The science around climate change is not as settled as it’s presented as being. I used to think it was, until about 2003 - and then, feeling that the remedies being proposed for climate change would be more damaging to the environment than climate change itself, I took it upon myself to look at the science.

In my book on biodiversity, Beyond Conservation, I had mentioned in one of the chapters that perhaps the man-made global warming theory was not all it was being cracked up to be. The changes we are seeing now, I wrote, suggested that some other processes were at work. I then took time out, visited the science libraries, and checked the original science upon which today’s models are based.

I was shocked by what I found. Firstly, there’s no real consensus among the scientists in the UN working groups, especially around oceanography and atmospheric physics. The atmospheric physics of carbon dioxide for example is presented as being pretty straightforward: it is a greenhouse gas, therefore it warms up the planet. But even that isn’t settled. There’s a huge amount of scientific disagreement on how much extra heating in the atmosphere you will get from carbon dioxide. It is even broadly accepted that carbon dioxide on its own is not a problem. So, you can double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and get half to one degree warming, which is within the natural variability range over a period of 50 years from now at the current rate of emissions.

The role of water vapour in planetary warming is also open to questioning. While it is presented as being a heat amplifier, in fact because it can turn into cloud it could actually regulate temperature instead. As it turned out, at the very beginning of the UN discussions, Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, and a leading expert appointed to the committee because of his meteorological expertise, was saying precisely that: the amplification effect asserted cannot be relied upon to increase warming because the vapour could turn into cloud. This needed to be proved before basing assumptions on it. But Lindzen was overruled. Despite still being a key part of the IPPC process, he is now vilified by the press and by the environmental movement. So even on the most basic science of the atmospherics, there is doubt.

Or take oceanography. Most of the heat of the planet is not contained in the atmosphere; it is in the oceans. And what happens in the oceans is absolutely vital to the dynamics of heat moving around the planet. So while of course it is possible to warm up the planet to an additional extent as a result of human activity, if the planet then lets more heat out than it would normally do, then it will balance out. That is to say, you have only to produce less cloud over the oceans and the oceans will release heat to space. Like CO2 itself, the atmosphere doesn’t actually hold heat - it simply delays its transmission to space.

The real dynamic of the planet is to do with clouds, yet this area of science - oceanography and cloud cover - is incredibly uncertain. When I first looked at the basic science, the findings were surprising. Over the global warming period - which I limit to the past 50 or so years - the globe didn’t warm at all between 1950 and 1980, even though carbon dioxide emissions were going through the roof due to the postwar expansion of industry; global temperatures stayed pretty much flat.

The real global warming took off in the 1980s and 90s, through to about 2005. (In the last 10 years it’s actually plateaued.) That period of 25 years, from around 1980 to 2005, coincided with changes in the ocean and cloud cover - that is, there was less cloud and more sunlight getting through to the ocean. And this can be seen in the satellite data on the kind of energy that’s coming through (short-wave energy, which is the only energy that heats water - infra-red energy coming from CO2 cannot heat water). So when you look at the real-world data, the warming of that entire period seems to be due to additional sunlight reaching the oceans.

In 2007, I put out a report on this, in the hope of getting feedback before I published my book, Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory. Since then, top scientists at NASA have agreed that this period of warming over the past 25 years is entirely due to the short-wave radiation from sunlight, with the ocean transferring that heat to the land.

So the crucial question is: has the cloud thinning been due to carbon dioxide? Or is it part of a cycle? If you ask some of the top people at NASA - that is, the people who interpret all the satellite data - they will say it’s 50-50. So you could say the greenhouse effect has warmed the oceans and the warmer oceans have thinned the clouds. But that is still just a hypothesis, it is not a proven scientific fact. That means you could assert with equal validity that thinning clouds have warmed the oceans, which has led to global warming - meaning the effect of carbon dioxide is minimal.

There is a fairly easy way of deciding between the two viewpoints: you look at the history of climate to find out whether there has been warming and cooling in the past, before carbon dioxide became such an issue. And of course there have been cycles of warming and cooling, with the longest of the cycles lasting about a thousand years and the shortest cycle - El Nino - about four-to-eight years.

