By P Gosselin on 17. September 2012
Climate science is hopelessly confused. A few years ago we were told to expect more hurricanes, but have since gotten almost none. We were told we would get winters without snow, instead we’re now getting hit by bitter cold, snowy winters. We were told to expect an Arctic melt down, and now they are telling us to expext a new ice age.
German NTV public television to broadcast “Der Super-Frost”, asks if global warming will cause and ice age!
Is it any wonder that nobody believes climate scientists anymore?
This week German NTV public television is broadcasting a show titled “Der Super Frost” - scheduled to air Wednesday evening at 11 p.m. CET. Hat-tip to Die kalte Sonne website. “Der Super Frost” just happens to be the Mega Freeze episode of the US Mega Disasters series from 2006 (see trailer below).
In the trailer, they ask if global warming will lead to a tipping to global freezing, in which case we would have to call it global cooling – which in reality climate scientists say is now global warming.
This show isn’t just some outdated theory from 2006. Once again today the notion that warming will lead to an ice age is coming back. For example last week German daily Bild here (and a host of other German media outlets) carried the story from scientist Jennifer Francis of Rutgers-University. Bild opened with:
In the Arctic it is getting warmer and warmer, the ice sheet covering the sea has reached a record minimum. Scientists fear that the winter in North America and Europe will therefore become extremely icy! Meaning: The Arctic sea is releasing more and more heat into the air – and this delivers frigid cold!
Wow! warming produces extreme cold. It really does, the scientists say. So should we be preparing for a bitter cold winter? Well, not really. You see Bild reports that these Francis added an opt-out provision to cover her tush:
However, many factors play a role, like snow cover in Siberia or also tropical influences. Thus despite less sea ice coverage, sometimes also mild and wet winters may remain - like last year. Climate scientist Francis: ‘I can only say that it will probably be a very interesting winter.’”
If that’s all you can say, then why did you tell us the rest? Is it because now, no matter what happens, you and the rest of the charlatans will be able to say your models predicted it?
If their idiotic hypothesis that a warm Arctic produces a cold northern hemisphere were true, then the opposite would have to be true. That is, when there’s lots of sea ice, as was the case 35 years ago, then North American and European winters would have to be very mild. That was not the case.
As climatologist Pat Michaels says, the hypothesis is horseshit.
Steve Goreham, TBO
President Obama’s remarks to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, he stated, “… My plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet - because climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They’re a threat to our children’s future. And in this election you can do something about it.”
The president’s remarks support the ideology of climatism - the belief that manmade greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate.
Today, the world is in the grip of the madness of climatism. Our president and 191 other world leaders of the United Nations continue to pursue futile policies to stop global warming. Universities preach “sustainable development.” Companies tout their “green” programs. Schools teach our children that if we change light bulbs, we can save polar bears. But an increasing body of science shows that the theory of catastrophic manmade warming is nonsense. Climate change is natural, and car emissions are insignificant.
The president did not mention the Keystone Pipeline in his speech. In January 2012, he halted the $7 billion Keystone project on recommendation by the State Department in order to assess potential environmental harm. During the last months of 2011, thousands of protesters gathered in front of the White House to protest the Keystone project. They claimed that the oil the pipeline would transport from Canadian tar sands would cause irreversible global warming. Dr. James Hansen of NASA was one of those arrested at the demonstrations. Media pundits speculated that the president halted the pipeline to strengthen his political support with environmental groups. But could it be that Mr. Obama believes that halting the pipeline was the right policy to save the planet?
Who can blame the president for sticking with the theory of man-made global warming? Most of his leading advisors, including Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, science guru John Holdren and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, warn that mankind is destroying the climate. The EPA campaign to halt CO2 emissions from power plants, new vehicle mileage standards, subsidies for wind turbines and electric cars, the Solyndra solar cell debacle, the banning of incandescent light bulbs, the looming California high-speed rail boondoggle and ethanol vehicle fuel mandates are all policies driven by climatism.
