Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, was recognized today by the Congressional Management Foundation http://www.cmfweb.org/ (CMF) for having one of the top websites in Congress. The Inhofe-Republican portion of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee website http://www.epw.senate.gov/minority was awarded CMF’s prestigious 2007 “Gold Mouse Award.” CMF is a non-profit, non-partisan management consulting and research organization in Washington, D.C.
“I am honored that the CMF recognized my Committee website as one of the “best of the best” websites in Congress,” Senator Inhofe said. “Creating a top-notch Committee website provides the public more direct information - in many cases by bypassing and critiquing the mainstream media - and greater access to their elected representatives. The goal of my website has always been to bring our government closer to the people and allows for more feedback from our constituents. Recognition by the non-partisan CMN shows we are well on our way.”
The 2007 Gold Mouse Report and Awards are part of the “Connecting to Congress” research project, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. For this project CMF partnered with researchers from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, University of California-Riverside and Ohio State University to study how Members of Congress can use the Internet to improve communications with their constituents and to promote greater participation in the legislative process.
The Inhofe EPW website has been on the vanguard of cutting edge Internet and media savvy dissemination. Read more here
Icecap Note; Congratulations to Senator Inhofe, Marc Morano and team for their courageous and tireless efforts to serve as a rapid response team to counter misinformation.
BY Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian
The scientist credited as being the first to convince Tony Blair of the urgency of the climate crisis has accused green activists of being Luddites who risk setting back the fight against global warming. In an interview with the Guardian today Sir David King, who stepped down last month after seven years as the government’s chief scientific adviser, says any approach that does not focus on technological solutions to climate change - including nuclear power - is one of “utter hopelessness”.
He says: “There is a suspicion, and I have that suspicion myself, that a large number of people who label themselves ‘green’ are actually keen to take us back to the 18th or even the 17th century.” He characterises their argument as “let’s get away from all the technological gizmos and developments of the 20th century”. “People say ‘well, we’ll just use less energy.’ Come on,” he says. “And then there’s the real world, where everyone is aspiring to the sort of standard of living that we have, which is based on a large energy consumption.” Read more here.
As the NSIDC and others have reported the Antarctic set a new record (since satellite records began in 1979) for extent of sea ice this past winter. The IPCC report noted that Antarctica with the possible exception of the region near the Antarctic Peninsula appeared to be stable and unlikely to show much decline and may with increased snowfall actually build snow and ice. But that hasn’t stopped the claims that the melting of Antarctica is a risk. Steve Milloy of Junk Science reports on the latest study and then looks at some actual data.
A Globe and Mail story Antarctic ice sheet shrinking at faster rate noted one of the biggest worries about global warming has been its potential to affect the stability of the Antarctic ice sheet, a vast storehouse of frozen water that would inundate the world’s coastal regions if it were to melt because of a warming climate.
But a new study presents a worrisome development: Antarctica’s ice sheet is shrinking, at a rate that increased dramatically from 1996 to 2006. In an e-mail, Dr. Rignot (the study’s lead author) attributed the shrinkage in the ice sheet to an upwelling of warm waters along the Antarctic coast, which is causing some glaciers to flow more rapidly into the ocean. He suspects the trend is due to global warming, and isn’t part of a normal natural fluctuation.
Junk Science Comments:
Our guess is it’ll be at least next week before competing statistics says the Antarctic is gaining ice mass. What isn’t highlighted in this piece is that this again relies on PlayStation® climatology. Meanwhile JunkScience reader M O’R has beaten us to checking the data, pointing out that the Antarctic Peninsula (the region of alleged ice loss) shows dramatic cooling over the last year.
See full size image here
See the full Junk Science story here with more data points surrounding the peninsula and a google map link.
Icecap Note: That cooling was this year and there is no disputing as one emailer noted that warming has occurred near the Antarctic Peninsula in recent years while temperatures have been steady or cooling in the vast interior. Another email today to Icecap noted the following about the globe and mail story: “...after many paragraphs of scare mongering in the story you linked to, we have this nugget of truth in the LAST sentence in the story. “One encouraging finding from the study is that the largest ice sheet, the one covering East Antarctica, has remained relatively stable, showing a small net gain in size.” The untold fact left out of this global warming hysteria fear mongering piece of journalism is that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is about 12% the size of the East Antarctic Ice sheet. The larger, growing East Antarctic Ice Sheet contains 26 million cubic kilometers of ice. The less stable West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains 3 million cubic kilometers of ice.”