So, right now, we are at the peak of a thousand-year cycle. We also had a peak for all the other cycles between 1995 and 2005. Given that these cycles have peaked, temperature-wise, before, one can look at what happened back then. A thousand years ago, for instance, the Vikings were growing crops on Greenland, which assumes that the summer ice would have been more limited than it is now. The Arctic melted down a thousand years ago, just as it did 2,000 years ago. What’s astonishing is that you can see all of that in the ice-core record in Greenland. And in each cycle of a thousand years, the peak is getting lower. So overall the planet is actually cooling, from a peak about 8,000 years ago.

Now the only way in which you can get cycles of warming and cooling on such a scale is through the oceans. And the only way that can happen is in relation to cloud cover. So the crucial question then is, how do the oceans vary their cloud cover? What creates these cycles? There is a major scientific controversy over how the sun’s magnetic field influences the different types of energy that reach the planet, and how they, in turn, influence cloud cover. There are several different scientific teams working on it, including one from the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). What this shows is that it is still an unresolved question. Nobody knows what the mechanisms are.

So why is the UN saying what it is saying? Well, if you actually look at the wording of what this so-called consensus of scientists has produced, then you will see that they believe that ‘global warming is not due to known natural causes acting alone’. This is clever wording. It means that the door is open to an unknown mechanism driving the warming. So although it is well known that the warming is naturally driven, the mechanism is not.

Why would the UN suppress all of this debate happening within its working groups? The problem is that the secretariat within the UN tasked with processing this debate is already committed - financially - to focusing upon carbon dioxide as the climate-change driver. It is very hard for them to backtrack.

It is only recently that the scientific world has bought into this consensus. In 2001, America, Russia and China did not accept the UN’s analysis. But by 2004, America had signed up to it. And this was all down to a certain team in the US which produced an analysis that ironed out the past cycles of warming and cooling. Although it has since been discredited, this report had a tremendous effect in bringing scientific institutions around to the idea of man-made global warming.

So behind the appearance of consensus and settled science, there is now this tremendous battle going on. The dissenting scientists are described by certain journalists and environmentalists as ‘denialists’ and ‘sceptics’ funded by the oil industry. This is simply not the case. There are top-level atmospheric physicists, oceanographers and solar scientists who do not agree that the case is proven for global warming. Nobody is seriously saying that carbon dioxide has no effect whatsoever, but the defenders of the faith, as it were, set up a straw man. ‘These people’, they say, ‘think carbon dioxide has no effect’. Only a lunatic fringe thinks that.

The critical scientists are simply saying that carbon dioxide’s effect is small, at most 20 per cent. This means that even a 50 per cent reduction by 2050 in manmade greenhouse gas emissions would only reduce the driving force of climate change by 10 per cent. That’s because the natural driving force will determine the climate. As I argue in Chill, if you look at all the past cycles, the temperature declines after a peak. And this decline will bring with it wholly different problems - ones which, so far, we are woefully underprepared for.

What’s really disconcerting for me is that I am a longstanding environmentalist. As part of environmental groups I’ve helped to prevent nuclear waste from being dumped in the ocean, I’ve helped change emergency planning for nuclear reactors, and I’ve also helped develop biodiversity strategy. I’m as green as you can get. But what I am faced with now is environmental groups and major NGOs - Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF, even the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds - which have allied themselves with the state. They talk about so-called denialists allying themselves with ‘Big Oil’, but they have fallen into the arms of big government. They’ve allied with disreputable prime ministers; they’ve allied with chief policy advisers who have never got anything right in their lives; they’ve allied themselves with scientific institutions that have never led on any of these environmental issues.

If you write something, as I have done with Chill, which is a rational, critical appraisal of the whole situation, you would at least expect to have some dialogue. But there has been nothing. I haven’t had a single invitation to speak to any of these groups. Even universities have been reticent. I have been invited to speak at Leeds University, which has quite a strong climate community, and the Energy Institute. But the environmental community has been absolutely silent towards me. I would challenge them to bring all of their experts to the table and hammer it out.

