sustaining trace gas, carbon dioxide, is an earth-destroying pollutant.  Federal agencies promoted the concept and dispensed billions of dollars in lavishly funding those scientists and commercial interests willing to pervert the term “climate change,” a constant feature of geohistory, into a man-made threat and a money-making commercial enterprise.

Classical scientific inquiry relies on axioms governing the formation of a tentative hypothesis, a nascent theory, and subsequent rigorous comparisons of predictions based on such a theory and real-world observations.  Climate computer-derived forecasts have consistently failed to match long-term climate reality.  Much of the error results from the dogmatic insistence by activist researchers that the model is reality, rather than a much simplified theoretical construct.  A trusting public expects the tax monies and gifts showered on universities and researchers to result in scientific reports and validated findings based on an impartial process.  What did it get?

It got Al Gore putting the carbon dioxide temperature change before the global temperature change horse.  It got “ClimateGate.” It got a Supreme Court that ruled that the Earth’s greenhouse gases are air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act.  It got the “carbon dioxide endangerment finding” by the EPA administrator du jour that gave legal power to the federal bureaucracy to regulate greenhouse atmospheric concentrations because they “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.” It got “ethanolized” gasoline, to the delight of corn farmers, but also a gas tank brew that gives lower mileage and more net pollution.  It got wind and solar power advertised as “clean and free energy sources.” It got to see the resultant mountaintop destruction of natural habitats, and the conversion of farmland into automobile fuel stock.  It got to see wind turbine slaughter of eagles become a federally countenanced collateral damage cost.  It also thereby got needlessly more expensive and less reliable electric energy.  It got higher tax bills as complicit state legislators mandated increasing use of highly subsidized renewables.  It got “free solar” residential electricity subsidized by federal and state tax giveaways paid for on the backs of the poor.  It got to see the oxymoron “crony capitalism” in action.  It got to see scientifically illiterate Hollywood stars become climate and energy experts, forgetting that great actors become great by making the audience believe that what is not true seems true, and by mouthing words written by others.  It got to see the dire computer-generated scare stories of coming climate catastrophes fail to materialize on schedule.  It got to see a progressive waning of sunspot activity, and now a renewed concern about an approaching period of significant global cooling such as characterized the “Little Ice Age” of the 15th-18th century.

Echoing Ross Perot, the next great sucking sound should be that of the Washington, D.C. swamp being drained and taking away the accumulated detritus of pseudo-science coopted in the service of false dogma and political favoritism, with the subsequent restoration of “skepticism” to its place as a benchmark for the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Soon to be ex-president Obama is throwing as much sand as possible into the energy machinery on his way out the door.  What can only be interpreted as a petulant and defiant act of sabotage, he is poisoning the well of energy and environmental reform promised by president-elect Trump.

Labor employment figures may take a hit for a bit, as the newly unemployed bureaucrats, non-tenured university researchers, renewable energy businesses shorn of governmental subsidies, commercial mega-farmers of corn-for-ethanol, and the supporting cast of radical environmentalists and NGOs look for gainful employment.

Charles G. Battig, M.S., M.D., Heartland Institute policy expert on environment; VA-Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment (VA-SEEE).  His website is www.climateis.com.

As the end of the year approaches, perhaps it is time to make an accounting of 2016 from a climate viewpoint. The high points of the year included the stay by the Supreme Court on implementation of the EPA’s so-called Clean Power Plan (CPP) on February 9. This stay remained in effect for the rest of the year despite the death on February 13 of the author of one of the five votes cast in favor of it. The second high point was the decision by one of the candidates for President to oppose climate alarmism and his subsequent election victory in November.

The low point of the year was the decision of the Democratic Party to advocate an end to the burning of fossil fuels by 2050. This could not have been achieved, of course, but the attempt to do so would have resulted in huge adverse economic and environmental effects. Since the Democratic presidential candidate lost, these policy goals are now presumably null and void. With one added vote from a Supreme Court candidate nominated by a Democratic president, the CPP would likely have gone into effect in 2017 or 2018. A number of other EPA regulations that directly or indirectly implement climate alarmism have gone into effect, however, and may or may not be withdrawn by the new Trump Administration.

