By the P/O’d Patriot

I, like many of you, did a few cartwheels when I noticed the headline on Drudge that said:

“Congress Overturns Incandesenct Light Bulb Ban…”

The dreaded “green” light bulb ‘mandate’ that was created in 2007 was dead! I began to proclaim the good news from the highest mountains in the land of Facebook without even reading the article. 

Shame on me for doing so…

I shortly found an article in Forbes that popped my bubble. So did Congress reverse the light bulb ban?  No, No, not really…

Read the rest at Gateway Pundit.

By Madeline Morgenstern

A Canadian campaign to fight global warming is using perhaps the ultimate scare tactic to raise cash for the cause: Santa Claus and his reindeer are going to drown — unless you give money, and fast.

The “Where Will Santa Live” website depicts Kris Kringle and two of his trusty reindeer struggling in the rising waters of the North Pole. Santa’s sleigh is keeping afloat on pontoons, and Rudolph and his buddy each have a pair of water wings to keep them from going under.

“The North Pole, once a wintery wonderland, is no longer safe for Santa’s workshop,” the website states. “Climate change is melting the snow and ice, and the rising water is getting too close for comfort. Santa must relocate — fast — to make sure that all the nice boys and girls still have a Happy Holiday.”

So how to do your part to keep Santa from drowning? The site offers a whole host of supplies for sale to help –  things like a “Dri-Fit Santa Suit” ($49.99), a “Solar Shine Reindeer Beacon” ($29.99), and those “Magic Sleigh Pontoons.”

There’s a catch, though: You (or Santa) won’t actually receive any of the things you buy. They’re “symbolic gifts” that are simply a colorful way of donating to the David Suzuki Foundation, a Canadian environmental activism group. Instead, you’ll get an e-card with a description of your “gift” and “that warm, tingly feeling that comes with knowing you helped keep Canada cold.”

Read the rest at The Blaze.

My six year-old, parroting her teacher, proclaimed, “If we don’t fix Climate Change, we’re all gonna die!” At that moment, I decided to write YOU’VE BEEN GORED, the book that lampoons Al Gore and his hypocritical ‘ALpostles.’

The environment has become the hottest political issue of our time. And when anything is politicized, falsehood flourishes. The volume of lies, disinformation, propaganda, hypocrisy and exaggeration far exceeds the quantity of material pollutants and is more hazardous.

Green has become the convenient, safe, lucrative cause for politicians, corporate weasels, celebrity eco-frauds, power-hungry government agencies and fast-buck swindlers hustling everything from gas-to-water engine conversion plans to carbon offset credits.

There’s a combination gold-rush/Armageddon’s a-comin’ zeitgeist that’s very troubling. It’s like watching the panicked crowd flee from Godzilla. Their mindless fear is more dangerous than the monster.

Statistics of doom are conjured and accepted without vetting. Idiotic “solutions” are clutched in desperation. Most terrifying of all, leaders are anointed and followed without scrutiny.

Read the rest at Big Government.

By Ed Morrissey

Conservatives know well that Mitt Romney has so far refused to back away from his contention that anthropogenic global warming is real, and yet the former Massachusetts governor continues to lead the Republican race for the presidential nomination. In seven debates, none of Romney’s competitors have challenged him on this position. This week, however, the blog Moonbattery found a very interesting memo from Romney’s office in 2005 announcing tough new regulations on emissions  and noting a partnership with a familiar conservative b’te noire in this administration (via Sundries Shack):

Governor Mitt Romney today announced that Massachusetts will take another major step in meeting its commitment to protecting air quality when strict state limitations on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power plants take effect on January 1, 2006. …
Massachusetts is the first and only state to set CO2 emissions limits on power plants. The limits, which target the six largest and oldest power plants in the state, are the toughest in the nation…
In addition to reaffirming existing stringent CO2 limits, the draft regulations announced today, which will be filed next week, contain protections against excessive price increases for businesses and consumers. They allow power generation companies to implement CO2 reductions at their own facilities or fund other reduction projects off-site through a greenhouse gas offset and credits program.

