By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM

John Abraham is a professor from Minnesota and John Cook his mirror image from Down Under. Though neither is a climatologist or even meteorologist, both of them have appointed themselves as bishops in the church of anthropogenic global warming. They defend any challenges to the consensus by skeptical scientists. Abraham attacked Monckton is a long diatribe that Chris painstakingly responded to showing John his flawed logic and bad science.

But since the true believers in the church of AGW depend on faith not facts, John claimed victory took his ball and went home. He then appointed himself a leader of the rapid response team where anytime a scientific paper or posting challenging some aspect of the house of cards AGW science, the rapid response time swings into action, proclaiming “no this is wrong, everyone says so”. This is a lot like the Monty Python sketch above where the pet shop clerk repeatedly denies the parrot is dead.

John Cook too has a web site and videos attacking skeptical positions. He claims he was motivated to action by Monckton and others who were calling their baby AGW ugly. He is an adept at putting together videos and very motivated and thus is more dangerous than Abraham in spreading the misinformation and feeding the religious their bread and wine.

Skeptics could have a field day taking apart his attempts at scientific logic, but chose to ignore him. He has a new post, an interview with the co-author of his new book “Climate Change Denial - Head in the Sands”, Haydn Washington, an environmental scientist.

In the interview, John asks Haydn

How do you distinguish between skepticism and denial?

Haydn replies:

They are actually opposites. Skepticism is about looking for the truth, denial is about hiding from it. All scientists should be skeptics, but when you get an overwhelming ‘preponderance of evidence’ from many different types of research, a true scientist will accept it [ a denier won’t. Many climate change deniers call themselves ‘skeptics’ and say the word ‘denier’ is an insult, as if they are ‘holocaust deniers’. However, people can deny anything, but when people deny the fact that every Academy of Science and 97% of practicing climate scientists say human-caused climate change is happening and very serious - it is important to call these people by their true name. They are deniers.

You may recognize the 97% number it comes from a very poorly construct survey Dennis Ambler reported on on SPPI (excerpted below).

We find that they originally contacted 10,257 scientists, of whom 3,146 responded, less than a 31% response rate. “Impending Planetary Doom” was obviously not uppermost in the minds of over two thirds of their target population. Of that number, only 5% described themselves as climate scientists, numbering 157. The authors then further reduced that by half by only counting those who they classed as “specialists”.

“In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change (79 individuals in total). Of these specialists, 96.2% (76 of 79) answered “risen” to question 1 and 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question 2.”

There is little detail of how many peer reviewed papers are needed to qualify as a specialist, it could by their definition be just two papers, one of which needs to be on climate change. What a poor example of scientific enquiry this survey really is. The two questions reported on:

1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?

2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

96.2% (76 of 79) answered “risen” to question 1, The ‘yes’ response to question 2 was 75 specialists out of 77, so here we have our massive 97%.

Of course the way they were worded, I and virtually every real skeptic I know would have answered yes to both. Yes we have warmed since the LIA thankfully and yes population growth from 1.5 to nearly 7 billion in urbanized centers does make a local difference in the climate.

Washington mentions that 97% number numerous times in his interview. It shows how shallow the knowledge Washington, Cook have of the science they defend.

There are many others who are real scientists who also stand up and shout AGW, some no doubt believe it, others are motivated by other things. Jeffrey Skilling, President of Enron, said about his company “...we are a green energy company, but the green stands for money.” That same green greed motivates many in the universities, government at all levels and in industry.

But for those who honestly believe in global warming, cognitive dissonance prevails. They write and holler ‘you are a denier!’ when we point out the errors of their ways and the failures of their models. Yet they are the true deniers. The parrot is dead.

See another skeptic, Jennifer Marohasy in a Brsibane No Carbon Tax Rally:

SPPI Blog

By David A. Patten

Conservative economists, commentators, and politicians are blasting a draft Obama administration plan that envisions using Big Brother-like tracking devices on private cars to tax drivers on how many miles they travel.

The new tax scheme, designed to help fund transportation spending, would determine your mileage by installing electronic equipment on your car. This would involve monitoring your location and how far you’ve traveled.

Fox host Lou Dobbs offered this reaction to the trial balloon on his radio show Thursday: “We’ve got an effective unemployment rate of nearly 17 percent in this country, and these idiots want to tax car mileage. It’s nuts, what they want to do,” he said.

Cato economist Chris Edwards tells Newsmax that the proposal, which he considers “a terrible idea,” is part of the reauthorization of U.S. transportation programs that is expected to occur sometime in the next 12 months. “There is a high degree of risk that there’s going to be all kinds of big government, intrusive stuff in this bill” he warns.

The administration, stung by rising gas prices and an 8-month high in jobless claims Thursday, is backing away from the draft proposal Thursday.

White House spokesperson Jennifer Psaki called the proposed tax “an early working draft proposal that was never formally circulated within the administration.”

The 498-page draft of the administration’s Transportation Opportunities Act was obtained and published by Transportation Weekly.

Psaki told TheHill.com that the draft plan “does not take into account the advice of the president’s senior advisers, economic team or Cabinet officials, and does not represent the views of the president.”

