By Chris Horner, Planet Gore
If ever there were two items fairly capturing much of the theme of Red Hot Lies - cruising up the charts nicely here in its first few days off the press, thanks to all - these are the two. First, establishment scientists attack heretics, then refuse to release the data they claim supports their alleged debunking of what, in this case, increasingly appears to be a fatal flaw in the alarmist thesis: the alleged “fingerprint" of greenhouse warming continues to not exist.
As I detail in RHL, the global warming industry have a long and unhappy history of making claims they apparently cannot back up and, when challenged, clinging to their data like grim death, claiming it was lost, apparently fabricating data, having journals publish helpful conclusions without ever asking to see the numbers, and so on. When the data are released, things don’t end well for the alarmists - as the Hockey Team’s original and now latest flailing bears out.
Second, Australia’s ABC news nicely embodies the media’s now ritual double standard of selective curiosity and umbrage in their efforts to dismiss those who refuse to accept the faith, and elevate those who have found salvation. As Andrew Bolt writes, the ABC reporter “rings the leper’s bell” in introducing a mere professor for his sin of being a skeptic, while spinning alarmists into authorities to whom all must defer.
This shows once again what I explore with example after example in RHL: climate scientists know where the path of least resistance lies; and, conversely, they have seen the excommunication that awaits if they dare to follow the research rather than the research dollars. The same reality holds true for politicians. Should one choose to infer relative legitimacy of the various positions from those facts, so be it. Read post here.
By Dr. Robert Carter
“The idea that human beings have changed and are changing the basic climate system of the Earth through their industrial activities and burning of fossil fuels - the essence of the Greens’ theory of global warming - has about as much basis in science as Marxism and Freudianism. Global warming, like Marxism, is a political theory of actions, demanding compliance with its rules.
Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof - of which history offers so many examples - that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science. If people are in need of religion, why don’t they just turn to the genuine article?” - Paul Johnson
Climate change knows three realities: science reality, which is what working scientists deal with every day; virtual reality, which is the wholly imaginary world inside computer climate models; and public reality, which is the socio-political system within which politicians, business people and the general citizenry work.
In 1990 the IPCC’s first Assessment Report concluded that no human influence on climate was discernible. Despite the huge expenditure of research effort and money since that time, the boundary arguments to the debate have scarcely moved. We now have copiously more data and more powerful computers, have spent upwards of $50 billion on climate research, and are the beneficiaries of twenty years of hard thinking by some of the world’s most accomplished scientists. Yet the protagonists in the debate remain in the same bunkers they occupied in the early 1990s, and a clear human-caused climate signal continues to elude us.
Two years ago, I wrote: “It remains a matter of faith whether reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, should they occur, will have any measurable influence on climate. My conclusion is that-irrespective of McCarthyist bludgeoning, press bias, policy-advice corruption or propaganda frenzy - it is highly unlikely that the public is going to agree to a costly restructuring of the world economy simply on the basis of speculative computer models of climate in 100 years time. Attempting to ‘stop climate change’ is an extravagant and costly exercise of utter futility. Rational climate policies must be based on adaptation to climate change as it occurs, irrespective of its causation.
Despite the present Australian government’s manifest determination to introduce a penal carbon dioxide tax, I see little reason to change this view. The IPCC experiment has failed, in large part because of the priority that has been given to policy advocacy over the accurate reporting of empirical science. Attempting to prevent ("mitigate", in the lingo) climate change is an expensive exercise in futility. Planning for inevitable future climate change, both natural and possibly human-caused, will best be undertaken in the same way as we plan for other natural disasters such as bushfires, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami and cyclones. Read this very well done and thought provoking essay here.
i>Investor’s Business Daily
From California to Missouri, four of five environmental initiatives lost at the ballot box. Voters are clearly still not ready for exorbitant costs and excessive regulation without clear benefits. President-elect Obama may have felt “a righteous wind” at his back during the campaign, but it did not translate into environmental victories at the ballot box, where one green initiative after another failed for a variety of reasons.
California voters shot down both clean-energy propositions on the ballot. Proposition 7 would have required utilities to generate 40% of their power from renewable energy by 2020 and 50% by 2025. It lost 65% to 35%. Proposition 10 would have created $5 billion in general obligation bonds to help consumers and others purchase certain high-fuel-economy or alternative-fuel vehicles, and to fund research into alternative fuel technology. It failed 60% to 40%. Even in San Francisco, the capital of liberalism and greenie fervor, voters rejected Proposition H, which would have mandated a rapid increase in the city’s use of clean energy to achieve its goal of being 100% renewable by 2040. It would also have meant taking over the city’s private electric company.
Obama took the former red state of Colorado, which also elected environmentalist Senate candidate Mark Udall over oil executive Bob Shaffer. Yet Coloradans struck down a measure to pay for conservation and clean energy by increasing taxes on oil companies. Only in Missouri did green energy score a victory. There, Proposition C mandated a 15% increase in renewable energy by 2021 with slow and steady yearly increases that energy companies felt they could phase in without disruption and with which voters felt more comfortable.
The mantra is that oil and car companies are blocking the increased use of renewable energy. The truth is that consumers, through their choices and their votes, are slowing the stampede. They worry about the cost in tough economic times and whether such efforts are worth it based on dubious evidence of global warming. Energy independence is one thing, but going bankrupt to achieve it is quite another.
When gasoline prices were over $4 a gallon, the chant “drill baby drill” grew loud enough that Democrats were forced to back off renewing a ban on offshore drilling. Now in complete control, they can block offshore drilling, nuclear power and shale oil in their Ahab-like pursuit of alternative energy. Texas consumers are finding out how expensive the pursuit of alternative energy can be. Their state generates more electricity from wind than any other, and people like oil legend T. Boone Pickens want to generate more. A just published study by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, “Texas Wind Energy: Past, Present and Future,” says that to achieve even modest amounts of wind energy would cost rate payers and taxpayers at least $60 billion through 2025. That includes transmission costs, production costs, subsidies, tax breaks, economic disruption costs and grid-management costs. Because of the intermittent nature of wind, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas uses a figure of only 8.7% of wind power’s installed capacity when determining available power during peak periods.
On cloudy and windless days, solar and wind are useless and require conventional power sources as backup. Output is not steady and cannot be increased on demand. You can’t make the sun shine brighter or the wind blow harder during peak periods. A Feb. 27 Reuters story illustrated the point. Headlined “Loss Of Wind Causes Texas Power Grid Emergency,” it told of an electric grid operator forced to curtail 1,100 megawatts of power to customers on just 10 minutes’ notice. The wind simply stopped blowing.
Wind turbines generally operate at only 20% efficiency compared with 85% for coal, gas and nuclear plants. A single 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant would generate more dependable power than 2,800 1.5-megawatt, occasionally operating wind turbines sitting on 175,000 acres. Nuclear power is clean energy, and you wouldn’t have to wait for a sunny or windy day to plug in your electric car.
Read more here.