By Alan Caruba

From December 6 through the 18th, a conference sponsored by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will gather in Copenhagen, Denmark, to explore ways to “prevent global warming” and I would like to be among the first to tell all those idiots checking their passports and deciding what to pack that they can all stay home.

This is not an original thought on my part and, in fact, is occasioned by Prof. Henrik Svensmark. He is director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Technical University of Denmark and, not surprisingly, knows a lot about the Sun and climate.

Permit me to share some of his thoughts. In a September 9th opinion titled, “While the Sun Sleeps”, Prof. Svensmark wrote, “Last week, the scientific team behind the SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) reported that the number of sunspot-free days suggest that solar activity is heading towards its lowest level in about 100 years.”

“Everything indicates that the Sun is moving into a hibernation-like state and the obvious question is whether it has any significance for us on Earth.” Good question, Professor! Particularly since the Sun is the sole source of heat for the Earth. When it takes a nap, everybody takes notice.

The professor then had a little professorial fun describing the Little Ice Age that occurred after a period of medieval warmth that had begun around 1000 AD. After 1300, however, it got a lot colder. Settlements in Greenland disappeared. The Thames froze over repeatedly. And here’s where we need to pay attention, there were “long periods of crop failure.” Between starvation and disease, it reduced the population of Europe by about a third.

“It is important to note that the Little Ice Age was a global event,” said Prof. Svensmark. It did not end until the mid-to-late 19th century; around 1850 in America. Do your math. That’s five centuries. As the Earth began to warm up and particularly in the last fifty years, “solar activity has been the highest since the medieval warmth of 1,000 years ago.”

Now, keep in mind that a couple of hundred, perhaps a thousand or more diplomats, scientists, and environmentalists are going to gather in Copenhagen for the single purpose of extending or expanding the Kyoto Protocols that are based on the assertion that the Earth is warming even though it is not.

Moreover, the IPCC will announce that, if the industrialized nations do not dramatically reduce the production of “greenhouse gases” (carbon dioxide), we are all doomed. In the United States, the Cap-and-Trade bill which passed the House by a slim margin will be up for consideration in the Senate. It is based on the global warming lie. It will drive up the cost of energy for all Americans and basically wreck the economy!

Like the witches in Macbeth, for years the IPCC has been stirring a cauldron of lies about global warming and the world’s media, intoxicated by the fumes rising from the pot, have never ceased from telling us that the Earth is warming when it is not.

The Sun, however, is not cooperating.

“It now appears that the Sun…is heading towards what is called ‘a grand minimum’ as we saw in the Little Ice Age,” says Prof. Svensmark.

“Indeed, global warming has stopped and cooling is beginning.” At a recent World Climate Conference in Geneva one of the participants predicted the cooling will likely continue through the next 10 to 20 years.

All those IPCC computer models that have been predicting global warming were wrong, are wrong, and will remain wrong for all time until the Earth actually begins to warm again.

If, however, the Earth slips into a new Ice Age and not just a “little” one, it will be several hundred thousand years before they are valid.

The Copenhagen conference is, like global warming, a hoax.

I hear it’s very cold in Copenhagen in the winter.

See post here.

Today is the 206th sunspotless day this year as we chase last year’s 266 to put us in the top 5. A total of 716 spotless days this cycle. Most recent cyles have had less than 300. The cycle and prior 3 look a lot like cycles #1-4in the last 1700 and early 1800s, the so-called Dalton Minimum, the age of Dickens and snowy London town.

Update: Please note: GOP Beware, Even though Now Stalled, Cap-and-Tax is alive and well - see Senator Inhofe’s Op Ed here.

By David A. Ridenour, Sacramento Bee

If you worry about what Congress could do in its health-care legislation, you should be terrified by the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. It’s legislation that would gut the economy and likely cost millions of Americans their medical insurance.

Nearly 15 million Americans are now looking for work, bringing the official unemployment rate to 9.7 - the highest in 26 years. If the Senate passes Waxman-Markey, that rate will go much higher. Employment and access to health insurance are inextricably linked.