We’re seeing the dangerous development here of a very intolerant political ideology. It is a very strange political and scientific situation, in which vast sums of money are underwriting a bureaucracy of climate accountants and auditors, and in which academic funding is easier to obtain if you put man-made climate change at the top of your research proposal. I have never seen anything like it in the 40 years of my scientific and environmental career.

Peter Taylor is author of Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory.

There’s enough snow to open a run at Mount Washington, shown in February, next weekend.

Photographed by: Darren Stone, Times Colonist, Times Colonist

A cool, wet spring has brought an unexpected benefit—Mount Washington plans to open for summer skiers and snowboarders next weekend, a first in its 32-year history. “How often can you say you’ve skied on the Island in June?” said resort spokesman Brent Curtain. “We’re allowing people the opportunity to do it.”

The rare chance to hit the slopes in a T-shirt is courtesy of a recent spate of unseasonably wet weather, which means less snow than expected has melted since the resort closed in late April. As a result, there’s enough snow to open the Linton’s Loop run on the Eagle Express chair. At the top, there’s as much as two metres of snow, said Curtain. “There’s been no sun, and snow melts a lot quicker when you have some sunshine and warmer temperatures,” he said. “Even with rain, if there’s cloud cover and rain, it’s not going to melt as quick.”

The summer ski session caps a banner year for Mount Washington. The resort was blanketed with more than 15 metres of snow from November 2009 to April 2010—the second-deepest amount in history. Mount Washington had a top-five year in terms of business, said Curtain.

Resort officials aren’t sure what the turnout will be for the summer ski weekend, or whether Mount Washington will turn a profit, said Curtain. “This wasn’t a venture to make a bunch of money or a weekend to be a cash grab. It’s more of a, ‘You know, we can do this,’ “ he said. “We’ve joked about it in past years when you’ve closed the season with a lot of snow and you joke, ‘God, imagine summer operations if we had enough snow to ski.’

“We always say that but you get the warm two-week stretch in May and then the snow disappears pretty quick.” The summer ski weekend runs 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. June 19 and 20. A lift ticket costs $25. Dads pay only $10 on Father’s Day Sunday if they bring their kids. Rentals are available. Because the weekend is considered a special event, the resort said season’s tickets are not being honoured.

The meltdown of the Himalayan glaciers is not going to be nearly as dire as a Nobel Prize-winning UN climate panel predicted, but it does still threaten the water and food security of 60 million people, says a new report.

Glaciers are often described as the “water towers” of the world, and the UN has warned that the glaciers feeding major Asian river basins - and providing water for 1.4 billion people - are fast disappearing as a result of climate change. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which co-won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, went so far as to say that the Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035 - which UN officials now admit was a mistake.

A study published Friday in the journal Science shows the report got more than the 2035 date wrong. It says the 2007 IPCC report also overstated and oversimplified the impact Himalayan glaciers have on Asian rivers.

Glacier meltwater plays only a “modest role” in the several major river systems in Asia, says the study by a Dutch team that took a close look the rivers downstream from the enormous Himalayan snow and ice fields.

“Meltwater is extremely important in the Indus basin and important for the Brahmaputra basin, but plays only a modest role for the Ganges, Yangtze, and Yellow rivers,” reports the team led by Walter Immerzeel at Utrecht University.

“A huge difference also exists between basins in the extent to which climate change is predicted to affect water availability and food security,” the study says. “The Brahmaputra and Indus basins are most susceptible to reductions of flow, threatening the food security of an estimated 60 million people.”

Though the study says global warming will lead to substantial changes in glaciers, it says the “impact will be less than anticipated” by the IPCC’s 2007 report. “In that report, it was suggested that the current trends of glacier melt and potential climate change may cause the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, and other rivers to become seasonal rivers in the near future,” the Dutch team says. “We argue that these rivers already are seasonal rivers, because the melt and rain seasons generally coincide and a decrease in meltwater is partially compensated for by an increase in precipitation.”