The president’s use of the term “carbon pollution” is disappointing. Environmentalists inaccurately use this phrase to conjure up images of billowing smoke stacks, and the president has picked this up. The theory of manmade global warming claims that carbon dioxide, not carbon, causes climate change. Carbon dioxide is an invisible gas, while carbon is a black solid. Referring to carbon dioxide as “carbon” is as foolish as calling water “hydrogen” or salt “chlorine.”
Compounds have totally different properties than their composing elements. Neither is carbon dioxide pollution. It’s an odorless, harmless gas that green plants need for photosynthesis. Carbon dioxide is a foundation for life on Earth along with oxygen and water.
Carbon dioxide is a trace gas. Only four of every 10,000 air molecules are CO2. It’s estimated that the amount of carbon dioxide that mankind added in all of human history is only a fraction of one of these four molecules. The idea that mankind’s tiny contribution to a trace atmospheric gas can cause hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods and wildfires is not a joke, it’s incredible.
Contrary to much of the recent press, a look at history shows that this summer’s drought was not unprecedented in these United States. The droughts of the 1930s and 1950s lasted longer and experienced higher temperatures. According to the State Climate Extremes Database of the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), 37 of the 50 state high-temperature records dated prior to 1960, with 22 of these from the decade of the 1930s. Only one state high-temperature record was recorded during the last 16 years. Additional data on droughts and floods from the NCDC show no increasing trend over the last 100 years. Nature drives droughts and floods, not manmade emissions of carbon dioxide.
The president’s statement is remarkable in another way. He implies that we should vote for him because he can control droughts, floods and wildfires to safeguard “our children’s future.”
During a speech in June 2008, he implied that he could slow the rise of the seas. What’s next, regulation of snowfall? If Mr. Obama is re-elected and with bipartisan support in Congress and approval of the United Nations, look for the Snowfall Abatement Act of 2014.
Steve Goreham is executive director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the new book “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.”
Source: SPPI
EPA Madness Spreads
EPA advances anti-energy agenda, with little regard for Americans health or welfare
by Paul Driessen
Seven score and nine years ago, President Lincoln resolved to take increased devotion to ensuring that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the Earth.
Yet, today, our lives are determined not so much by We the People, as by a distant central government, particularly increasingly powerful, unelected and unaccountable Executive Branch agencies. Foremost among them, by almost any standard, is the Environmental Protection Agency.
Under Administrator Lisa Jackson, the Gettysburg vision has mutated into government of, by and for the EPA. Indeed, Ms. Jackson seeks not merely to regulate, but to legislate; not merely to protect our health and environment against every conceivable risk, but to control every facet of our economy, livelihoods and lives. Under her direction, EPA increasingly flaunts the naked power of regulators gone wild.
Instead of following laws and policies set by our elected representatives, EPA is now controlled by environmental ideologues, determined to impose their utopian ideas, via a massive and arrogant power grab. President Obama set the tone, with his promises to “bankrupt” coal and utility companies and “radically transform” our economy and society, and serves as the rogue agency’s cheerleader-in-chief. With few exceptions, our courts have refused to intervene, and the Senate has obstructed any meaningful efforts to constrain agency overreach or reexamine the laws under which it claims jurisdiction.
EPA’s power grab picks the pockets of every American business and citizen, making it increasingly expensive to fill gas tanks, heat and cool homes and offices, run hospitals and factories, or buy food and consumer goods. The Employment Prevention Agency’s $100-billion diktats are killing countless jobs, making America more dependent on foreign sources of energy and raw materials that we have in abundance right here at home, and endangering our economic health and national security.
Under Lisa Jackson’s agenda, fossil fuels are to be relegated to the dustbin of history. America is to get its energy from intermittent, unreliable “renewable” sources, whenever they are available. Regulations on carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases,” mercury, soot and other substances are to make non-hydrocarbon energy appear cheaper by comparison, and pave the way for crony corporatist “alternatives” like wind, solar, ethanol, wave and tidal action, and even biofuel for the Navy and Air Force.
In a mere six instances, our courts have delayed or blocked some of EPA’s worst excesses. Ruling that the agency had exceeded its authority, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down EPA’s “cross-state” air pollution rule, which would have controlled power plant emissions on the ground that computer models predicted the pollutants might harm neighborhoods hundreds of miles away.