So it can be said that although climate policy was not the major issue in the election, the outcome means that there is now considerable hope that the US will avoid major damage from climate alarmism. No similar statement can be made for blue states, particularly California, that have or may adopt the anti-economic, anti-science, and anti-environmental tenets of climate alarmism.

So despite a roller coaster ride all year and several very close calls, the US as a whole appears to have escaped the devastating impact from climate alarmism at least for the next four years and possibly for eight years. Although it is much too early to be sure, there may even be hope for the demise of climate alarmism in Western Europe and other developed countries, although after much more damage has been done.

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How Trump’s Climate Skepticism Can Play a Crucial Role in Achieving His Larger Objectives
Alan Carlin

It is all too clear that the Climate-industrial Complex (CIC) has not abandoned its support for climate alarmism despite the shock of Donald Trump’s election. Instead, the last few weeks have witnessed their first counterattack - to try to persuade Trump of the virtues of their cause. The first effort was launched by the New York Times in a meeting with Trump where they attempted to persuade him, among other things, that recent storms have been unusually strong because of alleged climate change and that there was connectivity between human activity and climate change. They did succeed in getting Trump to agree that some undefined connectivity exists and that he had an open mind on climate.

But the major effort was that by Albert Gore to meet with Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, which led to a meeting with Donald Trump. We do not know what was said during the meeting except that Gore tried to find common ground between the two of them on climate. The proposed appointment of Scott Pruitt as EPA Administrator announced on December 7 underlines the ineffectiveness of both the NY Times’s and Gore’s efforts to persuade Trump.

In Understanding This It Is Important to Keep in Mind the Main Thrust of Trump’s Election Campaign

From a larger viewpoint, Trump has primarily set himself the task of reinvigorating the limping US economy and particularly the economic situation of those hurt by the Great Recession. He has even promised to revive the US coal industry. This last may be somewhat difficult since the advent of the widespread use of fracking has greatly lowered the price of natural gas by bringing huge new supplies to market. This has undercut the market for coal, although this has also been hurt by Obama’s regulatory “war on coal.”

It is far from clear whether Trump can do much more for coal than remove most or even all the climate-related regulations discouraging the use of coal, and this may not have a huge effect since to date the major adverse effects of the “war on coal” on raising electricity prices have not yet occurred because of the Supreme Court’s stay on the so-called Clean Power Plan. But he can do a great deal with regard to encouraging greater natural gas and particularly oil development. The most important of these actions would be to greatly ease the Federal regulations on and availability of oil and natural gas and to ease the regulatory oversight on the construction of additional pipelines to bring these products to market. If the resulting development were predominantly on Federal land or waters, it would result in a much greater increase in Federal revenue than if it were on state or private lands or waters.

Both would reduce the price of oil and natural gas and result in their more widespread availability for both domestic use and export. If these actions lowered prices sufficiently one could even conceive of making the US the new Saudi Arabia of oil, natural gas, and coal. If Trump can bring this about, this should provide a huge boost for the US economy and provide many jobs in the natural gas, oil, and pipeline industries.

It Is in Trump’s Interest to Support the Climate Skeptic Cause for Other Reasons

The logic of this approach should prevent Trump from any serious consideration of embracing even parts of the climate alarmist agenda and ideology. Presumably this does not bode well for the success of either the New York Times’s or Albert Gore’s attempts to do so. Unless Trump can show clear signs of an economic revival over the next few years, he is likely to be a one-term President. The easiest opportunity he has is probably rapid development of natural gas and oil and pipelines to carry them. It is hard to believe that Trump would give that up as a result of a little talk about climate alarmism from the Times and Gore. In the highly unlikely case that he embraces climate alarmism in any serious way, his major goal is much less likely to be achieved. So he is much more likely to lend no more than a few soothing words towards climate alarmism.

One of the most important aspects of this oil and gas strategy is that it should result in large increases in Federal revenue, particularly if the oil and gas come from Federal lands and waters. Because of the somewhat precarious Federal finances that may result from Trump’s tax, military and infrastructure enhancement proposals, and budget deficits inherited from the Obama Administration, these increased revenues could be very crucial to the success of Trump’s Administration as a whole and thus his chances for reelection in 2020.

