UPDATE:

Tom Nelson reported Joe Romm of Think Progress spouted off after Joe Bastardi’s Saturday morning FOX appearance in which he was asked to comment on CO2 and global climate changes. “Joe Bastardi Pulls a Charlie Sheen on Fox News, Pushing “Utter Nonsense” on Climate Science”. Joe proves again why he and Heidi Cullen (and throw in Obama) are the worst investments the billionair George Soros ever made.

Joe R. began :Those who watched Fox News over the weekend were treated to a brief but ambitious science lesson on “Why CO2 Can’t Cause Warming”:Oh boy. Let’s take these one at a time.” He went on to show how little Romm knows about climate. Gore also sounded off in obscenties this weekend.  A new Rasmussen poll shows the American public trusts the objectivity and credibility of impassioned global warming “scientists” about as much as used car salesmen, and boy is Al Gore ticked. If Michele Bachmann is Newsweek‘s Queen of Rage, Al Gore must be America’s potty-mouthed King of Bizarre Temper Tantrums.

While the sinking credibility of activist scientists is primarily due to documented scientific misconduct, it can’t help that the public face of global warming alarmism is an increasingly bizarre, tantrumatic potty-mouth who habitually lectures down to the American people like they are morally inferior beings. I am not a big cheerleader for the “Sky Is Falling” global warming campaign, but I can’t help but offer the following advice: You really need to get yourselves a new spokesperson. Tom Nelson.

Joe Bastardi responded…

The PDO changes, sunspot activity is down from the max around 2000. The Earths temps level out and co2 continues to rise. To the folks at climate progress.. if co2 is causing the temperature rise, why is it the temperatures have leveled off while co2 continues to rise, and the other 2 forcing mechanisms have changed. Where are the trapping hot spots at 400mb? Where is the positive feedback? Why is the temperature not in any of the IPCC ranges issued 20 years ago? Even Phil Jones admitted there has been no warming, so how can co2 be the cause? Where is the heat.. The ocean bottom, a cave somewhere? And how is it the satellites say it fine after the PDO switched to warm, but cant find it now?

By The way, I didnt see Joe Rohm or any of my other accusers in my thermodynamic classes at Penn State where I earned a degree in the University’s prime, graduating 2/3 rds of the worlds meteorologists at the time. To my friends at climate progress, media matters, etc, its a simple test.. If the earth’s temps fall back to where they were in the 70s by 2030, because of the changes in the oceanic cycles, which have been warm since the start of the satellite era, then what we are seeing now will be proven, co2 has nothing to do with it. If temps rise, in the face of the major drivers that have turned around ( oceanic, solar) as measured by OBJECTIVE SATELLITE MEASUREMENTS, WHICH WE HAVE ONLY HAD SINCE THE 70S) then co2 has something, if not almost everything to do with it. HERE IS THE PROBLEM. There is no answer you will admit to being wrong. I will at least admit I am wrong if my simple test doesn’t do what i say. Mine involves logic, reason, and basic laws of science, and as I said before, I did not see any of my critics in any meteorology or atmospheric chemistry class.

So that is my challenge. Temps have leveled off, co2 is continuing to rise. If you cant admit you are wrong about that, let us all know what we have to see for you to admit you are wrong.

I suspect we wont get an answer, since everything that happens, even if it cools, will be an answer they will claim they were right about

And by the way, Quit lying about me. I am all for any and all energy use that will make our world cleaner and energy cheaper. I am all for energy independence. I could care less where it comes from, because you still have to know if its going to be cold or warm, and how much you need to use. Windfarms for instance are a meteorologists dream since not only do they need to know the result of the weather, but the actual weather, so its a first and second derivative. The same with the solar ideas. Personally , I like the idea of on site wind and solar sufficiency, empowering your own home to reduce cost, but to me this is a forecast. Obviously for you its something completely different, and because it is, it is you, not me, that doesn’t take the facts into account.

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By P Gosselin on 8. August 2011

First, regrettably, while I was on holidays in the US, Joe Bastardi sent me something he wanted posted and it wasn’t until this morning that I discovered it in my spam. So I’m a little late getting this out, and maybe this already got published at other sites in the meantime. Oh well, in any case, without further ado, here it is. Joe has got some questions.

How Do The AGW People Get Away With This?
By Joe Bastardi

A few graphics make the position of the AGW people completely absurd. It’s why I am so confident as to my position on this matter, and by the way it does have something to do with the weather because if you know where the weather has been, you have a better chance to know where it’s going.

Exhibit one, from my co-partner here at WeatherBell Joe D’Aleo ( I wonder if we will share the same cell when the warmingistas come to get us. And will they let us have the same tattoo artist to brand us deniers?)

