Steve Goreham, TBO

President Obama’s remarks to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, he stated, “… My plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet - because climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They’re a threat to our children’s future. And in this election you can do something about it.”

The president’s remarks support the ideology of climatism - the belief that manmade greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate.

Today, the world is in the grip of the madness of climatism. Our president and 191 other world leaders of the United Nations continue to pursue futile policies to stop global warming. Universities preach “sustainable development.” Companies tout their “green” programs. Schools teach our children that if we change light bulbs, we can save polar bears. But an increasing body of science shows that the theory of catastrophic manmade warming is nonsense. Climate change is natural, and car emissions are insignificant.

The president did not mention the Keystone Pipeline in his speech. In January 2012, he halted the $7 billion Keystone project on recommendation by the State Department in order to assess potential environmental harm. During the last months of 2011, thousands of protesters gathered in front of the White House to protest the Keystone project. They claimed that the oil the pipeline would transport from Canadian tar sands would cause irreversible global warming. Dr. James Hansen of NASA was one of those arrested at the demonstrations. Media pundits speculated that the president halted the pipeline to strengthen his political support with environmental groups. But could it be that Mr. Obama believes that halting the pipeline was the right policy to save the planet?

Who can blame the president for sticking with the theory of man-made global warming? Most of his leading advisors, including Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, science guru John Holdren and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, warn that mankind is destroying the climate. The EPA campaign to halt CO2 emissions from power plants, new vehicle mileage standards, subsidies for wind turbines and electric cars, the Solyndra solar cell debacle, the banning of incandescent light bulbs, the looming California high-speed rail boondoggle and ethanol vehicle fuel mandates are all policies driven by climatism.

The president’s use of the term “carbon pollution” is disappointing. Environmentalists inaccurately use this phrase to conjure up images of billowing smoke stacks, and the president has picked this up. The theory of manmade global warming claims that carbon dioxide, not carbon, causes climate change. Carbon dioxide is an invisible gas, while carbon is a black solid. Referring to carbon dioxide as “carbon” is as foolish as calling water “hydrogen” or salt “chlorine.”

Compounds have totally different properties than their composing elements. Neither is carbon dioxide pollution. It’s an odorless, harmless gas that green plants need for photosynthesis. Carbon dioxide is a foundation for life on Earth along with oxygen and water.

Carbon dioxide is a trace gas. Only four of every 10,000 air molecules are CO2. It’s estimated that the amount of carbon dioxide that mankind added in all of human history is only a fraction of one of these four molecules. The idea that mankind’s tiny contribution to a trace atmospheric gas can cause hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods and wildfires is not a joke, it’s incredible.

Contrary to much of the recent press, a look at history shows that this summer’s drought was not unprecedented in these United States. The droughts of the 1930s and 1950s lasted longer and experienced higher temperatures. According to the State Climate Extremes Database of the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), 37 of the 50 state high-temperature records dated prior to 1960, with 22 of these from the decade of the 1930s. Only one state high-temperature record was recorded during the last 16 years. Additional data on droughts and floods from the NCDC show no increasing trend over the last 100 years. Nature drives droughts and floods, not manmade emissions of carbon dioxide.

The president’s statement is remarkable in another way. He implies that we should vote for him because he can control droughts, floods and wildfires to safeguard “our children’s future.”

During a speech in June 2008, he implied that he could slow the rise of the seas. What’s next, regulation of snowfall? If Mr. Obama is re-elected and with bipartisan support in Congress and approval of the United Nations, look for the Snowfall Abatement Act of 2014.

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.”

Source:  SPPI

EPA Madness Spreads
EPA advances anti-energy agenda, with little regard for Americans health or welfare

by Paul Driessen

Seven score and nine years ago, President Lincoln resolved to take increased devotion to ensuring that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the Earth.

Yet, today, our lives are determined not so much by We the People, as by a distant central government, particularly increasingly powerful, unelected and unaccountable Executive Branch agencies. Foremost among them, by almost any standard, is the Environmental Protection Agency.

Under Administrator Lisa Jackson, the Gettysburg vision has mutated into government of, by and for the EPA. Indeed, Ms. Jackson seeks not merely to regulate, but to legislate; not merely to protect our health and environment against every conceivable risk, but to control every facet of our economy, livelihoods and lives. Under her direction, EPA increasingly flaunts the naked power of regulators gone wild.