The Best Approach Is to Adopt the Already Existing Case that the Alarmist “Science” Is Invalid

The easiest way to justify this approach to climate strategy is simply to adopt the arguments put forth by climate skeptics concerning climate alarmism “science.” They have shown that the climate alarmist science is invalid. What better reason to abandon the Times and Gore in their continuing efforts to promote climate alarmism? A considerable portion of the research has been done by volunteers rather than the few and much maligned (by climate alarmists) paid professionals, but it is free for the asking, so why not? Many of the arguments concerning scientific invalidity can be found in my book, Environmentalism Gone Mad, and in a new research report by Wallace et al., 2016 discussed here.

Together, this and other research by climate skeptics shows that the “science” used by climate alarmists is scientifically invalid since it does not satisfy the scientific method. If Trump pursues this approach, he would be well advised to say so very publicly and very explicitly rather than attempting to hide his climate skepticism like George W. Bush. The NY Times and Al Gore will not like this, but it is better to fight it out on the basis of the alarmists’ invalid science rather than the moral wisdom of their alleged attempt to “save the world” from imaginary global warming/climate change due to human-caused CO2 emissions. It would also promote the use of good science in the future.

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Reuters reports, “Pope Francis urged national leaders on Monday to implement global environmental agreements without delay, a message that looked to be squarely aimed at U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.

“Addressing a group of scientists that included theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, the pope gave his strongest speech on the environment since the election of Trump, who has threatened to pull out of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

The ‘distraction’ or delay in implementing global agreements on the environment shows that politics has become submissive to a technology and economy which seek profit above all else,” Francis said.”

So the pope thinks opposition to the Paris Treaty stems from profit seeking?

How about all the billions in profits sought by renewable energy corporations like wind turbine makers General Electric and Siemens or solar panel makers First Solar and Solar City, whose products can’t compete economically with fossil fuels or nuclear without massive government subsidies and mandates?

How about the billions of taxpayer dollars showered on Solyndra and similar now-bankrupt renewable energy companies?

How about all the billions of taxpayers’ dollars showered on the climate-change research complex to fund its continued modeling that has achieved the magnificent advance in scientific knowledge since 1978 of narrowing the estimate of the warming effect of doubled atmospheric CO2 from 1.5-4.5 C to 1.5-4.5 C? (Yes, you read that right - no narrowing achieved. Scores of billions spent over 38 years and no advance in what we really need to know.)

How about all the profits sought by carbon traders who expect to amass billions trading permits whose economic value rests on nothing but empirically falsified climate models that project 2 to 3 times the warming actually observed?

All this isn’t even to mention the anti-capitalistic mentality apparent in the pope’s implicit condemnation of profit seeking. “But he only condemns seeking profit “above all else,” you say? Sorry, that doesn’t ring true to Francis’ past. Despite the fact capitalism has lifted whole societies out of poverty while socialism has only trapped them in or returned them to poverty, Francis has been committed to Liberation Theology - a Latin American variant of Marxism learned by Latin American priests while studying mostly in Marxist-dominated French seminaries - since early in his priesthood.

One can’t help wondering if his embrace of climate alarmism rests on politics rather than science. That wouldn’t be unique to him, as former U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretary General Christiana Figueres said as much last year.

Certainly the absence of any hard science in the four paragraphs on climate change in Francis’ encyclical ‘Laudato Si’ suggests science didn’t much factor into his opinion. That’s why hundreds of scientists - including climate scientists - signed the Cornwall Alliance’s Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change, and were joined by economists, theologians and ethicists.

If politics has become submissive to a technology and economy that seeks profit above all else, the technology is that of renewable energy, which is subsidized 60 (wind) to 400 (solar) times as much per megawatt-hour of electricity generated as fossil fuels. How else do you explain government’s willingness to sign onto a climate treaty implementation of which will cost $70-$140 trillion by century’s end while, on the IPCC’s own assumptions, reducing global average temperature by no more than 0.17 C.

Perhaps Pope Francis, who purports to care so much about the world’s poor, should consider how much more that money could achieve to lift people out of poverty if spent on things like water purification, sewage sanitation, nutrition supplements, infectious disease control, and health care.