The study helps set the record straight, says glaciologist Graham Cogley, at Trent University, in Peterborough, Ont. “They are probably in the right ballpark,” he says.

Cogley, like many scientists involved with the IPCC, was dismayed the panel’s report contained the unsupported claim that Himalayan glaciers “are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high.” UN officials have acknowledged the mistake, which overstated by several hundred years when the glaciers could melt away.

“It was a first-class disaster,” says Cogley, says of the mistake. He says some scientists saw the error and tried to alert senior authors, but it was “too late” to get the report corrected.

Cogley says he hopes that the fiasco - and the toll it has taken on the IPCC’s credibility - will lead to better co-ordination and cross-checking between the groups of thousands of scientists who will soon start work on the next UN climate change report.

He also says referring to the Himalayan glaciers as the “water towers” of Asia is “all right in a hand-waving sort of way.” But Cogley, like the Dutch team, notes that rainfall and snowfall often play a more important role than glacier meltwater in keeping rivers flowing. “The elementary point is that the farther you go downstream from a glacier, the less their relative importance,” says Cogley.

The meltdown of the Himalayan glaciers is not going to be nearly as dire as a Nobel Prize-winning UN climate panel predicted, but it does still threaten the water and food security of 60 million people, says a new report.

Read more here.

It is a measure of the weakness of the case against Sen. Murkowski’s resolution of disapproval (S.J.Res.26) that opponents keep trying to change the subject. They want to pretend that a vote for S.J.Res.26 is a vote for Big Oil in general and for BP’s oil spill and all the associated ecological and economic damage in particular.

To say it again, if they really think oil is so bad that America should pay any price, bear any burden, and endure any sacrifice to get “beyond petroleum,” then they should follow the Constitution and try to assemble legislative majorities capable of enacting their agenda.

They know they can’t, so they want EPA - an administrative agency - to enact their agenda for them. That this makes a mockery out of our constitutional system of separated powers and democratic accountability doesn’t seem to bother them one whit.

The vote on S.J.Res.26 is not “about oil.” The endangerment rule, which the Murkowski resolution would overturn, would not create a single tool or authority that could have averted the BP oil spill. It would not tighten a single petroleum industry safety standard or improve a single emergency response program. It would not create a single incentive that might have made BP more diligent in implementing safety standards.

The only way greenhouse gas regulations could stop oil spills is by making deep water drilling unprofitable. That, however, would make America more dependent on IMPORTED oil (duh!). Is that want opponents of S.J.Res.26 want?

They’ll say, no, their goal is to “set America free” from dependence on petroleum as such. But that is not possible at reasonable cost, which is why despite decades of anti-petroleum agitation, fuel economy standards, and government support for alternative technologies and fuels, U.S. petroleum consumption and imports continue to increase.

At most, EPA’s greenhouse gas emission standards can only decrease the rate at which U.S. petroleum consumption increases. More accurately, EPA’s standards would only complicate and reduce the efficiency of the fuel economy program Congress created and amended via the 1975 Energy Policy Conservation Act and 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act. As the National Automobile Dealers Association explains in a letter in support of S.J.Res.26, overturning the endangerment rule would help restore a more efficient approach: “a single national fuel economy standard, with rules set by Congress.”

Finally, the notion that oil is bad and hence that government can’t do too much to restrict petroleum production is benighted. Members of Congress who espouse this view either deliberately misleading the public or are ignorant of oil’s historic and continuing massive contribution to the improvement of human health and welfare.

A recent post on a blog called The Intellectual Activist eloquently explains the common sense of the matter. I reproduce it below.

Oil Is Good
By Jack Wakeland

I appreciated the pro-industrialism in last Friday’s edition of TIA Daily:

I also think that we need to return to a more old-fashioned attitude toward industrial accidents. Today, they are considered utterly unacceptable catastrophes for one reason: a large segment of the culture does not accept that it is legitimate for heavy industry to exist at all and has a particular animus toward industries that generate power - including oil and coal. So they exploit every accident to promote their pre-existing agenda of shutting down all oil exploration. But if we accept that the Industrial Revolution is a good thing - that it has roughly doubled the average lifespan and vastly increased our quality of life - then we accept that the oil industry has to exist and that occasional accidents are just part of the cost of living.