Instead of following laws and policies set by our elected representatives, EPA is now controlled by environmental ideologues, determined to impose their utopian ideas, via a massive and arrogant power grab. President Obama set the tone, with his promises to “bankrupt” coal and utility companies and “radically transform” our economy and society, and serves as the rogue agency’s cheerleader-in-chief. With few exceptions, our courts have refused to intervene, and the Senate has obstructed any meaningful efforts to constrain agency overreach or reexamine the laws under which it claims jurisdiction.

EPA’s power grab picks the pockets of every American business and citizen, making it increasingly expensive to fill gas tanks, heat and cool homes and offices, run hospitals and factories, or buy food and consumer goods. The Employment Prevention Agency’s $100-billion diktats are killing countless jobs, making America more dependent on foreign sources of energy and raw materials that we have in abundance right here at home, and endangering our economic health and national security.

Under Lisa Jackson’s agenda, fossil fuels are to be relegated to the dustbin of history. America is to get its energy from intermittent, unreliable “renewable” sources, whenever they are available. Regulations on carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases,” mercury, soot and other substances are to make non-hydrocarbon energy appear cheaper by comparison, and pave the way for crony corporatist “alternatives” like wind, solar, ethanol, wave and tidal action, and even biofuel for the Navy and Air Force.

In a mere six instances, our courts have delayed or blocked some of EPA’s worst excesses. Ruling that the agency had exceeded its authority, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down EPA’s “cross-state” air pollution rule, which would have controlled power plant emissions on the ground that computer models predicted the pollutants might harm neighborhoods hundreds of miles away.

In far too many other cases, however, EPA has been given carte blanche to regulate as it sees fit. A key pretext is the 1970 Clean Air Act, as amended by Congress in 1977 and 1990. The act deals primarily with six common pollutants: sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, particulates (soot), ozone, lead and carbon monoxide. It never mentions carbon dioxide, the plant-fertilizing gas that is essential for all life.

As EPA itself acknowledges, between 1970 and 2010, those six “criteria” air pollutants declined by an average of 63% and will continue to do so under existing regulations and technologies. Moreover, those dramatic reductions occurred even ascoal-based electricity generation increased 180% ... overall US energy consumption rose 40%… miles traveled soared 168% ...and the nation’s population increased by 110 million. However, EPA intends to go much further, to advance its radical agenda.

It ruled that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant,” ignoring solar influences and citing claims by alarmists like James Hansen and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that this essential gas (0.0395% of Earth’s atmosphere) “contributes” to “dangerous” global warming. Since hydrocarbons provide 85% of the energy used to power America, this single ruling gives EPA effective control over our transportation, manufacturing, heating, cooling and other activities. virtually our entire economy. while making it all but impossible to operate existing coal-fired power plants or build new ones.

To ensure that coal really is excised from our energy mix, EPA also issued oppressive new rules on other emissions. Its new mercury rule is based on computer-generated risks to hypothetical American women who eat 296 pounds of fish a year that they catch themselves, its determination to prevent a theoretical reduction in IQ test scores by “0.00209 points,” and its refusal to recognize that coal fired power plants contribute just 3% of the total mercury deposited in American watersheds, and thus in fish tissue.

EPA’s new PM2.5 soot standard is equivalent to having one ounce of super fine dust spread equally in a volume of air one half mile long, one half mile wide and one story tall while other rules demand that water from coal mines be cleaner than Perrier bottled water!

The agency repeatedly denied Shell Oil permits to drill in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska, because emissions from drilling rig and icebreaker engines might contribute to global warming. It opposes the Keystone XL Pipeline on the ground that burning Canadian oil sands fuel might likewise “contribute” to catastrophic climate change whereas that would presumably not be the case if China burned that same fuel.

When Congress failed to act, it imposed new 54.5 mpg automobile standards that will make cars less affordable, but also smaller, more lightweight and less safe, causing thousands of additional injuries, disabilities and deaths every year. The agency bragged about fuel savings, and ignored the human toll.

