Political Climate
Feb 01, 2017
Dakota Pipeline Protest Camp Cleaned Up To Avoid An ‘Environmental Disaster’

After months of protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline, activists left so much waste at their camp state, officials have ordered it be cleaned up to prevent an “environmental disaster.”

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Dump trucks and work crews moved into the campsite Monday to clean up the abandoned cars, structures, trash and waste left by thousands of protesters who converged on the region to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline over concerns it would contaminate drinking water relied upon by American Indians.

Rather ironically, the waste generated by protesters posed its own threat to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s drinking water, Reuters reported. Protesters have long claimed the Dakota Pipeline would contaminate tribal drinking water.

State, tribal and local officials worked with protest organizers to clean up the campsite, which sits on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers land in North Dakota.

“It is paramount for public safety, and to prevent an environmental disaster, that the camps be cleared prior to a potential spring flood,” GOP North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a pipeline supporter, said in a statement issued Monday.

Standing Rock Sioux officials asked pipeline protesters to leave the makeshift camp outside the reservation in January after months of sometimes violent protesting over the Dakota Access Pipeline. Hundreds of protesters stayed, and are now leasing reservation land.

The Dakota Access Pipeline sparked a massive political fight last year after Standing Rock Sioux tribal officials came out against the project, saying it would trample over sacred sites and threaten its drinking water.

They were joined by thousands of environmental activists in physically blocking the $3.8 billion pipeline’s route.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blocked the pipeline in November by not granting the project the easement it needs to cross the Missouri River. The Corps initially approved the project in summer 2016.

President Donald Trump came out in support of the pipeline, and signed an executive order to move Dakota Access along in the approval process. Observers expect the project to be approved by the Trump administration.



Jan 19, 2017
Trump’s NOAA Administrator Must Address the Temperature Record Controversy

Trump gives hope to avoid the establishment’s plans (both parties) for New World Order

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Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

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Roseburg, Oregon official USHCN temperature monitoring site shows examples of spurious heat influences that accumulate over the years, spuriously exaggerating the “global warming” signal.

An article appeared in the Washington Post yesterday entitled, “Who Will Lead NOAA Under President Trump?”. Written by the Capitol Weather Gang’s Jason Samenow, it lists three top contenders:

Scott Rayder, senior adviser for development and partnerships at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

Barry Myers, chief executive of AccuWeather in State College, Pa.

Jonathan White, president and chief executive of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership

The article addresses important issues facing NOAA in the coming years, such as making our weather forecasting capability the best in the world while still respecting the role of the private sector in adding value to the data collection and modelling role the government has taken leadership in.

Yet, something is missing…

You see, the names mentioned are part of the existing establishment, and we all know that President Trump is interested in “draining the swamp”.

They might be perfectly fine candidates - if Hillary Clinton had won the election.

What is missing is NOAA’s controversial role in promoting the U.N. plan to use global climate change as a way for the U.N. to oversee the redistribution of the world’s wealth and deindustrialize the West. (Note that’s not my claim...it’s their claim). It is well known that most of the countries that signed on to the Paris Agreement did so because they hope to gain from those transfers of wealth.

And we also know the result of CO2 emissions reduction will be a huge amount of pain (up to $100 Trillion loss of wealth this century) for no measurable impact on global temperatures, even using the U.N.’s over-inflated warming predictions.

NOAA has been actively “adjusting” the thermometer record of global temperatures over the years by making the present warmer, and the past colder, leading to an ever increasing upward temperature trend. This supports the global warming narrative the current administration, and the U.N., favors.

In my opinion, NOAA needs leadership that will reexamine these procedures. It took a TV meteorologist, Anthony Watts, to spearhead a site inspection of nearly all of the temperature monitoring locations in the U.S., even forcing NOAA to admit that many of their temperature monitoring stations were simply of no use for monitoring climate trends, when parking lots and air conditioning exhaust fans gradually encroached on these sites, causing spurious warming. Watts’ research has suggested that, after removing the contaminated stations, a substantial fraction of the reported warming in the U.S. simply disappears.

Why did it take an outsider - with no funding - to do what NOAA should have done to begin with?

Yes, providing data and analysis addressing the global warming issue is only one part of NOAA’s responsibility (which includes ocean research as well).

But it is by far the most important part of NOAA’s mission when it comes to the future health of the U.S. economy.

The new NOAA Administrator needs to address this issue head on, and not whitewash it. I seriously doubt any of the three candidates listed above will do that.
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See this working paper from several years ago that Icecap and Anthony Watts did exposing surface temperature measurement issues.

See Anthony’s paper showing half of the U.S. warming is artificial.

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2016 allegedly ‘hottest year’ by immeasurable amount degree - While satellites show ‘pause’ continues
Climate Depot

Two satellite datasets agree: The Temperature Pause lives on: ‘No warming for the last 18 years’

MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen on 2016 being called the ‘hottest year’: ‘The hysteria over this issue is truly bizarre’ - Warns of return ‘back to the dark ages’

Dr. David Whitehouse noted the ‘temperature pause never went away’: ‘According to NOAA 2016 was 0.07F warmer than 2015, which is 0.04C.