PDO and AMO are strongly correlated to the earths temps…now watch CO2 vs temps over the past century:

Even more damming than this, look at the past 10 years:

Or the last 15 years:

Which leads to the question: How do these people have any credibility? How do they get away with this?  It’s mind boggling that its gotten to a point where the EPA is dictating policy based on what is an obvious fraud, or if you want to be gentle about it, creates enough doubt to back off.

Here is something to consider.

Over a year ago I advised a client of mine at the time to purchase less air conditioners than for 2010 because the summer of 2011 would be cooler than the summer of 2010. Now there is talk that this is going to turn out like last summer, but assuming it won’t, the forecast was made. BEFORE LAST SUMMER. The client had to put in their order for air conditioners a year beforehand because they were ordering them FROM CHINA.

Now every red blooded American gets up in arms because all those jobs should be here in USA, right?  But why aren’t they? Well in large part because of policy that is based on absurdities like this, a factory making anything here is now being clamped down on by the EPA so hard, so why bother? Its like Obama said:  ” So, if somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can, it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that will get emitted”.

That is a direct quote and is like his energy Sec saying that they seek to take away choices that people waste their money on. Astounding that things like that are being pushed by people in control, or that they even got control in the first place. That is our fault, based on what is obviously flat out nonsense. But combine that with labor costs, and the fact the that the corporate tax rate in the US is higher than China, which few people in our nation seem to get, and this is what happens.

Now let’s say we wanted to make sure that a person here working in an air conditioner factory can make a decent wage from a helping hand ( how do like my populist line…from the Ghost of Tom Joad?) Well, get rid of the EPA running roughshod over factory owners, and lower the corporate tax rate to below China’s ( it is so hard to believe that Chinese tax rates are lower) and you will find that companies will stay here and pay a decent wage to build air conditioners, But not if you are clamping down on people based on questionable, don’t-have-a-leg-to-stand-on ideas about co2 warming the planet.

Again, it defies logic as to how they got to where they did with this issue, and the facts are there for all to see.

Joe Bastardi runs the professional weather services company Weather BELL Analytics LLC together with Joe D Aleo.

How the green movement is damaging the global economy and threatens populations worldwide

Before you accuse me and my realist colleagues of not caring about the future of our planet or our children and grandchildren, every climate realist I know is an environmentalist. Given the vigorous demands of merit referencing that definition, an objective inspection finds that to be true. We have worked diligently to build a world economic framework that our children and grandchildren can benefit from and build upon.

We live an energy and resource efficient lifestyle. We recycle and don’t debase the environment. In fact we treasure time spent within nature. We arrive from all sides of the political spectrum.
We share skepticism that man plays a dangerous role in climate change. We believe in natural cycles but don’t all agree on what factors play the most important roles. The fact we are monolithic in our views is testament to the fact we follow the scientific method in which skepticism is critical and an open mind to empirical data is the path to the truth. We trust observational data and not man-made models that can politicized to convey a political manifesto. Presently, our’s and the future of our families are threatened not by our skepticism or resistance to major changes they want to place on our world by those in power, but by the environmentally driven policies that our governments worldwide have enacted.

The usurpation of the environmental movement by those with a social and political agenda has led to counterproductive energy policies with unrealistic reliance on undependable and prohibitively expensive and non sustainable “renewables”. Wind and solar substitutes for fossil fuels and nuclear, even hydropower make no sense economically requiring massive state subsidies during a time of critical resources. And in no location have these sources proven reliable enough to replace fossil fuel plants. Instead, they must be kept in inefficient ready back-up mode and every country has seen increased carbon dioxide emissions. Whatsmore, instead of lowering energy costs, in the end, worldwide they have led to great increases of energy prices which have stressed the public, especially pensioners and low and even middle income families. The high cost of energy and unnecessary regulations are causing industries to flee overseas to India to China where energy and labor costs are manageable.

Globally, the ‘green job’ revolution has been an abject failure wherever it has been enacted.
In Spain, for every green job created, 2.2 real jobs were lost. Only 1 in 10 green jobs were permanent. Unemployment reached 20.89% last month, the highest single country rate in the world. In Italy, 3.4 real jobs were lost for every green job created. This unwise energy policy and the socialist entitlement programs have devastated individual freedom and economies.

Strong budget changes including the cessation of subsidies for renewables and cutbacks on entitlement programs have been instituted to stem the tide of economic decay. In the UK, major cutbacks are being implemented and changes to their energy policies are being debated.
It is little surprise that Italy and Spain are in daily headlines decrying bailouts from the EU as riots spread through streets and neighborhoods in the UK as witnessed in Greece as economic reality forced painful remediation.
These same environmental groups earlier led to the ban of DDT and are to blame for the tens of millions of malaria deaths in Africa, mostly children. DDT was a safe insecticide used here in the United States to control bed bugs; a remnant from over half a century ago. Bedbugs and their attending misery have returned here as well.