There has been growing momentum in recent months to find a new way to finance transportation spending.

In March, the Congressional Budget Office offered support for taxing drivers based on how many miles they travel. Payment, it suggested, could be collected automatically at service stations.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., also has voiced support for taxing mileage.

The draft of the transportation proposal, which reportedly has been circulated within the Department of Transportation and the Office of Management and Budget, would create a $300 million office within the Federal Highway Administration to be called the “Surface Transportation Revenue Alternatives Office.”

The office would be tasked with defining “the functionality of a mileage based user fee system and other systems,” according to the draft.

One Republican quick to criticize the mileage tax on Thursday: Former GOP Sen. George Allen.

Allen, who is campaigning to represent the Old Dominion in the U.S. Senate, released a statement that: “In our struggling economy, the worst thing Washington can do is raise taxes on middle-class families and small businesses. Yet that is exactly what the latest scheme being floated by Washington Democrats calls for.”

Concerned that increasingly fuel-efficient vehicles will reduce revenue from current gasoline taxes, state officials in Oregon, Iowa, Nevada, and Texas already are considering tax proposals based on mileage driven.

In Minnesota, the state department of transportation is conducting a research project that would use smart phones with a GPS application to monitor mileage. Critics point out, however, that taxing drivers based on miles driven rather than gallons consumed would decrease their incentive to purchase more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Quite apart from the economic issues are the privacy concerns. Allen labeled the tax an “onerous, big brother proposal.”

Edwards, the editor of DownsizingGovernment.org, tells Newsmax: “There’s clearly a potential for privacy abuses with such a system, government tracking American citizens driving around in their cars. These government data bases have often been hacked and leaked. So there’s a big privacy concern here.”

The draft proposal calls for field trials to test the feasibility of the mileage tax, but does not specify when or where those trials would occur.

Read more on Newsmax.com: White House Wants to Track and Tax Your Mileage

By Roger Aronoff

One of the more important issues raised during the budget battle that nearly shut down the Federal government in April was over power given to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by President Barack Obama to regulate greenhouse gases that they claim can contribute to global warming. This has led to renewed discussion on the validity of concerns about global warming, and the related issue of America’s future energy sources.

We have addressed the issue of global warming many times over the years at Accuracy in Media (AIM). In the mid 1970s, the big concern among so-called environmentalists was that we were heading toward a new Ice Age. The essence of that point of view was carried in a Newsweek article in its April 28, 1975 edition headlined “The Cooling World.” Here was the money quote: “The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic.”

It wasn’t too long, 1988 to be specific, when that “almost unanimous” view shifted, and the problem had become catastrophic global warming. Larry Bell is a space architect and professor at the University of Houston, and author of the new book Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax. Bell has worked with NASA on all aspects of mission planning for lunar programs, Mars programs, and orbital programs, including the international space station. He says that “politics is responsible for the global warming hoax, and, in reality, of course the climate warms and cools all the time - Climate changes all the time.”

In an interview earlier this year with AIM, Bell said that “Change is what climate does. It’s measured, typically, in three-decade periods, although it didn’t take three decades from the time of the ‘70s, when The New York Times and other organizations were reporting the next Ice Age coming, until Al Gore had his famous hearings in 1988, which declared not only that global warming was a crisis, but that we caused it.”

Bell argues that the ways the temperature is measured are hardly reliable, but that even if the earth is warming, that might not be so bad. “Do [I] believe in global warming? I say, “Yeah, sure I do. I think it’s great! I think it makes plants grow, and it’s good for the rainforest - lots of carbon dioxide they can breathe! The Earth isn’t frozen! We can grow plants! Trade flourishes! Pyramids get built! Sure, I believe in global warming.”

When asked if he accepts that there is a consensus among scientists that global warming exists and is caused by humans, he said that “everything affects everything, so to say that human activity doesn’t affect climate would be nonsensical. The question is, which activities, and how much? Can you even measure them? Can you separate them from other factors? I don’t think anybody can - I would maintain that nobody can.”

The media were complicit in pushing the global warming hoax, calling skeptics “deniers,” as in “Holocaust deniers.” Newsweek used some form of the term “denier” 20 times in one 2007 cover story on global warming about those who don’t buy into the theory. They argued that people who doubted the Al Gore apocalyptic view of a coming age of massive flooding, unbearable heat, the extinction of polar bears and the melting of ice caps and glaciers, all as a result of mankind’s overuse of carbon-based energy and the carbon dioxide it generates, were somehow the moral equivalents of people who believe that the Nazi genocide of millions of Jews in Europe was exaggerated or did not even occur.

...

“Cap and trade has morphed into a ‘clean energy standard,’ under which 80 percent of electricity in the United States would be generated from clean sources by 2035. Mr. Obama laid out the goal in this year’s State of the Union address and has promoted it at several events since.”

According to Mario Loyola, writing on The Weekly Standard blog, based on “EPA’s own estimates, the number of businesses subject to onerous new requirements would increase from 12,000 to 6.1 million, including millions of restaurants and apartment buildings, most of which would simply have to shut down. EPA estimated the cost to governments and business at more than $100 billion just in the first few years.”

Read much more in this lengthy commentary on the issue.