The Obama Gang is stealing our taxes, energy resources, revenues, jobs and economy
An oil and natural gas boom is underway in the United States, born of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” It has created tens of thousands of well-paying jobs directly, and hundreds of thousands more in hundreds of businesses that supply and support the industry and its workers.
In North Dakota, the unemployment rate is 2.4 percent, in large part because of a huge increase in natural gas and crude oil production from deep shale rocks that yielded nothing prior to fracking. The new technology is also driving job growth, higher incomes, and increased tax revenues for hard-pressed state and local governments in Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Texas and other states.
Meanwhile, 350 miles north of Edmonton, Alberta, other innovators are producing billions of barrels from oil sands that stretch across an area the size of Utah. Shallow deposits are accessible via surface mining, while deeper lodes are tapped using in situ drilling and steam injection. As work is completed in an area, the land is restored to woodlands, grasslands, lakes and marshes, and the process moves on.
As with fracking, the oil sands create tens of thousands of high-paying jobs and generate billions in revenue, benefitting people from Fort McMurray, Calgary and Vancouver to Ottawa and Halifax, and throughout the United States. Construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline would multiply these benefits.
And yet, despite ample evidence that responsible development of these enormous energy resources could power a national economic, manufacturing and employment renaissance, the Obama Administration’s environmental ideologies and political debts to radical green groups could delay or stymie progress.
The new robber barons in the Executive Branch and Congress are not content only with taxing job creators and saddling our children and great grandchildren with trillion-dollar IOUs. They are using hard-earned tax money to finance wind, solar, biofuel and other schemes that primarily reward crony capitalist campaign contributors. They’re also locking up centuries’ of oil, gas, coal and uranium that could generate an economic revival, millions of jobs, and many billions in federal, state and local royalty and tax revenues.
Some say the way these robber barons use, abuse and ignore laws to advance this agenda reminds them of the infamous James Gang, which plundered banks and trains until Northfield, Minnesota citizens ended their lawless ways. Others say a better example is the Chicago based Al Capone mob.
Still others point to the Capitol Hill “fiscal cliff” negotiations, as providing clues as to what lies ahead. President Obama says he favors a “balanced” approach to avoid fiscal calamity, but insists on raising taxes on high income citizens and will not discuss reining in entitlement expenditures that are lead life preservers on taxpayers and our economy. His Treasury Secretary tells us, “There are no options.”
The President’s unique concept of “balance” also defines his “all of the above energy program. Like Humpty Dumpty, his words mean just what he chooses them to mean as in all of the above-ground projects, but none of the below-ground resources. Perhaps the real question is, who is to be master...of our lives, natural resources, nation and pursuit of happiness?
Thus the Administration banned oil development on 1.6 million more acres of federal lands in the West and millions more on the Outer Continental Shelf, while delaying leasing and drilling in still more areas on top of vast acreage and resources that Congress placed off limits through legislation. The ruling czars and robber barons also imposed ethanol in gasoline requirements that turn 40% of the nation’s corn crop into fuel, converting an area the size of Missouri from growing food crops to producing fuel that we could get by drilling, and driving up the cost of countless food products.
Their wind and solar programs waste billions of tax dollars on expensive, unreliable electricity projects that blanket habitats and steal our wildlife heritage, in violation of clear environmental laws.
Meanwhile, EPA issued still more hugely expensive rules that effectively ban the use of coal in electricity generation sending coal’s contribution from 45% a few years ago to 35% today, and killing thousands of mining and utility jobs. Its latest rules demand that the transportation sector slash its soot emissions another 20% ostensibly to reduce asthma, other illnesses and “thousands” of premature deaths.
In reality, the only health or environmental benefits exist in EPA computer models, press releases and cover-ups of illegal experiments on humans, whose response to being subjected to “dangerous” levels of soot actually disproved EPA’s claim that tougher standards are needed. EPA has also ignored the significant health risks caused by its regulations, especially for now unemployed older workers.