With continuous 24-hour headline news coverage of this supposedly “unprecedented” disaster - in fact, it was preceded by the 10-month-long, 140 million-gallon Ixtoc 1 blowout off the gulf coast of Mexico in 1979 - Rob Tracinski and Sarah Palin are among a tiny minority of American commentators who have voiced the opinion that industrial development is essential for civilization. Unfortunately Sarah Palin and almost all conservatives agree 100% with conservationism - the pre-New-Left version of environmentalism. They say that energy development as a “dirty” business - a necessary evil - that produces “dirty” messes. But we must endure the ugly mess if we are to enjoy the benefits of living a civilized existence.

Of all of the hundreds of commentaries written about the BP oil spill, I can’t recall one single editorial that endorses oil drilling as good.

It is good for oil company stock holders. Good for industrial producers. Good for automobile and truck drivers. Good for people who travel by ship, railroad, or aircraft. Good for people who don’t want to be limited to living out their whole lives without ever traveling farther than 100 miles from the village in which they were born.

Oil is good for people who buy products that are shipped to them from out of town. Good for producers who buy parts and supplies that are shipped in from out of town. Good for the specialization of industrial production that is made possible by mass shipment of parts and materials. Good for the geometrical growth of world-wide industrial productivity made possible by the specialization of production and trade.

Oil is good for farmers who use machines to plant and reap and store and dry and ship and process all of the food we eat. Good for farmers who use fertilizer and other agri-chemicals made from oil to boost the productivity of the land. Good for anyone who doesn’t enjoy enduring bouts of malnutrition and starvation- and the occasional famine.

Oil is good for people who don’t want to endure freezing indoor temperatures in the winter. Good for all producers and end users of lubricants, paints, plastics and other petro-chemical-based products. (Half of the volume of a barrel of crude oil ends up going to make fertilizers and plastics.)

Oil is good for powering all of the ships, trucks, aircraft, helicopters, communications equipment and base electrical systems, and all of the fighting vehicles that the US military use for our national defense. (Ask yourself why it was that when the US Army Air Force decided to destroy the entire nation of Germany in 1944 - why was it that they bombed the oil refineries? Why was it that they bombed all modes of transportation to limit shipment between factories of unfinished industrial products?)

Oil drilling isn’t a “dirty” business. It isn’t a necessary evil. It is good. It is a life-giving good. It is an unqualified good.

The problems of an occasional industrial accident in which fewer than a dozen men are killed fades to nothing in comparison with the great comfort and prosperity and scope of life- including the operation of the mechanized agriculture and industrial production upon which the bare survival of the vast majority of the 6.5 billion human beings currently living on this earth depends. 

UPDATE: Read here why Barbara Boxer needs to be ousted in te next election after this bit of demogoguery and more here.

See also how Auto Dealers Demolish White House Rationale for Opposing Murkowski Resolution in letter to senators here.

Today (June 10, 2010), the Senate will vote on Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s resolution of disapproval (S.J.Res.26) to overturn the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. 

The endangerment finding is both trigger and precedent for sweeping policy changes Congress never approved. Wednesday, I will speak in support of S.J.Res.26 at an 11:00 a.m. Capitol Hill press conference hosted by Americans for Prosperity. My prepared statement follows.

Prepared Statement of Marlo Lewis

Sen. Murkowski’s resolution would stop EPA from ‘enacting’ controversial global warming policies through the regulatory back door. The endangerment finding is a classic case of bureaucratic self dealing. EPA has positioned itself to determine the stringency of fuel economy standards, set climate policy for the nation, and even amend provisions of the Clean Air act - powers Congress never delegated to the agency.

Worse, America could end up with a pile of greenhouse gas regulations more costly than any climate bill or treaty the Senate has declined to pass or ratify, yet without the people’s representatives ever voting on it. The Murkowski resolution puts a simple question before the Senate: Who shall make climate policy - lawmakers who must answer to the people at the ballot box or politically unaccountable bureaucrats, trial lawyers, and activist judges appointed for life? Because the endangerment finding dramatically expands EPA’s power, the agency fiercely opposes S.J.Res.26, depicting it as an attack on science.