In far too many other cases, however, EPA has been given carte blanche to regulate as it sees fit. A key pretext is the 1970 Clean Air Act, as amended by Congress in 1977 and 1990. The act deals primarily with six common pollutants: sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, particulates (soot), ozone, lead and carbon monoxide. It never mentions carbon dioxide, the plant-fertilizing gas that is essential for all life.
As EPA itself acknowledges, between 1970 and 2010, those six “criteria” air pollutants declined by an average of 63% and will continue to do so under existing regulations and technologies. Moreover, those dramatic reductions occurred even ascoal-based electricity generation increased 180% ... overall US energy consumption rose 40%… miles traveled soared 168% ...and the nation’s population increased by 110 million. However, EPA intends to go much further, to advance its radical agenda.
It ruled that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant,” ignoring solar influences and citing claims by alarmists like James Hansen and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that this essential gas (0.0395% of Earth’s atmosphere) “contributes” to “dangerous” global warming. Since hydrocarbons provide 85% of the energy used to power America, this single ruling gives EPA effective control over our transportation, manufacturing, heating, cooling and other activities. virtually our entire economy. while making it all but impossible to operate existing coal-fired power plants or build new ones.
To ensure that coal really is excised from our energy mix, EPA also issued oppressive new rules on other emissions. Its new mercury rule is based on computer-generated risks to hypothetical American women who eat 296 pounds of fish a year that they catch themselves, its determination to prevent a theoretical reduction in IQ test scores by “0.00209 points,” and its refusal to recognize that coal fired power plants contribute just 3% of the total mercury deposited in American watersheds, and thus in fish tissue.
EPA’s new PM2.5 soot standard is equivalent to having one ounce of super fine dust spread equally in a volume of air one half mile long, one half mile wide and one story tall while other rules demand that water from coal mines be cleaner than Perrier bottled water!
The agency repeatedly denied Shell Oil permits to drill in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska, because emissions from drilling rig and icebreaker engines might contribute to global warming. It opposes the Keystone XL Pipeline on the ground that burning Canadian oil sands fuel might likewise “contribute” to catastrophic climate change whereas that would presumably not be the case if China burned that same fuel.
When Congress failed to act, it imposed new 54.5 mpg automobile standards that will make cars less affordable, but also smaller, more lightweight and less safe, causing thousands of additional injuries, disabilities and deaths every year. The agency bragged about fuel savings, and ignored the human toll.
EPA also added industrial pollution, habitat destruction and fertilizer runoff as more reasons why irrigation water should not be turned on again in California’s San Joaquin Valley, to “protect” the delta smelt at the expense of farm jobs and families, after a judge ordered water to be turned back on.
To further justify its despotic decisions, EPA grossly overstates the economic benefits of its rules insisting that each “premature death” theoretically avoided creates $9 million in hypothetical societal economic gains, whether the assumed “person” was a newborn or an 85 year old in hospice care.
If even that isn’t enough, it uses human subjects in laboratory tests, exposing them to what Ms. Jackson has testified are dangerous, even toxic levels of fine soot. The agency also pays activist groups millions of taxpayer dollars a year to promote and applaud its farfetched claims and rogue actions.
Finally, EPA ignores the clearly harmful impacts its regulations have on human health and welfare. The rules cost jobs, thereby increasing the risk of depression, alcohol abuse, spousal and child abuse, cardiovascular disease and suicide. They just as obviously raise the cost of food, electricity, heating, air conditioning, commuting, healthcare and other necessities, thereby reducing health, welfare, living standards, civil rights progress and environmental justice especially for poor, elderly and minority families.
EPA is out of control, and thus far unaccountable for its abuses of power, its disinformation and fraud, and the harm it is inflicting for little or no health or environmental benefit.
Our founding fathers provided for elections, so that the American people could choose leaders who make the major decisions affecting their lives and not be subjected to involuntary servitude at the hands of unelected, unaccountable kings or bureaucrats.
Rarely in history has one election meant so much, or one agency asserted so much control over our lives, livelihoods and freedoms. The 2012 elections will determine whether America once again enjoys a new birth of freedom, or continues suffering under an EPA that enslaves and impoverishes us, rather than protects us.
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Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power Black death.