In the midst of all this, at the just concluded United Nations climate change negotiations in Doha, Qatar, Obama Administration representatives entertained brazen proposals to require developed countries to compensate less developed countries for “climate change damages” under a wealth redistribution scheme that could potentially cost United States taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. Also in the works are EPA rules, laws and treaty agreements to force the US to curb fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions.
Inconvenient facts about these decisions were simply ignored or treated much the same way as Steven Spielberg handled his powerful and entertaining Lincoln movie. It was released after the 2012 elections, many believe, so that minority and other voters would learn too late that it was our sixteenth president and other Republicans who championed the end of slavery and northern and southern Democrats who fought to prevent passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing the heinous practice.
The robber barons say whatever is expedient and then pursue policies that undermine the overall public welfare, while postponing many costly and politically explosive actions until after elections.
They also ignore and undermine the recent International Energy Agency forecast that, by 2020, the USA could be producing more oil than Saudi Arabia, currently the largest oil producer on the globe, thanks to advances in seismic, fracking, deepwater drilling and other technologies. A March 2012 Citi Global Problems and Solutions report painted a clear picture of the benefits that domestic energy development could bring – if government “public servants” and environmental “public interest” groups would permit it.
Cumulatively, the new production, reduced consumption and numerous activities associated with these technologies “could increase real GDP by an additional 2% to 3%, creating from 2.7 million to as many as 3.6 million net new jobs by 2020,” the Citi report stated. They could also shrink America’s “current account deficit” by 2.4% of GDP (a 60% reduction in the current budget deficit) and cause the dollar to appreciate in real terms by +1.6 to +5.4% all by 2020.
In the next few decades, Citi concluded, the energy sector “could drive an extraordinary and timely revitalization and reindustrialization of the U.S. economy, creating jobs and bringing prosperity to millions of Americans, just as the national economy struggles to recover from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.” It would also “improve national energy security and reverse perennial current account deficits” for decades to come.
However, as the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research has made clear, these enormous benefits “are at risk if new restrictions are imposed on the industry, from delays in approval of liquid natural gas exports, to opposition to expanding ports for coal and gas export, to opposition to pipelines and refineries, and to the threat of redundant federal regulations on the technology of hydraulic fracturing.” Worse, foregoing these enormous benefits would bring little or no improvement to the environment or human welfare.
Abundant, reliable, affordable energy is the backbone of the US and global economy. Perhaps one day renewable energy will become a viable alternative to the hydrocarbons that sustain jobs and energize virtually everything we make, ship, eat and do. Until then, America and the world need to promote regulatory sanity and increased production of our enormous base of coal, oil and natural gas resources.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power Black death.
It was dry in the American Midwest and hot across central North America this past summer; both triggered ridiculous claims that it was due to global warming. It’s what we predicted they said; trouble is the Earth has cooled since 2000. Claimants only illustrate they don’t understand climate mechanisms or climate history. There’s illogic in many of their claims such as warming bringing more droughts. Warming increases evaporation putting more moisture in the atmosphere increasing precipitation potential.
Actually, the drought cycles in the middle latitudes have little to do with temperature. Similarly current weather patterns are not unusual and easily understood with a brief explanation of the mechanisms.
Weather Extremes Are Normal
Basically the atmosphere has two parts, the cold polar region and the warm tropical region. The illustration shows the Northern Hemisphere, mirrored in the Southern Hemisphere.
Boundary between the two air masses is the Polar Front marked by a temperature contrast which is the greatest in a short distance for any latitude. As a result strongest winds, labeled the Jet stream, and most severe weather are associated. The technical name for the Jet Stream is the Circumpolar Vortex.
Each season the dome expands in winter to approximately 35N and shrinks in summer to 65N. It passes through southern Canada in Spring on its way north and again in Fall on its way south. Storms that ripple along the front bring severe weather and heavy precipitation accompany its passage.
A major feature in the Circumpolar Vortex are large amplitude Rossby Waves identified in 1939 by Carl Rossby. These Waves dominate and dictate the pattern of weather in the middle latitudes yet are still not included in most official explanations of weather.