Considering the error in the annual temperature is +/- 0.1C this makes 2016 statistically indistinguishable from 2015, making any claim of a record using NOAA data specious.’

Dr. Lindzen also ridiculed previous ‘hottest year’ claims. “The uncertainty here is tenths of a degree. When someone points to this and says this is the warmest temperature on record, what are they talking about? It’s just nonsense. This is a very tiny change period,” Lindzen said. “If you can adjust temperatures to 2/10ths of a degree, it means it wasn’t certain to 2/10ths of a degree.”



Jan 16, 2017
Scott Pruitt’s nomination - a call for support so he can stop the trainwreck that is the EPA

Donald Trump nominated the man who is the expert at running lawsuits against the EPA to run it. Naturally this threatens a lot of sacred totems, not to mention a very big trough.  Protests are raging. In reply, people are speaking up in support of Pruitt.

Those who think his nomination should be opposed are confused saying that “Mr. Pruitt’s backers tout it as a virtue that he has sued the EPA. ... In every instance, Mr. Pruitt has joined forces with polluting industries seeking to avoid clean up responsibilities.”

The EPA is so lost, it doesn’t know what real pollution is anymore. Opposing the EPA is what any good environmentalist would do.

The religious mission against plant fertilizer in the hope of holding back the tide by half a millimeter in 2100 is noxious, damaging, dangerous in so many ways. It deprives the poor of cheap energy, good jobs, and warm houses. It hurts the environment because it makes the EPA, the US, so much less effective at solving real environmental problems. The pogrom against carbon (we are carbon life forms) is anti-science, eating away at the core tenets of the scientific method, and teaching a whole generation nonsense. The CO2 fixation is over-riding every other environmental issue because the EPA makes it so. The toxic effect the EPA has on the broader community, the economy, on science and on education makes this more important than any single environmental issue today.

The EPA has run so far off the rails that only someone who has opposed it could possibly fix it. Trump can’t defeat the madness on his own. The nomination hearing is Wednesday morning US time. And Dr Nan Hayworth is collecting messages and names in support. If you want to add your name and thoughts below in comments or email them to me, I will forward them to her. Thank you. And if you think that international names don’t count, remember that science is bigger than any one country, and if Obama can threaten the Brits on Brexit, why can’t Brits help explain what science is (and what pollution is) to Congress.

Here’s one from Professor J. Scott Armstrong:

Dear Dr. Hayworth, January 15, 2017

Following up on your correspondence with Willie Soon, I strongly agree with the policies favored by Scott Pruitt.I have spent over 50 years as a forecaster and, over the past decade, have had the pleasure of working with Willie Soon, who I view as one of the leading climate scientists in the world. Along with Kesten Green, I am a Director of the primary website dealing with forecasting methods, author of Long-Range Forecasting, and of a handbook on forecasting methods, “Principles of Forecasting.” Our studies have produced what we claim to be the only evidence-based forecasts of long-term global mean temperatures: there is no evidence that long-term warming is occurring.I proposed a ten-year bet with Al Gore on this issue in order to increase interest in testing predictive validity. (Ten years is not sufficient time to assess long-term trends and I expected to have only a 2/3 chance of winning, given natural variability). Mr. Gore refused to take the bet, so Kesten Green has been posting what would have happened had he done so on theclimatebet.com. Year nine just ended.We have been unable to find scientific forecasts showing that that warming would be harmful. I testified before Senator Boxer’s committee on this matter with respect to polar bears. My testimony was based on this paper.We have been unable to find any scientific forecast that there are cost-effective ways to affect global temperatures, up or down.

Here is a short summary of the above studies on climate change.

Kesten Green and I have recently founded the Iron Law of Regulation website. This states that “There is no form of market failure, however egregious, which is not eventually made worse by the political interventions intended to fix it.” We started the site with an attempt to get evidence about regulations that have been useful and thus to help design new regulations. No one has been able to produce scientific evidence about regulations that have violated the aforementioned Iron Law (i.e., to have actually improved human welfare, not to mention the preservation of individual liberties).

Kesten Green and I are currently involved with a paper called “Guidelines for Science.” In it, we document that much research currently published in academic journals violates the basic scientific principle of objectivity: We call this “advocacy research.” It allows researchers to announce their hypotheses and then to provide only the research that supports their hypotheses. This is the method used in the research papers that support the “global warming hypothesis.” This is not science and scientists have warned of this non-scientific approach for centuries. We have developed a checklist that can enable clients to evaluate whether a paper complies with scientific principles; it can be completed by intelligent adults, regardless of background, in less than an hour and we find good inter-rater reliability. The latest working paper, version #378, is attached.

I look forward to a favorable outcome for your hearings and would be willing to help in any way that I can.

Best,

Scott
J. Scott Armstrong, Professor

The Wharton School, JMHH 747
Home Phone 610-622-6480
U. of Pennsylvania, Phila., PA 19104
homepage



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