A few years back, U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) added another woe to the already-long list of alleged negative consequences of global warming: airplane turbulence.

In an interview with the Detroit News, Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow said:

Climate change is very real. Global warming creates volatility and I feel it when I’m flying. The storms are more volatile.

Anyone else out there “feeling” global warming, or do we merely need to pass an anti-turbulence tax to satisfy the good Senator?  As Detroit News contributor Henry Payne noted: “And there are sea monsters in Lake Michigan. I can feel them when I’m boating.”

During an August 10 private meeting with the Detroit News editorial board, Stabenow explained her support for carbon dioxide restrictions designed to fight global warming. “Climate change is very real,” argued Stabenow. “Global warming creates volatility. I feel it when I’m flying. The storms are more volatile. We are paying the price in more hurricanes and tornadoes.”

Contradicting Stabenow’s claims, however, the U.S. National Weather Service reports the number of F2 or stronger tornadoes has been declining since the early 1970s and 2013 had 142 fewer tornadoes reported than an year on record. Florida State University scientists report global hurricane activity is at its lowest level in at least 30 years.

Fast forward to 2014:

The satellite images viewed by President Obama before a meeting with eight Western governors were stark, showing how snowpack in California’s mountains had shrunk by 86 percent in a single year.

“It was a ‘Houston, we have a problem’ moment,” recalled White House counselor John D. Podesta, one of two aides who briefed the president that February day. Obama mentioned the images several times as he warned the governors that political leaders had no choice but to cope with global warming’s impact.

The senate and the administration is filled with scientific illiterates and dangerous agenda driven politicians like Podesta.

This report in the Washington Post is a lead in to the US Climate Assessment Report to be issued tomorrow trying to energize the unwise and potentially deadly environmental agenda pushed by environMENTALists and the Hollywood elite ignorati.

After years of putting other policy priorities first - and dismaying many liberal allies in the process - Obama is now getting into the weeds on climate change and considers it one of the key components of his legacy, according to aides and advisers.

He is regularly briefed on scientific reports on the issue, including a national climate assessment that he will help showcase Tuesday. He is using his executive authority to cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other sources, and is moving ahead with stricter fuel-efficiency standards for the heaviest trucks.

And while he routinely brings up climate change in closed-door meetings with world leaders, according to his aides, he also discusses it in his private life, talking about global warming’s implications with his teenage daughters.

“This is really real for him, in terms of what he’s leaving,” said Cecilia Munoz, who directs the White House Domestic Policy Council and has helped coordinate federal investment in climate-resilient infrastructure projects. “This is personal for him.”

It’s a notable transformation for a politician who as a senator talked in grand terms about the need to combat global warming but adopted a much more constrained approach in the run-up to his 2012 reelection. Environmentalists also remain anxious about Obama’s delay in making a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, one of the movement’s signature issues.

Coal and gas industry officials say they are increasingly alarmed by Obama’s focus on climate change, saying administration policies are unrealistic and do not recognize how hydraulic fracturing has transformed the ability to extract oil and gas from the ground.

“They want a complete transformation from the hydrocarbon molecule to the electron, and their refusal to accept reality continues to frustrate me,” said Charles T. Drevna, president of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers. “So my question is, why are we doing this? Is it because he promised to do it when he came into office? Is it because he’s got a large donor out there dangling a lot of money? Is it because he really believes it and is passionate about doing it? Or is it all of the above?”

Read more here.

In 2010/11, near record or record western snowpack lasted well into the summer. They would have been seeing widespread white if he had flown then. Its called weather. Snows improved in March and April in the west. Precipitation in the Sierra is down 38% for the season but is likely to recover with El Nino the next year.

Meanwhile ice on the Great Lakes is setting all-time records for this time of year and globally sea ice is at a new record.

The National Climate Assessment, a 1,300-page report compiled by 300 leading laugh out loud here scientists and experts, is meant to be the definitive account of the effects of climate change on the US. It will be formally released at a White House event and is expected to drive the remaining two years of Barack Obama’s environmental agenda.

The findings are expected to guide Obama as he rolls out the next and most ambitious phase of his climate change plan in June a proposal to cut emissions from the current generation of power plants, America’s largest single source of carbon pollution.