There are two major flow patterns. Zonal flow has low amplitude Waves with stable weather patterns and generally northwest winds in winter and southwest in summer. Meridional flow has high amplitude Waves with unstable weather, extremes of temperature and precipitation, and winds more north and south in summer and winter.
Both Wave types migrate from west to east on a 4 to 6 week basis. Use a 5 week average and from the point when weather in your area changes noticeably you can expect that new pattern to last 5 weeks.
When the Meridional Wave amplitude deepens, cold air pushes well south, warm air pushes well north and the system blocks. Weather people talk about “blocking highs” or
“omega blocks”, the latter describing the pattern on a weather map. Under these conditions the Wave migration becomes 8 to 10 weeks causing persistence of the existing weather pattern. Dry remains dry as in the western US, and wet remains wet as in Britain this summer. People become nervous knowing from experience problems follow.
Drought Pattern in the Middle Latitudes
Government obsession with global warming meant they virtually ignored precipitation, yet in the short and medium term it is much more important for the human condition. In 2000, 200 top climate people listed the 20 worst climate disasters of the 20th century. 11 of the top 20 were droughts and 5 were floods.
Drought has been an issue since we began farming. We made ourselves vulnerable to the vagaries of weather when we switched from hunter/gathering to sedentary agriculture some 9000 years ago.
Drought fall into 3 broad categories.
• Perennial dryness occurs in hot deserts, such as the Sahara, Atacama, and Kalahari/Namib generally located between 15 and 30 degrees of latitude and cold deserts in the Arctic and Antarctic. The North Pole is one of the driest places on Earth.
• Seasonal dryness occurs in many regions of the world and are known as monsoon climates: summer is the dry season in California; winter in India.
• Intermittent dryness occurs wherever precipitation is below normal for an extended period.
Drought is defined in other ways. Hydrological drought occurs when stream flow or lake and reservoir levels are below average. Agricultural drought occurs when plant growth is limited by inadequate soil moisture, but what’s limiting for one plant is not for another. Shallow-rooted plants using soil moisture in the upper 10 cm are more drought- prone than deep-rooted plants using subsoil moisture. Trees are deep-rooted. A tree species adapted to the dry climate of North Africa might have roots going down 100 meters. Garden annuals are mostly shallow-rooted. Annual commercial crops are somewhere in between. If water is abundant, their roots tend to stay near the surface. When water is scarce, they go looking for it. Studies in Manitoba in the late 1980s drought found wheat roots down 3 meters.
In the U.S.. drought explains 55% of weather-related crop losses: excess moisture 16%; frost 11%: and hail 8%. Canadian numbers vary because of lower temperatures, but not by much. Regional variation shows drought more likely on the Prairies. Because of low precipitation it is a moisture deficit region.
Droughts persist throughout North America history. People are familiar with the 1930s, especially in western Canada, but few know similar droughts occur with varying degrees of severity approximately every 22 years.
Dust storm; Regina, Saskatchewan, April 14, 1933
Source; Western Canada Pictorial Index
Canadian Prairie droughts are an extension of the droughts of the American midwest - something John Palliser understood when he travelled across Canada in 1857 at the beginning of a drought, but that’s a story for another column.
The first person to relate the droughts to a physical phenomenon was A.E. Douglass. He was an astronomer whose main interest was dendroclimatology (tree rings), particularly the relationship between midlatitude precipitation patterns. He published an article in 1920 titled, “Evidence of Climatic Effects in the Annual Rings of Trees”. Later a chart was produced that showed the relationship between sunspots and droughts.
I used his work because I found a similar 22 year drought cycle in approximately 200 years of precipitation data for York Factory on Hudson Bay that correlated with sunspot activity. Theodor Landscheidt later showed the same relationship.
We don’t like the severe weather and especially the hardship it brings, but to exploit that for political gain is unacceptable and wrong. What is going on with today’s weather is not only perfectly normal, but not even close to much more severe weather in the past.
Proof of the effects of the Rossby Waves on middle latitude weather and the cherry-picking is evidenced by what happened in the week of August 20, 2012. Here is a map of record cold, yes I said cold, showing how the Wave pattern shifted, but it didn’t appear in the media because it doesn’t fit the alarmist agenda.
