Washington, D.C. - Today, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, voiced strong concern over the draft rules on hydraulic fracturing for public and Indian lands released by President Obama’s Department of Interior. The draft rules would require operators to publicly disclose chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing operations on public and Indian lands, address well-bore integrity, and create a number of new requirements surrounding the use, storage, and disposal of water.
“Today President Obama released yet another rule designed to strangle American energy production,” Senator Inhofe said. “Once again, his administration couched this rule in disingenuous rhetoric about increasing oil and natural gas development, all while rolling out just another duplicative and unnecessary bureaucratic roadblock designed to stall hydraulic fracturing - the only process available to develop our vast resources from tight shale formulations. This rule may only apply to public lands now, but let’s not forget that Interior Secretary Salazar has publically stated his hope to use these rules as a blueprint for federal regulation over state and private lands in the future.
“The reason we have had such a boom in natural gas production is precisely because states, not the federal government, have the sole authority to regulate the process. The first use of hydraulic fracturing happened in 1949 in Duncan Oklahoma, and it has been safely regulated at the state level for over 60 years. Even Administrator Jackson has admitted again, despite EPA’s best efforts to link hydraulic fracturing to groundwater contamination, that ‘in no case have we made a definitive determination that the fracking process has caused chemicals to enter groundwater.’
“If there is anyone out there still buying President Obama’s phony reelection rhetoric about natural gas, the Sierra Club - one of the Big Green groups that gave the President its most enthusiastic endorsement - has just rolled out its newest campaign: ‘Beyond Gas.’ As Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune explained yesterday, ‘As we push to retire coal plants, we’re going to work to make sure we’re not simultaneously switching to natural-gas infrastructure. And we’re going to be preventing new gas plants from being built wherever we can.’ With today’s announcement Big Green can be proud of their endorsement of their President, and his green team administration, who are working overtime to help them achieve their goals.”
Background: Rule Requiring Public Disclosure of Chemicals Used in Hydraulic Fracturing on Public and Indian Lands
These rules are duplicative and unnecessary; disclosure is largely being done through a state led Ground Water Protection Council and Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission web-based voluntary disclosure registry known as “FracFocus” which is required in many states and has over 254 participating companies with data on over 16,000 wells.
In order to combat encroaching federal regulations on natural gas development, Senator Inhofe and nine other Senators introduced the Fracturing Regulations are Effective in State Hands Act which will ensure that states - not the federal government - have the sole authority to regulate hydraulic fracturing within their state boundaries.
Although the Administration likes to take credit for increased oil and gas production and a decrease in foreign imports, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service recently released a report confirming that since 2007, “About 96% of the [oil production] increase took place on non-federal lands...” where states are successfully regulating the development of our natural resources. Furthermore, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), our lessened reliance on foreign oil “results from a variety of factors. Chief among those is a significant contraction in consumption… This decline partly reflects the downturn in the underlying economy.” The EIA also notes that total fossil fuel sales of production from federal lands are down since 2008.
By Art Horn
On May the 2nd Huffington Post published a story by Shoshana Zuboff titled “When Global Warming Ate My Life”. In the story she describes how she and her husband moved to a small town in Maine to escape the busy world and raise their two kids in a protected environment where they would learn “respectful down-to-earth values”. That all fine and good, I spent some of the best years of my youth in Maine and still return there as often as I can. It is a wonderful place. After describing the idyllic life they enjoyed there for many years she then goes on to say that on one fateful night, “global warming crashed our party in paradise”.
On a summer night in 2009 a lightning bolt struck her through a window and set their home on fire and burned it to the ground. Obviously she is very lucky to be alive. It was a tragic event that might have been prevented by lightning rods on the roof. I don’t know if they had them or not. The idea of the lightning rod is to take control of any lightning bolt that comes near a home. The sharp point of the rod will attract the bolt and then conduct it by way of a wire down to the ground instead of having it hit randomly somewhere on the house. In any event, she then proclaims that because her house was hit by lightning and burned to the ground that she is now a victim of global warming. I can understand the great sense of loss that she and her family experienced and for sure it was a terrible thing that happened but to blame global warming is a mighty big stretch.
First of all she apparently has been reading Time Magazine or the Huffington Posts “Green” section too much. Perhaps she has been watch too many TV programs on The National Geographic Channel that are continually condemning our way of life for our sin of creating global warming. Whatever the reason, the flavor of the story is that she is completely sold on the man made global warming catastrophe story. She states that a study by the NASA Goddard Institute (The Goddard Institute for Space Studies, GISS) estimates that a 1 degree Celsius rise in global temperature will cause a 5-6% increase in lightning frequency. The Goddard Institute for Space Studies is the last place I would go for reliable studies about future trends of anything being that they are also predicting an 82 foot rise in sea level if the earth warms 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. There has been no temperature increase for 15 years despite large increases in carbon dioxide. The rate of sea level rise is not accelerating. Sea level rise is the same as it has been for the last 100 years and in fact it has slowed over the last 5 years. GISS has also been caught altering data to enhance temperature trends to make it appear that global warming is much more severe than it actually is. This is an ongoing effort at GISS. Even if there has been a 5-6% increase in lightning frequency (there is no data available to support this) it would in no way confirm that the bolt that struck her house that evening was caused by that increase. In reality it was just a random and unfortunate act of nature.
