By Marc Morano, EPW Minority Blog

Even the greenie’s at Grist recognize a boondoggle when they see one! They note how “over$1 trillion of GHG revenue that has to go back to the Beltway before it can get distributed.” And this does not even take into account the Rube Goldberg new presidentially appointed federal carbon board modeled after Federal Reserve (See Senator Kit Bond’s brilliant chart on this new board which makes Hillary’s Health care plan look tiny by comparison).

See this excerpt from the post on Grist by Sean Casten - President & CEO of Recycled Energy Development, a company dedicated to the profitable reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Past President/CEO of Turbosteam Corporation, and 2007 Chair of the US Combined Heat & Power Association entitled “Lieberman-Warner: Bad Idea”.

But [Lieberman-Warner] is so big, so complicated, and gets the important details so wrong that it will make it extremely politically difficult to unpack. Worse, it will give green cover to politicians who don’t want to take hard actions on GHG reduction but were able to get some pork thrown back to their district. (And make no mistake: with over $1 trillion of GHG revenue that has to go back to the Beltway before it can get distributed, there is one heck of a lot of pork-centive in this bill.)

It’s time to call the Lieberman-Warner love train back to the station. This is not to say that we don’t urgently need to immediately start reducing atmospheric GHG concentrations and get policies in place that price carbon. It is instead simply the observation that as L-W morphs into ever greater complexity, it becomes an ever-worse way to meet that goal. Like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, I rather doubt that L-W will go anywhere close to far enough to cure AGW. But I am quite certain that the side effects of this purported cure are worse than the disease. Read more here.

By James Lewis, The American Thinker

In Stalin’s Russia any dissenter from the Party Line was guilty. Innocence had to be proved. It’s a standard tyrant’s trick. During the reign of Oliver Cromwell in England, witchhunters did not have to prove that their victims were guilty. The accused witches had to prove their innocence.

That’s what Al Gore has done to science: He and his friends have flipped innocence and guilt from normal science to Stalinist science. In Al Gore’s America, any “global warming denier” is guilty until proven innocent. He or she must have been bought off by Big Oil.  Skeptics, no matter how well-qualified, must prove the negative about really silly alarmist hogwash. And whenever some prediction is falsified, the warm mongers have an explanation: it’s just a temporary glitch in the data. Oh, yes, we were wrong about 1998, but just wait till 2050! The excuses are endless.

Putting the burden of proof on the doubters is a perversion of normal, healthy science. In normal science the burden of proof is on the proposer. Albert Einstein had to prove in his historic 1905 paper that there was a fundamental flaw in classical physics.  The distinctive predictions of Relativity Theory had to be verified for decades afterwards. Some are still being tested today.  His predecessor Max Planck remarked that he encountered so much skepticism that he had to wait for the older generation of physicists to die off before his work was accepted. Darwin said the same thing.

A healthy scientific community is extremely skeptical. It needs to see more and more evidence, over and over and over again, before it adopts some wild-eyed new idea. It takes all the time it needs; good science is very patient. Einstein himself was a complete skeptic about quantum mechanics, and never accepted it over the last forty years of his life. He had a perfect right to question it, as long as he had rational arguments, and he did. (He was wrong on QM, but he was right on Relativity.) “Catastrophic global warming,” caused by human beings, is a really wild-eyed idea, given the fact that animals have survived on earth for half a billion years, with thousands of massive volcanic explosions, giant meteors hitting the earth, drifting continents, and great biomass changes that would have perturbed the climate, if the hypothesis were true. 

There are no facts robust enough, consistent enough, and verified enough to support the mass hysteria. The climate system is hypercomplex, nonlinear and poorly understood. The media spinners are immensely ignorant about real science, and just care about the next scare headline. There’s a lot of wild speculation and a mob of self-serving politicians, bureaucrats and media types who stand to gain a ton of power and money by suckering millions of taxpayers. Al Gore just started a 300 million dollar PR campaign to convince everybody.  When was the last time you saw 300 million bucks being spent to promote a scientific hypothesis that was already proven? We’re not spending millions to prove the existence of gravity. The uproar and money involved in this fraud is in direct proportion to the lack of solid facts.  Read more here.

By Jennifer Marohasy, Jennifermarohasy.com/blog

UPDATE 4/8/08: See video of Glenn Beck and Noel Sheppard discuss this BBC capitulation to activist on CNN Headline’s Glenn Beck show last evening 4/7/08 here.

I have been emailed the following correspondence, purportedly between an activist, Jo Abbess (jo.abbess@gmail.com), and BBC Environment reporter Roger Harrabin. It would appear that the result of the email exchange between the activist and the reporter was that the BBC changed its story (see story below). In particular instead of reporting the story as received from the World Meteorological Organisation, the BBC modified the story as demanded by the activist who was concerned that in its original form it supported ‘the skeptics’ correct observation that there has been no warming since 1998.

From Jo, April 4, 2008

Climate Changers,

Remember to challenge any piece of media that seems like it’s been subject to spin or scepticism.

Here’s my go for today. The BBC actually changed an article I requested a correction for, but I’m not really sure if the result is that much better.

Judge for yourselves.

See the constant barage from this activist (jo.abbess@gmail.com), and the initial pushback by the BBC author but eventually capitulation in the email exchange here. Good detective work Jennifer. In George Orwell’s words “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes revolutionary”. Revolution anyone?