The Mayan calendar is about to end, and with it, the world.
People love nothing more than an apocalypse. Meteor collisions, alien invasions, super volcanoes, nuclear winter, and global warming all provide great material for mass entertainment and breathless news reporting.
The latest apocalypse to capture our imagination is the idea that, along with the Mayan calendar, the world will end on the 21st day of this month. The Mayan “Long Count” calendar, which began in 3114 BC, ends on December 21, 2012. The calendar is supposedly the measure of days from the beginning of humanity to the end. As a result, some doomsayers predict the end of the world in a few days.
Proposed scientific reasons why we won’t have a merry Christmas include ejection of mass from the sun, a sudden switching of Earth’s magnetic poles, a massive meteor collision with Earth, and a sudden shift in Earth’s crust. At this very moment, people across the world are stockpiling guns, machetes, kerosene, matches, sugar, and candles in preparation for the coming disaster. But our National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) assures us that the world won’t end on December 21.
Over that last two centuries, most doomsday threats have been blamed on humanity itself. Consider overpopulation. The Anglican minister Thomas Malthus postulated in 1798 that global population would outstrip mankind’s ability to feed itself, leading to economic disaster. Dr. Paul Ehrlich followed up with his 1968 book The Population Bomb, predicting that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death during the decade of the 1970s. But the agricultural revolution of the twentieth century and slowing population growth have confounded the predictions of Malthus and Ehrlich.
Other feared manmade catastrophes include killer air pollution, global thermonuclear war, worldwide disease pandemics, economic collapse from passing the production point of peak oil, and disaster from genetically engineered foods. While the jury is still out in some cases, these predicted catastrophes do not appear to be occurring.
But the greatest of all these fears is Climatism, the belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate.
Alarming climate change predictions would fit well with Mayan fears, but they need a little more time. According to economist Lord Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics on the impacts of global warming: “...at we are talking about then is extended world war...People would move on a massive scale. Hundreds of millions, probably billions of people would have to move...” From environmentalist Bill McKibben: “The world hasn’t ended, but the world as we know it has even if we don’t quite know it yet.”
From Dr. James Lovelock: “...before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”
What’s amazing is that the theory of dangerous global warming is accepted by the majority of world leaders. Today, the heads of state of 191 of the 192 nations are pursuing policies to try to stop the planet from warming. Most leading universities, NASA and other major scientific organizations, most of the Fortune 500 companies, and the news media accept the pending doom of man-made climate change. The world is spending over $250 billion each year to try to “decarbonize.”
But empirical evidence does not support the theory of catastrophic man-made warming. The 0.7C rise in global temperatures since 1880 was matched one thousand years ago during the Medieval Warm Period, when temperatures were warmer than today. Despite increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, Earth’s surface temperatures have been flat to declining for more than 10 years. Arctic ice has been declining, but Antarctic ice, which is 90 percent of Earth’s ice, has been increasing over the last 30 years. Sea levels are naturally rising at 7‒8 inches per century, but no evidence shows that accelerating sea level rise is underway. Hurricanes and tropical storms are neither more frequent nor stronger today than in times past. Polar bear populations have more than doubled in the last 50 years.
So, complete your Christmas shopping and don’t sell your winter coat. The world may end, but not before you have to pay your taxes and your credit card bills.
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the new book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
For one, you can offer to your Weather enthusiast friends, a subscription to Weatherbell with blogs and commentary by Joe Bastardi, Joe D’Aleo and Ryan Maue. Also a dynamite model page, and coming soon weather data and model based meteograms. Go to weatherbell.com.
There is the Icecap Amazon Book Store, with small percentage going to Icecap.
Also why not go to our friend Mish Michaels new site naturalcloudcover.com and purchase organic clothing with a weather theme with proceeds that support the Blue Hill Observatory.
And of course, Anthony Watts has a Weather Shop with great weather instruments.