EPA also added industrial pollution, habitat destruction and fertilizer runoff as more reasons why irrigation water should not be turned on again in California’s San Joaquin Valley, to “protect” the delta smelt at the expense of farm jobs and families, after a judge ordered water to be turned back on.

To further justify its despotic decisions, EPA grossly overstates the economic benefits of its rules insisting that each “premature death” theoretically avoided creates $9 million in hypothetical societal economic gains, whether the assumed “person” was a newborn or an 85 year old in hospice care.

If even that isn’t enough, it uses human subjects in laboratory tests, exposing them to what Ms. Jackson has testified are dangerous, even toxic levels of fine soot. The agency also pays activist groups millions of taxpayer dollars a year to promote and applaud its farfetched claims and rogue actions.

Finally, EPA ignores the clearly harmful impacts its regulations have on human health and welfare. The rules cost jobs, thereby increasing the risk of depression, alcohol abuse, spousal and child abuse, cardiovascular disease and suicide. They just as obviously raise the cost of food, electricity, heating, air conditioning, commuting, healthcare and other necessities, thereby reducing health, welfare, living standards, civil rights progress and environmental justice especially for poor, elderly and minority families.

EPA is out of control, and thus far unaccountable for its abuses of power, its disinformation and fraud, and the harm it is inflicting for little or no health or environmental benefit.

Our founding fathers provided for elections, so that the American people could choose leaders who make the major decisions affecting their lives and not be subjected to involuntary servitude at the hands of unelected, unaccountable kings or bureaucrats.

Rarely in history has one election meant so much, or one agency asserted so much control over our lives, livelihoods and freedoms. The 2012 elections will determine whether America once again enjoys a new birth of freedom, or continues suffering under an EPA that enslaves and impoverishes us, rather than protects us.

____________

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.

By Larry Bell, Forbes

My wife Nancy and I recently enjoyed a couple of great days with Burt Rutan and his wife Tonya at their beautiful new home in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The visit afforded an opportunity to discuss many topics of keenly shared interest, including the global warming “debate”. Although Burt is world renowned for his remarkable record-setting achievements in aircraft and spacecraft design, he has devoted a great deal of attention to this subject as well.

By way of brief introduction, Burt Rutan designed Voyager, the first aircraft to fly around the globe without stopping or refueling. He also designed SpaceShipOne financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen which won the $10 million Ansari X-Prize in 2004 for becoming the first privately-funded manned craft to enter the realm of space twice within a two-week period. Both, along with three other of his aircraft, are on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.  Burt’s recent projects include a flying car, and the Virgin GlobalFlyer which broke Voyager’s time for a non-stop solo flight around the world.

Burt, as someone with such intense involvement in aerospace design and development, what got you interested in climate issues?

Even though I’ve been very busy throughout my entire career developing and flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force, I’ve always pursued other research hobbies in my time away from work. Since I’m very accustomed to analyzing a lot of data, about three or four years ago many alarmist claims by some climate scientists caught my attention. Since this is such an important topic, I began to look into it firsthand.

Although I have no climate science credentials, I do have considerable expertise in processing and presenting data. I have also had extensive opportunities to observe how other people present data and use it to make their points. There is a rampant tendency in any industry where someone is trying to sell something with a bunch of data, where they cherry pick a little bit...bias a little bit. This becomes quite easy when there is an enormous amount of data to cherry pick from.

The first thing that got my attention, a lot of people’s attention, was statements that the entire planet is heading towards a future climate catastrophe that is attributable to human carbon dioxide emissions. So I decided to take a look at that and just see if this conclusion was arrived at ethically. It’s obviously an extremely important issue which has gotten a huge amount of media attention.  I was particularly concerned because the proposed solutions will have enormous impacts upon costs of energy, which of course, will increase costs of everything.

Many people seem to get much of their information from what they see in newspapers, with variously biased viewpoints presented in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, Canadian Free Press, etc. I may be considerably different, in that I always like to look at both sides of things that I take special interest in. So when I decided to look closely at the anthropogenic [man-made] global warming crisis claims, I avoided focusing on media reports, and instead, went directly to available raw climate data. The intent was to see if that data might just as reasonably be interpreted differently.