Maine Annual Temperatures 1895-2011 (Enlarged)
In the story Ms. Zuboff goes on to state that the earth has warmed by 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1802. The more generally accepted figure is 0.6 degrees Celsius of warming since 1850. She then goes on the say that Maine has warmed a whopping 1.9 degrees Celsius (3.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in the last 100 years! I don’t know where she got that figure, maybe from the World Wildlife Fund or Greenpeace, but it is completely wrong. The actual amount of warming in the last 100 years in Maine is zero degrees. Don’t take my word for it, you can calculate it yourself at Climate at a Glance U.S. Statewide Analysis. Go down the state of Maine, click on it and follow the instructions on how to plot the temperature trend for the last 100 years, you’ll find no warming at all.
Ms. Zuboff’s story is another in and endless number of tails about our struggle to survive in a hostile world. From the earliest humans to today, mankind has always been in a struggle with nature. Go pet a nice furry and cuddly polar bear, it will be the last thing you ever do. For most of human history we have been fighting to survive what nature throws at us. It has been an epic struggle to beat back the weather to keep us from freezing to death, dying in floods and hurricanes, starving from drought or being hit by lightning. For most of our existence we have been trying to defeat nature.
Over 150 years ago we discovered oil and along with the earlier discovered coal, we revolutionized the world with these abundant fuels. Oil and coal were the principal weapons that we used and continue to use to defeat nature. Like it or not, nature will kill you if you give it a chance. The incredible affluence that oil, coal and natural gas provided us after world war two offered us protection against nature like never before. As prosperity increased our vulnerability to the ravages of nature declined. With this decrease in vulnerability our attitude towards that which had been trying to destroy us changed. From this great affluence the environmental movement was born in the 1960s. The movement preached that it wasn’t nature that was at fault for death and destruction, it was us. The tables had been turned. Now we were the killers, not nature. Fast forward to the current time and the environmental movement has grown so much that it permeates all of our schools and advertising. You can’t go anywhere without being told you must “go green”.
From her story it appears that Ms. Zuboff has indeed been a victim but not of global warming, but of the indoctrination of the environmental movement. She says “Now I know that no one of us can keep our children safe”. That is a lesson that humanity learned a long, long time ago, long before there was any talk about global warming. Nature has always been a threat to our well being and it always will be. She an her family were the tragic victims of a random act of nature and no amount of going green, carbon taxes or government regulation could have stopped it. Global warming did not eat here life, nature did, just as it always has. PDF
By Dr. Tim Ball
Claims of a consensus was an early sign climate science was political. It was used to support official science of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in a public relations campaign to offset and divert from bad science, inadequate data, and incorrect assumptions. It’s in use again as the science of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis fails and people are not persuaded.
Many scientists were fooled, including James Lovelock, a central figure to environmentalism with his Gaia hypothesis. In 2007 he said,
“Before this century is over, billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic.”
Recently he revised his view;
“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books - mine included - because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened.” “We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now.”
How could a reputable scientist be so wrong?
Some words have different meanings for the public than for professionals. For example, calling someone a skeptic is considered derogatory, yet it’s a necessity for a scientist. When warming became climate change skeptics became deniers, a nasty ambiguous word. It means you refuse to acknowledge information, but it’s specifically used for a few who deny the holocaust, arguably the most horrendous event in history.
There’s a negative implication to the word consensus. If you’re not part of it you’re out-of-step, stupid, antisocial, or all three. There’s no consensus in science. Even in politics it’s rare to assign a number to a consensus. Apparently to pretend credibility current users say there’s a 97 percent consensus about IPCC climate science.
Numerical measures of the consensus argument appeared early in climate As I recall, approximately 6000 people associated with the IPCC represented the original consensus. That number decreased to 2500 today, but they’re still the consensus according to RealClimate, the web site about which Michael Mann wrote in a 2004 email,
“...the important thing is to make sure they’re loosing (sic) the PR battle. That’s what the site is about.”
A 16 December 2004 entry asks,
“Is there really “consensus” in the scientific community on the reality of anthropogenic climate change?”
Evidence used was the now discredited study of Naomi Oreske that claimed of 928 articles selected objectively by a three word google search, 100 percent supported IPCC science.
On 22 December 2004 there’s another RealClimate insight;
We’ve used the term “consensus” here a bit recently without ever really defining what we mean by it. In normal practice, there is no great need to define it - no science depends on it. But it’s useful to record the core that most scientists agree on, for public presentation. The consensus that exists is that of the IPCC reports, in particular the working group I report (there are three WG’s. By “IPCC”, people tend to mean WG I).