Meanwhile, President-elect Trump, at whom the pontiff was preaching, should stick to his guns. He should announce that because President Obama never submitted the Paris treaty to the Senate for ratification, which the Constitution requires for the United States to be bound by any treaty, the U.S. is not a party to the treaty. Then, on the day he’s inaugurated, he should submit the treaty to the Senate, where it will die the ignominious death it deserves.

E. Calvin Beisner is founder and national spokesman of The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.

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Europe has so many historical and cultural wonders that even the reddest of red-blooded Americans can find something European to be envious of.  After all, it was Europeans who gave us Led Zeppelin, pizza, and beer and personally, I think it’s high time we consider adopting the siesta as a national policy.  But what we don’t need to migrate across the pond are European energy prices.

Europe grew to be a manufacturing juggernaut in the 20th century utilizing technical acumen as well as the energy resources it had available.  But manufacturing consumes massive quantities of energy, and while the continent was blessed with several Wonders of the World, it was not bestowed the greatest of energy resources, forcing it to increasingly rely on imports. Additionally, over the last two decades, the European Union and many of its members have stumbled down an experimental path of making energy less accessible and more expensive. 

By making energy use more expensive, these policies have strained Europe’s once mighty manufacturing sector. Meanwhile, the energy revolution in the U.S. over the last decade has brought us some of the lowest energy prices in the world, and a subsequent manufacturing renaissance.  We’ve already witnessed tens of billions of dollars invested in U.S. manufacturing with more on the way.  But—and this is a big but --, this isn’t a fate accompli. 

In fact, it has become vogue in certain extremist circles for politicians and the special interests that support them to champion EU energy policies and prices and wish them upon America. The latest installment in our Energy Accountability Series asks the question, What If....The United States Was Forced to Pay EU Energy Prices?  In the spirit of Halloween, our analysis found the answer to be positively ghoulish.  Importing EU energy prices to America would cost our economy about $700 billion and almost 8 million jobs.  From a consumer standpoint, every household would be shelling out $4,800 more per year. Some states in particular would be hit hard.  With its high level of fixed income residents, Florida would shed almost $30 billion from its economy. Other states blessed with robust manufacturing sectors would really be hobbled.  Ohio would lose almost 190,000 jobs and Michigan about 160,000.  Michigan would shed $12 billion from its economy, Illinois more than $17 billion and Ohio almost $15 billion. 

Our analysis found major contractions in industries ranging from poultry to paper to food manufacturing.  The bottom line is EU energy prices would be disastrous.  So let’s keep importing the scrumptious chocolate - but leave the bad policy across the Atlantic.

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“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered,” physicist Richard Feynman once said, “than answers that can’t be questioned”.

(CNSNews.com) - Nearly three-quarters of Americans don’t trust that there is a large “scientific consensus” amongst climate scientists on human behavior being the cause of climate change, according to an in-depth survey on “the politics of climate” released Tuesday by Pew Research Center.

According to the survey, only 27 percent of Americans agree that “almost all” climate scientists say that human behavior is mostly responsible for climate change, while 35 percent say that “more than half” of climate scientists agree on this. An additional 35 percent of those surveyed say that fewer than half (20%) or almost no (15%) climate scientists believe that human behavior is the main contributing factor in climate change.

Pew contrasted this to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which “stated in the forward to its 2013 report, ‘the science now shows with 95 percent certainty that human activity is the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-20th century.’”

Additionally, Americans were skeptical about the expertise of climate scientists.

Just 33 percent of those surveyed said that climate scientists understand “very well” whether global climate change is happening, another 39 percent said climate scientists understand this “fairly well.” Twenty-seven percent of those surveyed say climate scientists don’t understand this “too well” or don’t understand it at all.

When it comes to the causes of global climate change only 28 percent say climate scientists understand them “very well” while 31 percent say the scientists understand them “not too well” or “not at all.”

Additionally, Americans seemed to lack trust in climate scientists’ solutions to climate change. Only 19 percent say climate scientists understand very well the best ways to address climate change, and 35 percent say the scientists understand this not too well or not at all.