That is nonsense. Although a strong case can be made that the endangerment finding is scientifically flawed, the Murkowski resolution neither takes nor implies a position on climate science.

The resolution would overturn the “legal force and effect” of the endangerment finding, not its reasoning or conclusions. It is a referendum not on climate science but on who should make climate policy. Climate policy is too important to be made by non-elected bureaucrats. That ought to be a proposition on which all Senators can agree.

The importance of Thursday’s vote is difficult to exaggerate. Nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional system of separated powers and democratic accountability hangs in the balance.

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PRESS RELEASE NCPPR

National Center for Public Policy Research

Washington, D.C. - Senators will soon consider a resolution to pare back an Environmental Protection Agency plan to regulate greenhouse gases - a plan that would raise energy costs.

On June 10, the U.S. Senate will consider a “resolution of disapproval” regarding a 2009 ruling made by the EPA in late 2009 claiming six greenhouse gases are a threat to public health. This makes these gases—carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride—subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act.

“The EPA’s endangerment finding endangers our economy and our liberty,” said Deneen Borelli, full-time fellow with the Project 21 black leadership network. “The EPA’s effort to regulate greenhouse gases will affect virtually every aspect of our economy and our lives. In expert opinion, this will result in higher energy costs and job losses while having—by their own admission—virtually no effect on cooling global climate.”

Senate Joint Resolution 26, introduced by Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), would use the Congressional Review Act to overturn the administrative ruling. This would allow elected representatives to deliberate and pass their own regulations as Congress sees fit.

“I don’t want an unelected bureaucrat imposing rules and regulations on businesses that are essentially a tax on energy and will be passed along to consumers—many of whom are just getting by as it is,” said Tom Borelli, director of the Free Enterprise Project of the National Center for Public Policy Research.

“Opposition to the cap-and-trade bill that was jammed through the House of Representatives is one of the key positions of the tea parties, and this endangerment finding is cap-and-trade by other means,” noted Deneen Borelli. “Americans are already skeptical enough of lawmakers these days. Watching them pass up an opportunity to do what they were sent to Washington for will restore no lost faith in the government.”

“This resolution is a major indicator of where our republic is headed. Senators will determine if they are going to cede their authority as an elected representative of the people to largely unaccountable bureaucrats,” added Tom Borelli. “While the White House is eager for the EPA to seize regulatory authority, rank-and-file Americans such as those found in the tea party movement are troubled and will be watching to see who will be for and who will be against this massive federal power grab.” See release here.

The National Center for Public Policy Research is a non-profit, free-market think-tank established in 1982 and funded primarily by the gifts of over 100,000 recent individual contributors. Less than one percent of funding is received from corporations.

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The EPA Runs Amuck
By Alan Caruba

On Thursday, the Senate will vote on S.J. Resolution 26. It is an effort to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating “greenhouse gas emissions” without any legislative accountability. If the vote fails, the EPA will be free to continue its assault on the nation’s economy and every aspect of your personal life.

Here’s what my friend, Dr. Kenneth P. Green, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, had to say about the energy and environment “advisor” to President Barack Obama:

“Carol Browner’s selection as ‘energy coordinator’ (sometimes called energy czar) virtually guarantees that the Obama administration’s energy and environmental policies will be anything but moderate.”

“Her two terms as Environmental Protection Agency boss were marked by adversarialism, punitive enforcement actions, draconian tightening of environmental regulations and the message that business is destructive of the environment and dishonest about the cost of environmental regulations.”

And that was just the nice things he had to say about Browner. It is worth noting that Browner has been the lead spokesman about the BP oil spill for the Obama administration after it became obvious that Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Interior, was generating negative public reaction to his ‘get tough’ approach and there have been few public statements issued by Dr. Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy.