There’s no debating a cap-and-trade system would harm the economy. The only question is how costly it would be.

The Congressional Budget Office low-balled the costs of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed by the House in June, saying it would cost just $175 per household per year. This is the “less than the price of a postage stamp per day” figure we keep hearing. But to arrive at this number, the CBO had to ignore employment and income losses from cap-and-trade measures - costs estimated to be thousands of dollars per household per year. After figuring that in, yes, cap-and-trade would cost less than a postage stamp per day, but only if you’re buying a $13.05 Express Mail stamp daily.

The Heritage Foundation provides a more comprehensive estimate, projecting a family of four would pay an additional $4,609 per year by 2035. Annual job losses would average 1.15 million between 2012 and 2030, with job losses rising to nearly 2.5 million in 2035.

Higher unemployment rates mean more uninsured. In 2007, employers provided health insurance for 63 percent of Americans under age 65 and paid for nearly 90 percent of all private health insurance policies.

Although the newly unemployed may extend their health benefits through COBRA, many can’t afford to. According to Families USA, family health insurance premiums under COBRA equal, on average, 84 percent of unemployment benefits received.

The Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured estimates that for every percentage point increase of unemployment - in present terms, the loss of about 1.54 million jobs - the number of Americans without health insurance rises by 1.1 million.

For illustrative purposes, using Heritage’s job loss projections and the Kaiser figures, we estimate that cap-and-trade could lead to more than 820,000 people losing their health insurance annually, on average, between 2012 and 2030, with about 1.8 million losing coverage in 2035 alone.

But that’s not the half of it.

The stress and loss of self-esteem that accompanies job loss can lead to unhealthy lifestyles, including substance abuse and poor eating habits. The unemployed are more likely to be diagnosed for hypertension, heart disease, diabetes and stroke, and because discretionary income drops with the loss of a job, so too do routine screenings that might prevent late-stage diseases. Researchers at the University of California, University of Oxford and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found a 28 percent increase in alcohol-related deaths with a 3 percent increase in unemployment. Associate Professor Kate W. Strully of the State University of New York at Albany, in a survey of 8,000 unemployed factory workers, found unemployed workers were 83 percent more likely to develop a new health problem than were workers who kept their jobs.

Ralph Catalano, director of the Robert Woods Johnson Health and Society Program at University of California at Berkeley, found a strong correlation between unemployment and low birth weight babies. Low birth weight accounts for more than 64 percent of all infant fatalities. Catalano has also found higher incidence of advanced-stage breast tumors among women dealing with unemployment. The diagnosis is clear: If we want to move the American health-care system from the intensive care unit to the recovery room, we must first send cap-and-trade to the morgue. Read post here.

By Ben Eltham

Did Australia’s largest solar power project collapse because of government inaction? Details about government funding of low emissions technology projects are thin on the ground. This week saw the collapse of Solar Systems Pty Ltd, the company building what was to be Australia’s largest solar power station in Mildura in Victoria.

As Solar Systems’ website dolefully announces, “administrators are undertaking an immediate assessment of the operations and financial position of the companies with a view to continuing the operations on a reduced scale in order to restructure and sell the business as a going concern.”

That’s going to be hard, because Solar Systems is far from operational. Sadly, it’s not even built. The giant solar collecting tower that was going to generate 154MW of electricity in peak operation has yet to be constructed, and Solar Systems apparently needs hundreds of millions of further venture capital funding to build it. 950 jobs were expected to be created through the life of the project; more than 100 are reportedly now in jeopardy.

A year on from the fall of Lehman Brothers, the difficult state of global venture capital markets means the receivers have a tough task on their hands. According to administrator Stephen Longley, who The Australian’s Lauren Wilson tracked down for comment earlier this week, Solar Systems had burned through their original $150 million in capital developing the technology for the solar plant, then realised they needed more cash to bring the project to market.