Americans also don’t trust the news media’s coverage of climate change. Forty-seven percent of those surveyed say the media does a “good job” covering global climate change, while 51% say they do a “bad job.”

Thirty-five percent of Americans say the media “exaggerate the threat of climate change” and 42 percent say the media “don’t take the threat of climate change seriously enough.” Just 20 percent say the media are “about right in their reporting.”

Overall, Pew noted that few Americans - only 11 percent - follow news about climate change “very closely.”

The findings in the Pew report are “based on a nationally representative survey of 1,534 U.S. adults conducted May 10 [ June 6, 2016.”

CNSNews.com is not funded by the government like NPR. CNSNews.com is not funded by the government like PBS.

Note in Europe where the greens pushed an agenda like the one the EPA and the Clinton DNC plans call for, energy prices skyrocketed, driving many into energy poverty (especially pensioners). High energy drove industry to relocate in countries with lower energy costs. Countries like Spain had unemployment reach over 27%.

Two must see videos from the Doctors of Disaster Preparedness meeting:

]

This week our civil rights were placed under direct attack on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse led a small group of senators who attacked a number of free-market think tanks for having the temerity to correct them on “climate change” science and policy.

These senators offered a resolution condemning the think tanks for speaking out, calling for them to “to cooperate with active or future investigations.” Fortunately, these senators comprise a minority fringe in the Senate, yet their efforts to chill free speech is dangerous and must not go unchallenged.

CFACT President David Rothbard joined with the heads of twenty-one organizations who jointly fired off a powerful letter to the senators opposing this misuse of the their power.  “Your threat is clear” the letter states, “There is a heavy and inconvenient cost to disagreeing with you. Calls for debate will be met with political retribution. That’s called tyranny. And, we reject it.” You can read the full letter at CFACT.org.

CFACT monitored what these senators said on the record, and came away surprised at how biased, shallow and flat out wrong was their understanding of the facts surrounding the climate debate.

Senator Whitehouse was particularly egregious.  He repeatedly cited as his sources not scientific literature, nor the mainstream warming-compliant press, but rather such radical outlets as DeSmog Blog, the socialist magazine Mother Jones, a book entitled Poison Tea, and climate campaign and attack sites like Media Matters, Conservative Transparency Project, and Sourcewatch.

Whitehouse just read the climate-left’s propaganda directly into the record and treated it as gospel.

If this is the best these senators’ aids can do to inform them about climate science and prepare their remarks, the senators and their constituents are very poorly served.  Yet this would explain the torrent of smugly presented, unscientific whoppers they brought forth.

New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen stated that “rising temperatures are affecting our tourism, our outdoor recreation and our agriculture industries and we’re experiencing an onset of negative health impacts and increases of insect borne diseases, lyme disease is one of those, all of which can be tied to the effects of climate change.”

Really, Senator Shaheen?  Not cold enough for you or New Hampshire skiing?  Have the people of New Hampshire forgotten so quickly that the winter of 2008 saw 115.2” of snowfall - the most in over a century?  Have they forgotten that nearby Boston had its snowiest winter ever last year with 110.6”?  A simple search of NOAA’s historical climate records shows there is nothing abnormal about New Hampshire weather.

Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey went over the top stating that anyone under the age of 31 “watching the Senate floor tonight has never experienced in their life a month whose temperature was below the 20th Century average” Could the Senator’s staffers not be bothered to check? NOAA data reveals that the people of Massachusetts experienced many recent months with temperature below the 20th century average.  March was below average three times in the last five years.  That’s just March!  That’s the government temperature data fiddled and adjusted with to make it seem as warm as possible! Three of the last five Januaries and Februaries were below average in Massachusetts and two of the last five Aprils were below average as well.  The data goes on and on.

Senator Bill Cassidy said that, “in New Mexico we are already seeing more extreme and prolonged drought conditions, larger wildfires, increased flooding. This is the reality now, not at some far off date in the future, and the longer that we wait to act the more difficult and more expensive the solutions will be.” Can the Senator be unaware how little temperature has varied over the last century?  It was certainly not enough to meaningfully alter drought, fires and floods - all of which are historically normal according to the data.