The current administrator of the EPA is Lisa Jackson who learned her trade working under Browner until she was picked to head the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. A Browner acolyte, Jackson has presided over an EPA run amuck.

Jackson will be remembered for leading the EPA fight to get carbon dioxide declared a “pollutant” that can then be regulated under the Clean Air Act. This is the same reasoning put forth by the constantly renamed Cap-and-Trade Act that is was a “climate” bill and has now become something else. It is based on the same totally bogus “science” that gave us “global warming” until Mother Nature decided that the Earth should begin to cool about a decade ago.

President Obama just announced that, just like the much-hated healthcare reform bill, he is going to devote himself to getting Cap-and-Trade passed by Congress. Combined, they should be called The Destroying America’s Economy Act.

Suffice to say that, other than oxygen, carbon dioxide is the other gas on which all life on Earth depends. It’s what all vegetation “breaths” and, coincidently, it is what all humans and other animals exhale. It has nothing to do with the climate.

Dr. Green points out that, “When it comes to climate change, she is a disciple of Al Gore for whom she worked from 1988 to 1991,” adding that “Browner believes that ‘climate change is the greatest challenge ever faced’ and that the EPA is the agency to face it.”

I have been watching the EPA in action since it was created in the 1970s by Mr. Watergate himself, Richard Nixon. It has since expanded like a cancer cell, doing a lot of damage along the way. There must be a sign on the wall of EPA headquarters that says, “If it’s a chemical, we will ban it.” On May 24, the EPA announced it was discussing the perils of oil dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico. Please, let’s do nothing to disperse the oil!

From its earliest days, the EPA set out to ban or limit the use of any and all pesticides nationwide. They have never stopped. It is essential to understand that what passes for EPA “science” is merely a charade to advance their agenda.

It can cost up to $15 million or more for a company to get a pesticide registered for use. If you take away the pesticides, all that’s left is the pests, but this simple truth is lost on the EPA. They have come up with a proposed new “permit requirement that would decrease the amount of pesticides discharged to our nation’s waters and protect human health and the environment.” If you really want to protect human health, you have to kill the billions of insect and rodent pests that have always spread disease.

So far in the last month, the EPA has announced they will release “a draft health assessment for formaldehyde that focuses on evaluating the potential toxicity of inhalation exposures to this chemical.”

Also announced was news that the EPA “is initiating a rulemaking to better protect the environment and public health from the harmful effects of sanitary sewer overflows and basement backups.” They are “reviewing” Florida’s coastal water quality standards, a move that will wreak havoc on its agricultural and tourist industries.

Another EPA announcement noted that “It just got harder for a TV to earn the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star. Starting May 1, 2010, TV’s that carry the government’s Energy Star label are, on average, 40 percent more efficient than conventional models.” This is all done in the name of reducing “greenhouse gas emissions” when, in fact, this is the baseless justification for the global warming hoax.

If at this point, you are beginning to think the EPA is just a tad intrusive regarding your basement backup problems, the kind of television set you should purchase, and other previous decisions such as how much water your toilet can use or the banning of incandescent light bulbs nationwide, you will be happy to know that in May the EPA took the time to “encourage ways to travel green by checking into an Energy Star labeled hotel.”

While in the hotel, you are advised to “turn off the lights and TV when leaving the hotel room”, “adjust the thermostat to an energy-saving setting so it doesn’t heat or cool the room while empty”, “to open curtains to take advantage of daylight when possible”, and “re-use linens to save both water and energy.”

If, by now, you’re getting the feeling that the EPA is more intrusive into the most mundane aspects of your life than any other government agency or combination of agencies, you’re right.

And very little of it has anything to do with protecting your health or the environment. It has everything to do with advancing a fanatical green agenda intended to threaten every form of energy production, manufacturing process, property rights, and your right to make a wide range of personal lifestyle decisions.  See post here.

RADIO INTERVIEW
Shannon Goessler, the executive director of the Southeastern Legal Foundation will be discussing SLF’s lawsuit against the EPA over CO2 regulation on Global Cooling Radio.  The interview will take place this Saturday at 10:00 AM CDST here.