This admits consensus is unnecessary in science, but necessary for climate science “for public presentation” or propaganda.
It’s another circular argument that pervade IPCC science and politics. For example, they hypothesize that CO2 causes temperature increase, program a computer model accordingly, then say the model proves that CO2 increase causes temperature increase. RealClimate says,
“The main points that most would agree on as “the consensus” are:
1.The earth is getting warmer (0.6 +/- 0.2 C in the past century; 0.1 to 0.17 C/decade over the last 30 years (see update)) [ch 2]
2.People are causing this [ch 12] (see update)
3.If GHG emissions continue, the warming will continue and indeed accelerate [ch 9]
4.(This will be a problem and we ought to do something about it)
I’ve put those four points in rough order of certainty. The last one is in brackets because whilst many would agree, many others (who agree with 1-3) would not, at least without qualification. It’s probably not a part of the core consensus in the way 1-3 are.”
So the consensus is their IPCC Reports.
Here are the facts of the consensus today.
1.The rise of 0.6 C has an error of 0.2C or 33 percent - which is scientifically meaningless. Phil Jones a senior member of the IPCC produced the number. The earth is not warming any more.
2.The only evidence people are the cause is in their computer models.
3. Temperature increase precedes CO2 increase in every single record anywhere, except in their computer models.
4.An application of the precautionary principle.
RealClimate said about consensus,
“In normal practice, there is no great need to define it - no science depends on it.”
But climate science of the IPCC and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia was not normal practice: a political consensus was their only hope. As Michael Crichton said,
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.
Sounds familiar; the science is settled, and the debate is over because there’s a consensus.
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Climate scientists’ claims of email death threats go up in smoke
by: Christian Kerr
From: The Australian, May 3, 2012
CLAIMS that some of Australia’s leading climate change scientists were subjected to death threats as part of a vicious and unrelenting email campaign have been debunked by the Privacy Commissioner.
Timothy Pilgrim was called in to adjudicate on a Freedom of Information application in relation to Fairfax and ABC reports last June alleging that Australian National University climate change researchers were facing the ongoing campaign and had been moved to “more secure buildings” following explicit threats.
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Environmentalists compared their opponents to mass murderers long before the Heartland Institute
By Brendan O’Neill
The climate-sceptical Heartland Institute has driven environmentalists mental this morning by unveiling an advertising campaign which, in the words of the Washington Post, is “in incredibly poor taste”. The ads, promoting an upcoming Heartland conference, show some of the crazier people who buy into climate-change alarmism – such as the Unabomber, Charles Manson and Osama bin Laden – alongside the words, “He still believes in global warming. Do you?” That is actually a tiny bit funny. Though according to easily offended green-leaning hacks it is outrageous to “compare belief in global warming to mass murder”. It is mad, they say, to “link terrorism and murder” with “global warming belief”.
Okay, yes, it is not the most sophisticated advertising campaign in world history. But I don’t remember greens getting their panties in a bunch on the 700,000 previous occasions (that’s a rough estimate) when non-belief in global warming was likened to being a terrorist, a Nazi, or Beelzebub. Indeed, greens - including some of those who choked on their muesli this morning when they heard about Heartland’s advert antics - are world experts in comparing their critics to Hitler and other assorted nutjobs.
Consider the leading British green who said climate-change deniers should be held responsible for the “coming” “Holocaust” and thus might have to be banged up for their complicity in mass murder. “I wonder what sentences judges might hand down at future international criminal tribunals on those who will be partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead”, he mused. The popular eco-magazine Grist has called for “some sort of climate Nuremberg” to try the “bastards” who deny climate change. When they aren’t being likened to Hitler, climate-change sceptics are being lumped in with those who appeased him. Chris Huhne says climate change is our generation’s “Munich moment” and anyone who fails to campaign against climate change is a perfect fit for Winston Churchill’s description of an “appeaser” - “someone that feeds a crocodile, hoping that it will eat him last”.
Other greens have described climate change as a calamity that will make “genocide and ethnic cleansing look like sideshows at the circus of human suffering”, with the implication being that anyone who doesn’t tackle it is an appeaser or an enabler of massive amounts of evil. As to Heartland’s comparison of belief in global warming with being a terrorist - well, what about the endless claims by greens that if we don’t tackle climate change then there will be more war and terror, because “global warming could destabilise struggling and poor countries… creating breeding grounds for terrorists”? Rough translation: fail to tackle global warming and you’re nurturing terrorism.
Heartland doesn’t have a monopoly on evoking mass murder and terror as a way of rubbishing its opponents. That art was perfected by greens first. Yet judging by today’s fracas, where it is okay to compare climate-change sceptics to mass murderers, it is not okay to compare greens to mass murderers. Is that right?