The White House is believed to be organising a number of events over the coming week to give the report greater exposure.

“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” a draft version of the report says. The evidence is visible everywhere from the top of the atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean, it goes on.

“Americans are noticing changes all around them. Summers are longer and hotter, and periods of extreme heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced. Winters are generally shorter and warmer. Rain comes in heavier downpours, though in many regions there are longer dry spells in between.”

The final wording was under review by the White House but the basic gist remained unchanged, scientists who worked on the report said.

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The real story:

Sitting on the world’s greatest supply of gas and oil, we may face shortages because of green energy policies and flawed science

This past winter, bitterly cold weather placed massive stress on the US electrical system and the system almost broke down. It was the coldest winter on record in Chicago and many other midwest cities and the cold has continued into the spring.

Eight of the top ten of all-time winter energy demand peaks occurred in January 2014. Heroic efforts by grid operators saved large parts of the nation’s heartland from blackouts during record-cold temperature days. Nicholas Akins, CEO of American Electric Power, stated in Congressional testimony, “This country did not just dodge a bullet, we dodged a cannon ball.”

Environmental policies established by Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency are moving us toward electrical grid failure. This EPA crusade against global warming continues even though last winter was the coldest US winter since 1911/1912. Winters have cooled in all 9 US climate regions for the last 20 years.

Enlarged

EPA policies are forcing the closure of many coal-fired plants, which provided 39 percent of US electricity last year. American Electric Power, a provider of about ten percent of the electricity to eastern states, will close almost one-quarter of the firm’s coal-fired generating plants in the next fourteen months. Eighty-nine percent of the power scheduled for closure was needed to meet electricity demand in January. Not all of this capacity has replacement plans.

Energy prices exploded this winter. The winter wholesale price of gas increased four-fold over 2011/2012. New England businesses and residents have almost spent as much money on power this winter than they did in all of 2012.

The regional grid operator, ISO-New England, attributes these sharp increases to the combination of ‘low temperatures, high demand for natural gas and limited natural gas pipeline capacity.’ There are 210 natural gas pipelines over 305,000 miles in the nation but limited transmission into the northeast.  The six New England governors are trying to prompt the publicly funded development of new natural gas pipelines. Because natural gas runs so much of New England’s power generation, the price of that fuel is closely tied to the price of electricity. 

ISO said last January, when natural gas prices spiked to all time record levels, power plants that could burn oil were able to run on oil through the ‘Winter Reliability Program’ which stockpiled oil as a reserve emergency supply.

Over the course of the winter, these power plants had burned through most of the 3 million stockpiled barrels.  Some generators, at one point, only had two days’ worth of oil left. 

The oil produced in the United States has increased 38.25% since 2009, but not because the Federal government which recently delayed decision on the Keystone pipeline.
The production in federal lands actually dropped 6.3%. It was a boom on private land that made the difference. Production there, where the Federal government can’t control it, increased 61%. If leases were granted for more drilling on federal land and in the sea, and the Keystone Pipeline was approved, hundreds of thousands of jobs would become available. Very low cost energy would benefit the poor and middle class. We would all have more money to spend, providing a huge boost to the economy.

But the party in power has aligned itself with the more radical environmentalists, whose ideal world is one without fossil fuel, and far fewer people.

So ironically, while we are literally sitting on an abundance of energy, we may see major power outages and shortages and still higher prices for electricity, oil and natural gas.

CANARIES IN THE COAL MINE

The problems have been even more severe elsewhere. In January, every Canadian Province except British Columbia experienced rotating blackouts in record cold.

Though, they got a break this winter, the past 5 years were record setters in Europe and Asia. In a stunning admission by Germany’s Economics Minister and Vice Chancellor to Angela Merkel, Sigmar Gabriel announced that the country’s once highly ballyhooed transformation to renewable energy, the so called Energiewende, a model that has been adopted by a number of countries worldwide, is “on the verge of failure”.

In California ‘mandates’ utilities to use renewable power to combat ‘climate change’; major utilities in the Golden State are now forced to obtain 33% of their power from renewable sources by 2020, which does not include less expensive hydropower from massive dams located in the mountains of Sierra Nevada.