The increased energy costs are pushing more and more people into energy poverty. 26% of the Wales families are in that category. Another bad winter like the last 4 (last December was trhe second coldest since 1659 in the little ice Age) will lead to increasing cold deaths. In the United States, the EPA is pushing to increase regulation that would shut down fossil fuel power plants needed to keep the air conditioning or heating going during cold winters like the last two years and brutally hot summers like this one. Long lasting blackouts and brownouts would be deadly during these extremes.

Somehow NGOs like Greenpeace, WWF, EDF and the NRDC that have led in the green movement and pressured politicians and economists to adopt these now failed policies have escaped any blame.

Economists who hang onto the failed Kensyian policies like Stern, Krugman and politicians like Gilliard and Gore and Huhne who stubbornly stand by the failed science, economic theory and policies share the blame spotlight.

Instead of the polar bears and seals, they have created an ‘environment’ that makes humans endangered. We need to fight back against these merchants of debt and dissolution to preserve the future we have worked so hard to build for our families.

The United States imports almost half of its oil (49%), and about 25% of our imports come from one country - our friendly neighbor to the North, Canada. Today, Canada supplies more oil to the USA than all Persian Gulf countries combined.

With an estimated 175 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, Canada has the world’s second largest oil reserves. About 170 billion of those barrels, or 97%, are located in geologic formations called oil sands - a mixture sand, water, clay, and bitumen, a sticky tar-like form of petroleum.

Unlike “conventional” oil, bitumen is too viscous to be pumped without being heated or diluted.

Last Wednesday and Thursday, courtesy of the good folks at American Petroleum Institute (API), I and other bloggers toured two large Canadian oil sands projects near Fort McMurray, Alberta.

The Surmont Project, operated by ConocoPhillips, uses a technology called steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) to melt the bitumen so that it can be pumped back to the surface. At each well site, two parallel pipes descend to about 1,000 feet below the surface and then extend horizontally for several thousand feet. Heated steam in the upper pipe melts the bitumen, which then flows back up to the surface through the lower pipe. Natural gas may also be injected in the upper pipe to further reduce the viscosity of the bitumen. Along with the melted bitumen, the lower pipe brings hot water and natural gas back up to the surface for capture and reuse in a closed cycle.

This process is relatively new but within a few years it is expected to dominate Canadian oil production, because about 80% of Canada’s oil sands are too deep to be mined. The Surmont Project, which started production in 2007, currently produces about 23,000 barrels per day (bpd). It is expected to be producing 136,000 bpd by 2015.

The Millennium site, operated by Suncor Energy, relies mainly on mining to access the bitumen. The oil sands here are at a relatively shallow layer - about 350 feet below the surface. Millennium started production in 1967, making it the world’s first commercially-successful oil sands venture and the longest-running oil sands project in Canada.

Millennium’s scale is truly breathtaking. Suncor’s leases (which also include SAGD drilling sites) cover more than 1,800 square kilometers. A fleet of giant trucks with shovels that remove 100 tons of earth at a bite operate day and night. Some trucks remove the “overburden” - a surface layer composed of muskeg (a peat-like substance), clay, and rock, while others dig up the oil sands beneath. The largest of these trucks, which are built by Caterpillar, haul loads up to 400 tons. In a year’s time, the trucks haul about 2,000 loads of overburden and 1,600 loads of oil sands.

The next photo is me pretending to be the master of all I survey. The distant object to the left of my outstretched hand is a monster truck.

After being mined, the oil sands are sent to massive facilities that use water and steam to extract the bitumen from sand and other minerals, separate the bitumen from water, and chemically treat the bitumen until it has the consistency required for transport as crude oil through pipelines.

My reaction to the Millennium project was one of awe. I could not but marvel at the immense scale of market-driven coordination that has turned an otherwise worthless material - sticky, smelly, black sand - into a valuable resource empowering literally millions of ordinary people to enjoy a degree of mobility unknown to the kings and potentates of old.

Some of course may only see - and decry - the industrial footprint, the “scars upon the land,” as the John Denver song put it. What they may not know is that Suncor also engages in land reclamation on a gigantic scale.

The overburden is not only removed, it is also saved, so that it can used to restore landscapes and create habitat after mining operations are completed. In addition, Suncor has developed a process (Tailings Reduction Operation, or TRO) for accelerating the extraction of suspended particles called “mature fine tailings” (MFT) from its tailing ponds (small lakes where water, sand, and clay are sent after separation from the bitumen). After drying, the MFT hardens and is used as landscaping material.