Then, what really drew me into the subject, was when I found that I couldn’t obtain the raw data that I was looking for. I was shocked to find that there were actually climate scientists who wouldn’t share the raw data, but would only share their conclusions in summary graphs that were used to prove their various theories about planet warming. In fact I began to smell something really bad, and the worse that smell got, the deeper I looked.

I even read Al Gore’s book, which was very enlightening...but not in a good way. When you look for data to back up his claims, you immediately discover that they are totally unsubstantiated. This was frankly astonishing because analyzing data is something I’m very good at. All my professional life I have been analyzing complex flight test data, interpreting it and presenting it. Something that I always did in flight test is to make a chart that shows every bit of the data, and only then, decide later on the basis of real observed results which parts of the data were valid.

Tragically, policymakers have thrown horrendous amounts of taxpayer money needed for other purposes at solving an unsubstantiated emergency. It is scandalous that so many climate scientists who fully knew that Al Gore had no basis for his irresponsible claims stood mute. Meanwhile, that alarmism has generated billions of dollars more to finance a rapidly growing climate science industry with budgets that have risen by a factor of 40 since the early 1990s. I consider this failure to speak up just as unethical as the behavior of those who put out the false catastrophic claims.

Burt, what was most astonishing to you in the disconnect between what you were seeing in the raw data you were able to obtain and what you’re seeing in various report conclusions and in the media?

Well, one of the first things I did was to get out the [U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] IPCC summary for policymaker’s reports. Inexplicably, the Medieval Warm Period appearing in the first report which was warmer than today’s temperatures, disappeared from the second. The last Little Ice Age disappeared as well. They were replaced by the infamous “hockey stick” graph, which appeared multiple times. That was a big disconnect.

Actually, looking back over the past 11,000 or so years since Earth began to recover from the last big Ice Age, we’re experiencing a very moderate and stable climate stage. And going back nearly half of the past million years, a long Ice Age occurred about every 90,000 years or so with a large percentage of the planet uninhabitable. We’re talking about ice as much as a mile or more thick covering large portions of North America and Europe. Any local warming that alarmists talk about is only a brief and tiny blip.

There’s certainly nothing alarming about the stable period we currently enjoy. I was struck by claims that we are experiencing unprecedented warming caused by Man, where data clearly shows that our recent warming isn’t unprecedented.  I think that’s the main thing that drove me into an obsession to look at this climate subject very closely during my early investigations. I don’t do so much nowadays, and hardly did anything last year, but in those early years I spent an enormous amount of time researching data and comparing it with what I was seeing in the IPCC summary reports as products from the alarmists.

Another important thing that caught my attention was that the increased atmospheric CO2 that all this alarmism centers on is of huge benefit for agriculture. Green houses actually supplement CO2 to make plants grow better. It has been shown that crop yields actually go up some 30% or more with doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. So I’m a very confused as to what’s wrong with CO2. It’s the food plants need to grow and feed all animals, including us.

I’m very impressed by all the data that you have made available on charts you prepared for your website. Readers can find that and much more at: www.burtrutan.com

What I’m doing really, is just put out all of the data I can in order to enable anyone to look at everything before arriving at a conclusion. If someone forms a conclusion at the onset, they can always find and focus only on data that supports their theory.

I recognize that you feel very strongly about the importance of this topic. What happened when you began to speak publicly about this and let your conclusions be known?

Good question Larry. I first decided to present the results of my study and my data at the Oshkosh Air Show, an event that I have been continuously going to ever since 1971.  Of course I have had an enormous following there, and I had always previously spoken on the subject of aircraft development.  But on this occasion I thought that the global warming subject was too important not to mention because it was indeed fraudulent. Its effect on America’s competitiveness and economy would be enormous compared to anything else that I have ever seen in my lifetime.

The interesting thing is that I decided to preview this talk for a totally unusual audience, in fact one that would be considered to be opposite of any I normally address. This was on the occasion of receiving a lifetime design achievement award at the Pasadena Art College in July 2009.  That was to be a very liberal crowd, mostly college students.  The event was about design as it related to what they design in an art college...things like automobiles and motorcycles primarily involving styling rather than dealing with engineering. They had some phenomenal talents for showing beautiful shapes applied to transportation. My designs, which many consider beautiful, are determined by complex flight dynamics and laws of physics.