Likewise Senator Gary Peters of Michigan intoned that we have experienced “dramatic changes in weather.” He is apparently unaware that today’s weather is historically normal.  Claims that today’s weather has become more extreme are propaganda talking points unsupported by science or history.  Take a look at the report debunking the extreme weather scare that CFACT’s Marc Morano prepared for the UN climate summit in Doha, Qatar.

Climate models consistently project a warmer world than real-world measurements record.  These Senators are either unaware of this fact, or want the rest of us to be.  How’s that for denial?

The sorry truth is that the radical Left chose “climate change” as its latest rationale for taking control of our energy supply and economy.  Climate campaign organizations continually misrepresent and exaggerate the facts about the climate.

It is incumbent on those of us in touch with the facts to correct the record when we see it distorted and present what, in our opinions, are better-founded public-policy recommendations.

If Senator Whitehouse and company succeed in stifling the climate debate it will guarantee the inaccuracies and exaggerations of the climate campaign will go unchallenged. Useless and wasteful freedom and economy-crushing public policy will be the result.

That’s why our Founding Fathers wrote free speech into our Constitution. So nice try Senators. But we are not intimidated. We will not be silenced.

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Over 30,000 scientists say ‘Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming’ is a complete hoax and science lie
By Daniel Barker

NaturalNews) The highly-politicized climate change debate rages on as we approach the crucial 2016 U.S. presidential election, despite an ever-growing body of evidence revealing the fact that “catastrophic man-made global warming” is nothing more than an elaborate hoax.

And the November election may prove to be a victory for the hoaxers, according to experts who happen to be among those who dare to challenge the spurious climate change narrative.

One of these experts is Weather Channel founder John Coleman, who is now warning that the election could prove to be a “tipping point” in favor of people like Al Gore, who continue to amass vast fortunes based on the global warming scam.

In a recent interview with Climate Depot, Coleman said:

“Al Gore may emerge from the shadows to declare victory in the ‘global warming’ debate if Hillary Clinton moves into the White House. Yes, if that happens and the new climate regulations become the law of the land, they will be next to impossible to overturn for four to eight years.”

Climate change proponents remain undeterred in their mission, ignoring numerous recent scientific findings indicating that there has been no warming trend at all for nearly two decades.

Al Gore’s dire predictions of the melting of polar ice on a massive scale have proved to be completely false. In fact, in 2014 - a year that was touted as being “the hottest ever” in the Earth’s history - there were record amounts of ice reported in Antarctica, an increase in Arctic ice, and record snowfalls across the globe.

Debunking the “97 percent” lie

On top of those “inconvenient truths,” the White House’s assertion that 97 percent of scientists agree that global warming is real has been completely debunked. Several independently-researched examinations of the literature used to support the “97 percent” statement found that the conclusions were cherry-picked and misleading.

More objective surveys have revealed that there is a far greater diversity of opinion among scientists than the global warming crowd would like for you to believe.

From the National Review:

“A 2008 survey by two German scientists, Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, found that a significant number of scientists were skeptical of the ability of existing global climate models to accurately predict global temperatures, precipitation, sea-level changes, or extreme weather events even over a decade; they were far more skeptical as the time horizon increased.”

Other mainstream news sources besides the National Review have also been courageous enough to speak out against the global warming propaganda - even the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece in 2015 challenging the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) pseudoscience being promulgated by global warming proponents.

And, of course, there are the more than 31,000 American scientists (to date) who have signed a petition challenging the climate change narrative and 9,029 of them hold PhDs in their respective fields. But hey, Al Gore and his cronies have also ignored that inconvenient truth, as well.

Many of those scientists who signed the petition were likely encouraged to speak out in favor of the truth after retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist John L. Casey revealed that solar cycles are largely responsible for warming periods on Earth - not human activity.

Al Gore and cronies continue getting richer from the global warming hoax

But the global warming crowd continues to push their agenda on the public while lining their pockets in the process. If you’re still inclined to believe what Al Gore has to say about global warming, please consider the fact that since he embarked on his crusade, his wealth has grown from $2 million in 2001 to $100 million in 2016 - largely due to investments in fake “green tech” companies and the effective embezzlement of numerous grants and loans.

You might want to take all of this information into serious consideration before casting your vote in the November election.