Following suit, presently there are 30 states in the US that have also enacted similar mandates for renewable energy, which demands that states must reply on significantly more costly solar and wind power generation. Because these energy sources depend on Mother Nature to operate, they necessitate the construction of backup power supply, being primarily natural gas fired power generation. This is a concealed aspect to the overall ‘renewable’ green energy movement, that quite frankly they don’t want most people to know. These backup systems can add significant costs to rate payers, because not only is the consuming public paying for expensive renewable generation infrastructure, but they’re also footing the bill for the cost of more dependable fossil fuel based energy producing systems as well.

With last week’s US Supreme Court decision to uphold the cross-state air emissions limitations, right out of the chute there are about 24 coal-fired power generation plants across the nation are planned for decommissioning.  In the relatively near term future, many more coal plants will be opting to retire plants or convert to natural gas. Either way, it’s a costly process, which in the end rate payers will be responsible for. When these new federally mandated regulations begin in 2015, the US Dept of Energy estimates that about 60 gigawatts of capacity, which is equal to the production of 60 nuclear reactors, will be eliminated from the US power grid. This creates far more demand on natural gas fired power generation to make up the difference, all during a time when US gas supplies will be still dealing with recouping from 11 year lows. Not only that, but there is a variable tsunami of new natural gas demand coming on-line over the next several years, stemming from various industries and initiatives, which will only exacerbate the high costs of power for consumers.

When electricity prices skyrocketed last year, 600,000 German users had their power turned off. Germany is rushing the building of 24 coal fired plants and renewing their nuclear program.

In the UK, Prime Minister Cameron announced that he plans the dismantling of the on-shore wind farms and the UK is busy slant drilling for coal in the North Sea and fracking for natural gas.  Spain stopped the subsidization of their wind and solar when prices skyrocketed and industry moved plants overseas, forcing unemployment to increase to 27.5%. 2 real jobs were lost for every ‘green job’ created and only 1 in 10 green jobs were permanent. It was a similar tale in Italy where 3.4 jobs were lost for every green job created.

The Australian government recently released an issues paper finding carbon taxes have contributed to household electricity costs rising 110 per cent in the past five years, hitting the poor the hardest. Lynne Chester of the University of Sydney estimated last year that 20 per cent of households are now energy poor: “Parents are going without food, families are sitting around the kitchen table using one light, putting extra clothes on and sleeping in one room to keep warm, and this is Australia 2013.”

In the US, 70 solar companies benefiting from the Obama’s stimulus have gone bankrupt since 2009. Does the US learn from the failures of the green energy movement in Europe, Canada and Australia and early ones here? No of course not, it instead doubles down.

Friends we are not talking about just inconvenience, cold is a killer.

In Europe, mortality rates jump 18 percent every winter.

“For the last decade, Brits have been dying from the cold at the average rate of 29,000 excess deaths each winter,” British science journalist Matt Ridley wrote in the Spectator.

“Excess winter deaths from cold hit the poor and elderly harder than the rich for the obvious reason: They cannot afford heating.” They have to choose between heating and eating.

That could be our future if you don’t take the threat seriously. Time is running out. Don’t let the administration and environmentalists get away with murder...again.

Conservative columnist George Will says global warming is just another way for liberals to get what liberals want: more government power.

“Global warming is socialism by the back door,” Will told The Daily Caller. “I mean, the whole point of global warming is it is a rationalization for progressives to do what progressives want to do, which is concentrate more and more power in Washington, more and more Washington power in the executive branch, more and more executive branch power in independent czars and agencies, to micromanage the lives of the American people.”

The reason, he explains, that global warming is such a good tool for liberals to give the government so much power is that “everything becomes involved in the exigencies of rescuing the planet.”

Will also said another thing that makes global warming so hard to rebut is that it is essentially a religion.

“It’s a series of propositions that can’t be refuted,” Will explained. “It’s very ironic that the global warming alarmists say that ‘we’re the real defenders of science’ and then adopt the absolute reverse of the scientific attitude, which is openness to evidence - you cannot refute what they say.”

He said it’s no different than the apparent threat of “global cooling” in the 1970s.

“You say to them, ‘What happened to global cooling?’” and they say their “models were wrong.”

“And now we’re supposed to risk several trillions of dollars of global growth and spending on new models that might be wrong?”

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