The transportation design theme attracted Jay Leno to bring one of his very rare cars to the event, a steam-powered vehicle that was absolutely beautiful. Jay sat right in the front row for my presentation. I had previously been on his show twice, appearances related to our SpaceShipOne program.  The audience had obviously expected me to present my designs and my philosophy...discuss how I approached creative design. So I did that for maybe five minutes, and then I launched into showing what I have found with my climate hobby. I included chart after chart of data that clearly showed there was fraud and cherry picking bias used by alarmists presenting climate data in order to try to make their point...namely that the Earth faces a catastrophe because of emissions into the atmosphere by Man.

I didn’t really know what to expect, because this was the first time I had ever made a public presentation of any of my hobbies.  And when I looked out into the audience, what I saw might best be described as stunned silence. I clearly knew that audience was generally liberal, and had assumed that Jay Leno was also. But as soon as I was done, he rushed to the stage, took me off to the side, and told me that he didn’t know anything about this, or that the subject was even debatable.

It really surprised me that someone who reaches millions of people every evening could be so totally insulated from any skeptical views on what the alarmists were trying to sell as a future catastrophe.  What shocked me most is that I had originally been thinking that the average viewer was at least aware that there are two sides to the issue, rather than almost universally accepting alarmist positions as absolute truth.

But also keep in mind that this was before the East Anglia University Climategate e-mails were released which clearly showed some of the IPCC folks were indeed fraudulent in their science...before there was any way to make a big case that there is a large problem here.

Burt, I’m aware that when you joined with many others in signing a letter about this that was published in the Wall Street Journal, you were taken back by the hostile responses directed your way. Can you comment about that experience?

The skeptic community was actually already starting to pay attention to me because they tended to appreciate my large data presentation effort. So I got an e-mail from someone who had rounded up a dozen or so climate scientists that agreed there is no need for alarm regarding catastrophic human-caused global warming to be co-signers, and had gotten approval to have it published in the Wall Street Journal. When asked to join them, I wrote back and said that while I enthusiastically agreed with everything the letter said, I didn’t want to sign it because I would be in a group of people who were all climate scientists, and I’m not a climate scientist.  I finally agreed to allow them to put my name under it only if they made it clear that I am an engineer, not a climate scientist. I still receive a lot of flak from alarmists who challenge how an airplane designer can have the temerity to disagree with their views of science.

Larry, I wasn’t really taken back so much by the hostile responses.  I expected some of that.  But later when I decided to answer some of the more than 150 comments posted at the Scholars and Rogues website, I was surprised that I was often attacked in a very personal way which denigrated my intelligence and accused me of bias. I have no reason to have any bias. Some said I was obviously being paid for by oil companies, which seemed like a joke.  If you go through and read my responses you will find that I did so with hard data that alarmists will not publish. But they don’t hesitate to publish personal attacks.

So Burt, what are some of the most important points that you wish to emphasize to readers?

One of the most important is to have the general public, the media, and policymakers understand is that any claims that 97%, 98%, or whatever, of all climate scientists agree that our planet is heading for a climate catastrophe are totally bogus. Have humans had any influence on climate? Sure, probably so, although no one has ever succeeded in accurately measuring them. In the absence of everything else, would adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere have produced some warming?  Again, yes. Answering these two questions, and these two questions only, you will see a very large consensus, not only among alarmists, but essentially, every skeptic would also agree.

But none of this presumed warming should be taken to suggest that the results will be catastrophic, causing terribly dangerous things to happen...like serious heat waves and droughts which cause crops to fail...or that when they occur they are “unprecedented”. It doesn’t require anyone with a climate science-related degree to recognize, for example, that 1938 was the warmest year in recent times, and that CO2 levels were much lower then. These consensus issues are discussed in some detail in three PowerPoint charts included near the end of my “An Engineer’s Critique of Global Warming Science” report. The bottom line: there is no consensus on the claims of planet catastrophe.

Even prominent former global warming doomsayers, are finally seeing the light of reason. One is my good friend James Lovelock who once said that within the next 50 years or so the few remaining humans will be huddled up in high latitudes to escape the heat of the lower latitudes.  He has recently said the alarmists were wrong, and has moved to a new coastal home, unafraid of rising seas.