Noel Sheppard’s blog

Just how far is all this global warming nonsense going?

Well, on Tuesday, four senators proposed a bill that would create a new federal bureaucracy to oversee the growing multi-billion dollar carbon trading market.
Just what we need, right? Another monolithic bureaucracy, this one designed to help solve a problem the existence of which is greatly questioned.
As Duke University reported Tuesday (emphasis added): Senators Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and John Warner (R-Va.) introduced a bill to minimize negative economic impacts to consumers and industry of the transition to a lower-carbon economy while achieving critical environmental goals. The bill is designed to be incorporated into broader climate change legislation.

The measures would be implemented by a Carbon Market Efficiency Board, which would oversee what is estimated to be a multi-billion dollar emissions permit trading market. The board would operate much like the Federal Reserve Board, providing information on price and low-emission technology investment trends to Congress and the public, and it would employ cost-relief measures when a market correction is needed. For those wondering why the Duke citation, it’s because this proposal went almost totally ignored by conventional media outlets, and the University is connected to the bill: “The plan was developed with analysis provided by the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions of Duke University.”

Why might media have ignored this? Well, one possibility is that regardless of how green the press appear today, the new federal bureaucracy they’re looking to back at this point in time is universal healthcare. On the other hand, maybe they’re concerned that too much coverage of the issue will kill it much as what happened to Hillary Clinton’s healthcare proposal in 1993, especially given some of the similarities.

Read full story here.

Canadian mayor calls Gore ‘junk scientist’ who ‘trades on fear’ .  “I think there’s a lot of junk science out there that’s masquerading as true science,’’ the Mayor (Andy Wells, St. John’s) told CanWest News Service yesterday, “and I think as a consequence public agencies and organizations such as municipal councils are making stupid decisions.” During a council debate on the subject in St. John’s Monday night, the feisty mayor tore into another councillor, calling him a junk scientist like “Al Gore and David Suzuki.”

Mr. Wells repeated the assertion Tuesday. “I always thought David Suzuki was a charlatan,’’ he said. Mr. Wells added: “I think this Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, from what I’ve read, contains a lot of very poor science.  “I’m not an expert, far from it, but I know how to read.” Mr. Wells said Mr. Gore, Mr. Suzuki and the Sierra Club of Canada trade on fear to scare Canadians into giving them money to fund their activities.

See full story here.

By Viscount Monckton of Brenchley for the Science and Public Policy Institute

Note: A new website has been launched: The Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) is a nonprofit institute of research and education dedicated to sound public policy based on sound science. Among the premier stories is this one by Lord Monckton of Benchley.

It is often said that there is a scientific “consensus” to the effect that climate change will be “catastrophic” and that, on this question, “the debate is over”. The present paper will demonstrate that the claim of unanimous scientific “consensus” was false, and known to be false, when it was first made; that the trend of opinion in the peer-reviewed journals and even in the UN’s reports on climate is moving rapidly away from alarmism; that, among climate scientists, the debate on the causes and extent of climate change is by no means over; and that the evidence in the peer-reviewed literature conclusively demonstrates that, to the extent that there is a “consensus”, that “consensus” does not endorse the notion of “catastrophic” climate change.

A growing number of scientists who had previously subscribed to the alarmist presentation of the “consensus” are no longer sure. They are joining the numerous climatologists – many of them with outstanding credentials – who have never believed in the more extreme versions of the alarmist case. Indeed, many scientists now say that there has been no discernible human effect on temperature at all. For instance, Buentgen et al. (2006) say: “The 20th-century contribution of anthropogenic greenhouse gases and aerosol remains insecure.”Let the last word go to Mike Hulme, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK, who has himself undergone something of a conversio morum on climate change, and has written: “The IPCC is not going to talk about tipping points; it’s not going to talk about five-meter rises in sea level; it’s not going to talk about the next ice age because the Gulf Stream collapses; and it’s going to have none of the economics of the Stern Review. It’s almost as if a credibility gap has emerged between what the British public thinks and what the international science community think.

See full story here and see the new web site here.