Seeking another $50-100 million in capital funding, Longley told Wilson that Solar Systems “landed in the US to do roadshows the week (investment bank) Lehman Brothers collapsed”.

It wasn’t always like this. Way back in 2006, the Mildura plant was launched to great fanfare by the Howard and Bracks governments with promises of $125 million in Commonwealth and state funding. Canberra promised $75 million to the plant through a Howard-era funding scheme known as the Low Emissions Technology Demonstrator Fund. There was plenty of positive publicity, especially for a government still highly skeptical of the Kyoto process and under fire for its fossil fuel sympathies.

But as has emerged this week, none of that $75 million of federal money ever arrived. In fact, only $500,000 of the promised $125 million in funding was ever paid to Solar Systems by the Victorian government - and neither state nor federal government officials will say why.

When I rang the office of Victorian Minister for Energy and Resources Peter Batchelor, and Federal Minister for Resources Energy and Tourism Martin Ferguson trying to find out, the responses were revealing.

According to a spokeswoman from Batchelor’s office, “The Victorian Government is disappointed that this promising solar technology start-up business has been unable to raise the additional capital needed for its ongoing development.

“Our Energy Technology Innovation funding is tied to the project, not the company. We are talking about taxpayer’s money and milestones had to be reached for that money to be given.

“The Government supports the demonstration of technology, but is not in the business of giving loans to private companies with taxpayer’s money.”

Victorian taxpayers might be surprised by this last statement, as it is exactly what the Brumby government has promised AquaSure, the consortium building the $3.5 billion Wonthaggi desalination plant, should it be unable to find enough money.

Martin Ferguson’s office was even terser, in keeping with the gruff style of their minister. A spokesman confirmed that none of the promised $75 million of federal money had been dispensed to Solar Systems, and added that “it’s too early to make any assessment of either the company or the project’s future; both of these are being worked out by the administrator in the coming months.”

That start-up technology firms occasionally go bust is not news. But what is news is that governments supposedly committed to seeing more renewable power connected to the Australian grid idled while $125 million in budgeted funding sat in state and federal coffers.

Neither the Victorian nor the federal Energy departments were prepared to tell me what the “milestones” were that Solar Systems hadn’t met. And, because of the murky conditions surrounding the award of hundreds of millions of dollars of government renewable energy funding, we may never know.

This is because many of the grants that our governments are giving to companies for their renewable energy projects are “commercial-in-confidence”, a classic cloaking technique that allows important public policy decisions to be veiled in contractual secrecy.

The Mildura solar plant, for instance, was one of five projects funded under the Howard government’s Low Emissions Technology Demonstrator Fund. The other four all went to big carbon projects, including Chevron and its partners for the $50 billion Gorgon gas development,and International Power, the company that operates Hazelwood power plant.

Little is publicly known about either the status or the progress of the grants awarded to these five projects, which add up to some $335 million. Neither Martin Ferguson’s office nor the Department of Energy were prepared to comment on the Fund. Indeed, the Department of Energy’s spokesman, Tom Firth, either could not or would not disclose whether the other four projects had met their milestones or received their promised funding.

Newmatilda.com has been able to ascertain that at least one project, the retrofitting of the Callide A coal-fired power plant in central Queensland with carbon capture and sequestration technologies, has received $50 million from Canberra, and is apparently progressing toward a possible demonstration in 2011.  As for the Gorgon development, we know that it has only just received federal approval from Peter Garrett’s Environment department - and that in any case the technical feasibility of carbon sequestration underneath Barrow Island is thus far unproven.

No-one connected to the other three projects funded by the Low Emissions Technology Demonstrator Fund - including Chevron’s representative for the Gorgon project - got back to us.

The result is that potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money sits in Treasury coffers, committed to projects that may never happen, on conditions that remain secret to the public. Australia’s 20 per cent by 2020 renewable energy target looks a long way away.

Did Martin Ferguson’s department fiddle while Solar Systems collapsed? We may never know - unless the Greens or other opposition parties ask some hard questions in the next round Senate estimates hearings. Read more here.