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Meteorologist Klaus-Eckart Puls: Sea Level Rise Has Slowed 34% Over The Last Decade! P Gosselin on 6. Dezember 2012
German veteran meteorologist Klaus-Eckart Puls here has done an analysis of sea level rise. Contrary to claims made by fringe alarmist physicists, we see that sea level rise has decelerated markedly since 2003.
From 1993 to 2003, sea level rose 3.5 mm/year. Over the next decade, sea level rose only 2.3 mm/year! Source, then supplemented by EIKE.
In his report, Puls writes that even TOPEX and JASON 1+2 show no acceleration. “The acceleration calculated by the models and constantly reported by the media does not exist!”
Puls adds:”
It is obvious to see that sea level rise has slowed down significantly. In view of the relatively short time frame in which the measurements have been made, it should not be speculated on whether the deceleration in the rise is a trend change or if it is only noise. What is certain is that there is neither a ‘dramatic’ rise, nor an ‘acceleration’. Conclusion: Climate models that project an acceleration over the last 20 years are wrong.”
In the chart that follows, Puls fitted a polynomial curve to the data from TOPEX and JASON 1+2:
“The result is no surprise. The 20-year data series of global sea level rise shows a weakening!” No wonder con-artist Al Gore bought a mansion on the beachfront. It’s great living in a world of suckers and dimwit media.
But let’s not rely solely on the satellite data, which has been around only a measly 20 years, to infer a trend. Let’s compare it to tide gauges, which have been used well over one hundred years. Puls presents the following chart of the trend of the German bight”.
Sea level rise at the German bight. Source: see graphic.
Puls writes:
An evaluation shows: Also tide gauges indicate a slow-down in sea level rise, and do so with a statistically very ‘robust’ dataset of 160 years. Also there has been an evaluation of numerous tide gauages globally, see Die kalte Sonne.de, p=4429.
Conclusion:
We have found no indication that sea level has accelerated over the last 30 years. It doesn’t look good for the fans of acceleration.”
Puls summarizes:
The latest alarmist reports on the supposedly dramatic sea level rise for the present and the future cannot be confirmed by actual measurements. Quite to the contrary, they are refuted by the data. Globally neither tide nor satellite data show an acceleration of sea level rise. Rather they show a slow-down. Moreover they starkly contradict the previous and current claims coming from climate institutes. Also there are good indications that the satellite data were ‘overly corrected’ using inflated amounts.”
by Professsor Morner, world-class expert on sea level
Main points
- At most, global average sea level is rising at a rate equivalent to 2-3 inches per century. It is probably not rising at all.
- Sea level is measured both by tide gauges and, since 1992, by satellite altimetry. One of the keepers of the satellite record told Professor Morner that the record had been interfered with to show sea level rising, because the raw data from the satellites showed no increase in global sea level at all.
- The raw data from the TOPEX/POSEIDON sea-level satellites, which operated from 1993-2000, shows a slight uptrend in sea level. However, after exclusion of the distorting effects of the Great El Nino Southern Oscillation of 1997/1998, a naturally-occurring event, the sea-level trend is zero.
- The GRACE gravitational-anomaly satellites are able to measure ocean mass, from which sea-level change can be directly calculated. The GRACE data show that sea level fell slightly from 2002-2007.
- These two distinct satellite systems, using very different measurement methods, produced raw data reaching identical conclusions: sea level is barely rising, if at all.
- Sea level is not rising at all in the Maldives, the Laccadives, Tuvalu, India, Bangladesh, French Guyana, Venice, Cuxhaven, Korsør, Saint Paul Island, Qatar, etc.
- In the Maldives, a group of Australian environmental scientists uprooted a 50-year-old tree by the shoreline, aiming to conceal the fact that its location indicated that sea level had not been rising. This is a further indication of political tampering with scientific evidence about sea level.
- Modelling is not a suitable method of determining global sea-level changes, since a proper evaluation depends upon detailed research in multiple locations with widely-differing characteristics. The true facts are to be found in nature itself.
- Since sea level is not rising, the chief ground of concern at the potential effects of anthropogenic “global warming” that millions of shore-dwellers the world over may be displaced as the oceans expand is baseless.
