‘Propaganda,’ a lawmaker says

By Ben Wolfgang

House Republicans charged Wednesday that the Obama administration is aiming to establish a “propaganda office” for Democratic initiatives on global warming through a proposal to consolidate operations in a new “climate service” office within the Commerce Department

Tensions boiled over at a congressional hearing as officials of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) defended the consolidation plan contained in President Obama’s fiscal 2012 budget and denied having any ulterior motive.

NOAA hopes to move more than 50 percent of its resources into the new climate service department, which it says will serve as the central clearinghouse for farmers, local governments, the military and academics seeking information on climate trends.

But a number of GOP lawmakers, who have staunchly opposed the administration’s climate and energy policies in the past, challenged NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco at a hearing of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.

Read the rest at the Washington Times.

Wind Turbine

By Ed Morrissey

When Barack Obama spoke of “necessarily bankrupting” coal-fueled electricity producers, he claimed that the explosion in “green jobs” would replace the workers dislocated by penalizing fossil fuels.  So far, though, there is little evidence of any explosion in green jobs, or even significant job creation at all.  As Politico reports, the Obama administration is having to fall back on “saved and created” language to describe its big investment in the green-collar field:

President Barack Obama heads to an energy plant in North Carolina on Monday to talk once again about the job-creating power of a green economy.

The catch? Nearly three years into Obama’s presidency, the White House can’t point to much solid evidence that significant numbers of Americans are scoring the green jobs the president has been touting.

Monthly Labor Department employment reports say nothing about the new clean energy workforce, while an effort to document how many Americans actually make a living in the “green collar” field may not be done by November 2012.

Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers suggests 225,000 clean energy jobs were either created or preserved through the third quarter of 2010 thanks to more than $80 billion in the economic stimulus package. But those are estimates at best.

At $80 billion, that would mean a cost of $355,555.56 of public subsidy per job created … or “saved.”  At best, as Politico states.

Read the rest at Hot Air.

From The Blaze

Kill a camel, earn cash for cutting greenhouse gases: That offer may be coming soon in Australia, where vast numbers of the nonnative, methane-belching animals have been trampling the Outback for more than a century.

The government has proposed that killing camels be officially registered as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Australia has the world’s largest population of wild camels — an estimated 1.2 million — and considers them to be a growing environmental problem.

Read the rest at The Blaze.

From NIPCC Report

Authors de Jager and Duhau (2009) write that (1) “solar activity is regulated by the solar dynamo,” that (2) “the dynamo is a non-linear interplay between the equatorial and polar magnetic field components,” and that (3) “so far, in sun-climate studies, only the equatorial component has been considered as a possible driver of tropospheric temperature variations.”

In the present study, based on “direct observations of proxy data for the two main solar magnetic field components since 1844,” de Jager and Duhau derived “an empirical relation between tropospheric temperature variation and those of the solar equatorial and polar activities.”

When the two researchers applied the relation they derived to the period 1610-1995, they found a rising linear relationship for temperature vs. time, upon which are superimposed “some quasi-regular episodes of residual temperature increases and decreases, with semi-amplitudes up to ~0.3°C,” and they note that “the present period of global warming is one of them.”

Read the study: Episodes of Relative Global Warming

Read the rest at NIPCC.