Suncor’s first tailings pond operated for 40 years from 1967 through December 2006. This 220-hectare area today is a contoured medowland with more than 600,000 planted trees and shrubs. Called the Wapisiw Lookout Reclamation, the area’s rock piles provide habitat for small animals, its tree poles provide habitat for raptors, and its wetland provides habitat for aquatic waterfowl. The picture below shows three raptor poles. While our tour group was there, we spotted a black bear cub moving among the hillocks a few hundred yards away.

Canada already ships almost 2 million barrels of oil a day to the USA, but the existing pipeline infrastructure must be expanded not only to handle the larger volumes that Canada will produce in the future but also to transport Canadian oil to U.S. Midwest and Gulf Coast refineries, where it can be turned into gasoline, jet fuel, and other finished petroleum products.

In March 2008, the U.S. State Department granted TransCanada Keystone Pipeline a permit authorizing the company to construct pipeline facilities from Alberta to refineries in Illinois and Oklahoma.

Then in June 2008, Keystone proposed to build an extension, called the Keystone XL Pipeline, to move Canadian oil to refineries in Port Arthur and Houston, Texas. Initially, Keystone XL would be able to deliver 700,000 bpd of heavy crude to U.S. refineries.

From 2010 to 2035, this “shovel ready” project could create 85,000 U.S. jobs, provide $71 billion in U.S. employee compensation, and boost cumulative U.S. GDP by $149 billion, according to the Canadian Energy Research Institute.

Predictably, green pressure groups and their allies on Capitol Hill have mounted a campaign to block the Keystone project, alleging that the pipeline will expose neighboring communities, aquifers, and wetlands to oil spill risk and increase America’s “dependence” on “dirty” energy. Let’s briefly consider these accusations.

The State Department’s massive April 2010 Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) notes that the pipeline “would be designed, constructed, and maintained in a manner that meets or exceeds industry standards and regulatory requirements” (ES 6.13.3). Although some leaks and small spills are bound to occur, “There would be a very limited potential for an operational pipeline spill of sufficient magnitude to significantly affect natural resources and human uses of the environment” (ES 6.13.2). If zero risk of even minor spills is the only acceptable standard, then no petroleum should ever be shipped anywhere. That may be what green groups ultimately have in mind. Such a standard, however, would condemn mankind to Medieval squalor, not enhance public health and welfare.

By “dirty,” Keystone XL opponents refer to the fact that the process of transforming oil sands into petroleum emits more carbon dioxide (CO2) than conventional petroleum extraction. However, whatever Canadian oil does not get shipped to the United States will eventually go elsewhere - mainly to China and other Asian countries, which are investing billions of dollars in Canadian oil sands projects. Just last month, for example, the Chinese company CNOOC agreed to buy Canadian oil sands producer OPTI for $2.1 billion. On a life-cycle basis, shipping oil to China is more carbon-intensive than shipping oil to the USA, because it must be transported on mammoth CO2-emitting tankers.

As for the Keystone XL Pipeline itself, yes it will deliver more Canadian oil to U.S. refineries, but this will mostly offset declining oil shipments from Mexico and Venezuela. Thus, “the incremental impact of the Project on GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions would be minor,” concludes State’s EIS (ES 6.14.2). Again, if no incremental CO2 emissions is the only acceptable standard, then U.S. policy should be to prevent unemployment from falling below 9%, because there’s nothing quite like a deep recession for cutting CO2 emissions.

The long and the short of it is that building the infrastructure to deliver oil from friendly, democratic, politically-stable, environmentally-fastidious Canada is in the U.S. national interest, as the State Department concluded in March 2008. The review process has dragged on, with State in March 2011 issuing a Supplemental EIS that affirms the findings of the earlier document. In May, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on legislation to expedite a presidential decision on Keystone XL, and in July the House passed H.R. 1938, the North American-Made Energy Security Act, by 279-147. The bill would require the President to issue a final order granting or denying a permit to construct Keystone XL by no later than November 1, 2011.

Global demand for oil is growing and America will continue to import oil over the next 25 years even if biofuels and electric vehicles achieve unexpected breakthroughs. As Mark Milke of the Fraser Institute explains in a new report, what this means is that blocking Keystone XL and restricting U.S. access to Canadian oil would not move the world closer to some imaginary environmental utopia. The effect, rather, would be to increase U.S. imports from unsavory regimes where corruption is the norm, environmental safeguards are weak, autocrats brutally suppress dissent, and women are denied economic opportunity and equal protection of the laws.

Alas, I suspect this is actually one of the main reasons green groups oppose Keystone XL. They would like us to believe (a) that oil is a rapidly dwindling resource from which we will soon have to decouple our economy anyway, and (b) that using oil = sending $$ to OPEC. The vast potential of Canada’s oil sands and Canada’s emergence as the leading source of U.S. petroleum imports fractures both pillars of that scaremongering narrative.