By Richard Simon and Bob Drogin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
The environmental movement, only recently poised for major advances on global warming and other issues, has suddenly found itself on the defensive as high gasoline prices shift the political climate nationwide and trigger defections by longtime supporters. Opposition to offshore drilling—once ironclad in places like California and Florida—has begun to soften. Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida on Tuesday eased his opposition to new energy exploration off the coast.
“Floridians are suffering, and when you’re paying over $4 a gallon for gas, you have to wonder whether there might be additional resources that we might be able to utilize to bring that price down,” said Crist, a Republican. At the same time, pressure to drill is mounting. President Bush today is expected to call on Congress to lift the ban on new offshore drilling, and a House committee will consider a proposal to relax the moratorium.
John McCain, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, opposed new offshore drilling in his 2000 presidential campaign. He said Tuesday that he now supported lifting the long-standing ban. “I believe it is time for federal government to lift these restrictions and put our own reserves to use,” the Arizona senator said in a Houston speech on energy security.
Much of the nation’s coastal waters are off-limits to new oil and gas leasing until 2012 under executive orders first issued by Bush’s father,President George H.W. Bush, in 1991 and extended by President Clinton in 1998. In addition, Congress has taken action annually since 1981 to preclude drilling in coastal areas. But high petroleum prices have caused policymakers to begin rethinking a variety of issues, including opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to energy exploration and imposing mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions from oil refineries and power plants. Read more here.
Vinod K. Dar, Right-Side News
The earth warmed strongly between 1915 and 1940, cooled between 1940 and 1975 and then warmed strongly again between 1975 and 1998. The earth has been cooling in the opening years of this century even as carbon dioxide levels have risen appreciably since 1998. Many influential people in the industrialized world believe that global warming is a transcendent issue and human activity, especially the activity of the energy complex, is to blame and carbon management, at any cost, is imperative.
A growing number of influential people in the developing world (this includes China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, as well as Russia) are openly rejecting the idea that human activity has any measurable influence on the planetary climate or even that there is anything unusual or abnormal about the climate at present. Some of these people, joined by hundreds of scientists in the U.S. and Western Europe advance the idea that sunspot activity (which is cyclical) and the recently discovered (as recent as 1996) PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation: 20 to 30 year warming and cooling of the north-central Pacific Ocean) explain the cyclicality of global temperatures. According to those who hold this view, the planet has entered into a 30 year or so cooling period and carbon dioxide emissions even if they keep growing, cannot prevent this cooling.
In support they cite NASA’s recent study that the global oceans are cooling and expected to cool for several years. NASA is the leading proponent of man-made global warming. They also quote data from the new Jason oceanographic satellite that the PDO is entering a multi-year cooling period. Jason is run jointly by NASA and a French team. Other support for this idea that global cooling not warming, is the planetary future within anyone’s strategic planning horizon comes from experiments conducted by the Danish Space Research Institute, which links global climate behavior to variations in the magnetic wind of the sun, which is changeable, driven by sunspot cycles. Contrary to expectations, the current cycle (Cycle 24) is turning out to be very weak with negligible sunspot activity.
Cooling will create greater stress on energy, food and health care than warming. This stress can only be relieved by very large increases in energy output. For example, exposure to cold is more dangerous to the fragile old, the infirm, the injured and the ailing. More energy for space heating will be needed. Increasingly, the huge waste in the food supply chain from field to table in much of the world will require tremendous investments in spoilage reduction at every step of the local, regional, national and global food supply chain. Spoilage reduction is energy intensive. So is productivity enhancement via fertilizer, bio-engineered seeds, and water management. For those who hold the second belief system, cooling is a more frightening prospect than warming. The determination of NWNs to accelerate energy and food supply growth will only be strengthened as the second belief system attracts more adherents. Read moe here.
Right Side News Marc Morano Weekly Roundup June 17, 2008
Note: The Sheer volume of scientists dissenting from UN IPCC climate views since 2007 has made it difficult for me to keep the database up to date. To read about the latest scientists to publicly speak out, see below and see: U.S. Senate’s report of now over 500 skeptical scientists (and constantly growing) of man-made global warming fears. See: Senate Report - It appears that man-made climate fears are literally as Meteorologist James Spann says below “rapidly running out of gas” both in peer-reviewed studies and in the claimed “consensus.”
Mythical UN IPCC ‘Consensus’ Continues to Crumble: Top UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Turns on IPCC. Calls Warming Fears: ‘Worst scientific scandal in the history’. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist who specializes in optical waveguide spectroscopy from the Yokohama National University, also contributed to the 2007 UN IPCC AR4 (fourth assessment report) as an expert reviewer. Itoh, a former lecturer at the University of Tokyo, just released his new book Lies and Traps in the Global Warming Affairs (currently in Japanese only).
“We have described many topics in this book, including inaccurate temperature measurements (e.g., A. Watt’s work), ‘observations’ of climate sensitivity, many climate forcings such as colored-aerosol and vegetation (based on 2005 NRC report as Roger has so many times pointed out), and the effect of solar magnetic activity (including my own work),” Itoh wrote on June 17, 2008, on the weblog of former Colorado State Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr. Itoh’s new book includes chapters calling man-made global warming fears “the worst scientific scandal in the history.” “I also cited the opinions of Dr. Akasofu (Professor Emeritus, University of Alaska) in the last part of the book. He sincerely advises us‚ “When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists,” and says, “IPCC should make appropriate comments before G8.” I sincerely think he is correct,” Itoh wrote.
Meteorologist says Man-Made Global Warming Movement ”Rapidly Running Out of Gas” In last year. A year and a half ago, James Spann questioned the money and the so-called scientific consensus pushing the idea that mankind is causing global warming. Today, he says it’s losing steam. “[Y]ou know, there was some great power in that movement back in January of 2007,” Spann said. “It’s pretty rapidly running out of gas and it just seems like every day more and more people are coming out with the fact that that’s pretty much a hoax.” And these are Ph.D climatologists that are pretty much saying what I said all along.”
‘IPCC theory of anthropogenic warming is a hoax’ says Patrick Carroll, retired Environment Canada meteorologist (June 9, 2008 - Canada’s The Hill Times)
Professor Dr. William J.R. Alexander, Emeritus of the Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and a former member of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters. Man-made global warming is not real. Professor Will Alexander claimed that claims by environmentalists that climate change was real were not true and if the world was warmer now, it was simply caused by natural climatic variability.
Prize-wining Geologist Dr. Ian Plimer, a professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Adelaide in Australia says all the expense will be for nothing, as climate change cannot be stopped—and it isn’t even caused by human-created carbon dioxide. “There is no relationship between carbon dioxide produced by industry and climate change,” he said. He claims Myth May Wreck Economy.
Weather Channel Founder: ‘I ask Al Gore, where’s the global warming?’ Meteorologist John Coleman said in a speech to he San Diego Chamber of Commerce “Mr. Gore and his crowd would have us believe that the activities of man have overwhelmed nature during this interglacial period and are producing an unprecedented, out of control warming. Well, it is simply not happening.”
Dr. John Brignell a UK Emeritus Engineering Professor at the University of Southampton who was awarded the Callendar Silver Medal by InstMC and served on a committee of the Institute of Physics says “Global Warming has become the core belief in a new eco-theology. The term is used as shorthand for anthropogenic (or man made) global warming. It is closely related to other modern belief systems, such as political correctness, chemophobia and various other forms of scaremongering, but it represents the vanguard in the assault on scientific man.” Read more on these and many more weekly stories here.