- We are facing a very grave, unethical “sea-level-gate”.
A new paper published in the Journal of Climate examines global average sea-level rise during the 20th century and finds
1) Global sea level rise was constant throughout the 20th century, with “small or no acceleration, despite the increasing anthropogenic forcing,” in other words, increased CO2 has not accelerated sea-level rise.
2) The rate of glacier mass loss “was not smaller in the first than in the second half of the century,” in other words, increased CO2 has not accelerated glacier mass loss.
3) Future projections of sea-level rise “depend on the existence of a relationship between global climate change and the rate of sea-level rise, but...such a relationship is weak or absent during the 20th century.” In other words, alarmist projections of sea-level rise are based upon false assumptions of a human influence on sea-levels which is not found by observations.
In sum, global sea-level rise during the 20th century was constant, not accelerated, and shows no evidence of “climate change” or human influence.
Sea level rose more than 3 times faster than the 20th century from the last ice age 20,000 years ago until about 8,000 years ago. During meltwater Pulse 1A shown above, sea levels rose about 15 times faster than during the 20th century. Sea level rise has been at a relatively constant, low level during the past 8,000 years.
A new study by the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change—The State of Earth’s Terrestrial Biosphere: How is it Responding to Rising Atmospheric CO2 and Warmer Temperatures?—refutes claims by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that global warming is stressing Earth’s natural and agro-ecosystems by reducing plant growth and development.
“Such claims are simply not justified when one examines the balance of evidence as reported in the peer-reviewed scientific literature,” says Dr. Craig Idso, author of the report. “Far from being in danger, the vitality of global vegetation is better off now than it was a hundred years ago, 50 years ago, or even a mere two-to-three decades ago.” And “the observed increases in vegetative productivity and growth are happening in spite of all the many real and imagined assaults on Earth’s vegetation that have occurred during this time period, including wildfires, disease, pest outbreaks, deforestation, and climatic changes in temperature and precipitation.”
Specific findings in the meta-analysis examining hundreds of scientific studies on the subject include:
1. The productivity of the planet’s terrestrial biosphere, on the whole, has been increasing with time, revealing a great greening of the Earth that extends throughout the entire globe.
- Satellite-based analyses of net terrestrial primary productivity (NPP) reveal an increase of around 6-13% since the 1980s.
2. There is no empirical evidence to support the model-based IPCC claim that future carbon uptake by plants will diminish on a global scale due to rising temperatures. In fact, just the opposite situation has been observed in the real world.
- Earth’s land surfaces were a net source of CO2-carbon to the atmosphere until about 1940. From 1940 onward, however, the terrestrial biosphere has become, in the mean, an increasingly greater sink for CO2-carbon.
- Over the past 50 years, for example, global carbon uptake has doubled from 2.4 plus/minus 0.8 billion tons in 1960 to 5.0 plus/minus 0.9 billion tons in 2010.
3. There is compelling evidence that the atmosphere’s rising CO2 content - which the IPCC considers to be the chief reason behind all of their concerns about the future of the biosphere (via the indirect threats they claim it poses as a result of CO2-induced climate change) - is actually most likely the primary cause of the observed greening trends.
4. In the future, Earth’s plants should be able to successfully adjust their physiology to accommodate a warming of the magnitude and rate-of-rise that is typically predicted by climate models to accompany the projected future increase in the air’s CO2 content. And factoring in the plant productivity gains that will occur as a result of the aerial fertilization effect of the ongoing rise in atmospheric CO2, plus its accompanying transpiration-reducing effect that boosts plant water use efficiency, the world’s vegetation possesses an ideal mix of abilities to reap a tremendous benefit in the years and decades to come.
Given these findings, the report contends that the recent “greening of the Earth” observed by a host of scientists will likely continue throughout the years and decades to come. Government leaders and policy makers should take notice of the findings of this important new assessment on the state of the Earth’s terrestrial biosphere.
The report can be viewed or downloaded at the website of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change here. Questions about the report can be addressed to Dr. Craig Idso at the email address contactus@co2science.org.