In other words, the Romney administration in 2005 essentially did what Barack Obama’s EPA wants to do now. He imposed CO2 emission caps, “the toughest in the nation,” in an effort to curtail traditional energy production.  Not only did Romney impose these costly new regulations, he then imposed price caps to keep power companies from passing the cost along to the consumer. As we have seen in RomneyCare, regulation and price controls eventually drive businesses into bankruptcy or relocation.

So what has happened to Massachusetts’ electrical production since signing these regulations into law? According to the EIA, whose latest data is for 2009, it dropped 18% in four years, from over 46 billion megawatt hours to 38 billion. International imports, however, went from 697 million megawatt hours in 2006 to 4.177 billion megawatt hours two years later, and to almost 5 billion megawatt hours in 2009, more than twice the amount imported in any of the previous twenty years.

And who advised Romney on these regulations? Why, none other than Obama’s chief science adviser, John Holdren…

Read the rest at Hot Air.

Depopulation of Americas may have cooled climate

By Devin Powell

By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and the other explorers who followed may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate for centuries.The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University.

“We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident with the European arrival,” says Nevle, who described the consequences of this change October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting.

Tying together many different lines of evidence, Nevle estimated how much carbon all those new trees would have consumed. He says it was enough to account for most or all of the sudden drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide recorded in Antarctic ice during the 16th and 17th centuries. This depletion of a key greenhouse gas, in turn, may have kicked off Europe’s so-called Little Ice Age, centuries of cooler temperatures that followed the Middle Ages.

Read the rest at Science News.

Dr. Michael Mann will be at the Minneapolis Convention Center Wednesday to give a short lecture to the American Geological Society’s annual meeting.

Mann is probably best known as the infamous creator of the “hockey stick” graph designed to show a rapid, recent deviation from “normal” global temperatures,

Mann’s other notable contribution to climate science was his so-called “Nature trick,” in which he obfuscated data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures his own flawed tree ring research indicated. Mann had essentially disproved the reliability of his own work, which was the basis for reconstructing the Earth’s past climate record, the very foundation of the theory that the warming period experienced in the 1990s was outside the Earth’s norms.

Mann will address the geologists with a short talk titled, “Climate Scientists in the Public Arena: Who’s Got Our Backs?” at 1:45 PM.

From the synopsis of the talk posted on the AGS website, it appears that Mann will complain about warmists like himself being singled out and lament that scientists of his ilk are “massively out-funded in this battle” (not) over the realities of anthropogenic climate change.

It’s true that Mann has often been the subject of ridicule. In the wake of the “climategate” email scandals, his “Nature trick” of graph-scrubbing received a lot of attention and his hockey stick chart which was the basis for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth has been proven false. Both of these facts have made him a target for satire, prompting him to threaten lawsuits against his detractors in the past. Now it seems, he’s hoping to grab some sympathetic ears among the geologists meeting at the Minneapolis Convention Center on Wednesday.

Perhaps Dr. Mann could use a welcoming committee. If you feel like welcoming one of the inner sanctum of warmist climate scientists to Minneapolis with a hand-made sign of some sort, drop by outside the Convention Center around 1:00 on Wednesday, October 12th. Can’t make it that early in the day? The meeting wraps up at 5:30 – 6:00 PM. You could drop by to bid adieu after work instead.

Update: Two facebook events have been established for a Michael Mann Welcoming Committee.

• See here for the 1:00-2:00 demonstration.
• Minnesotans for Global Warming has set up a facebook event for the 5:00-6:00 demonstration.

[Carbon Credits Kill, Destroy]

More than 20,000 people were expelled from their homes.

By Josh Kron

According to the company’s proposal to join a United Nations clean-air program, the settlers living in this area left in a “peaceful” and “voluntary” manner.People here remember it quite differently.

“I heard people being beaten, so I ran outside,” said Emmanuel Cyicyima, 33. “The houses were being burnt down.”

Other villagers described gun-toting soldiers and an 8-year-old child burning to death when his home was set ablaze by security officers.

“They said if we hesitated they would shoot us,” said William Bakeshisha, adding that he hid in his coffee plantation, watching his house burn down. “Smoke and fire.”

According to a report released by the aid group Oxfam on Wednesday, more than 20,000 people say they were evicted from their homes here in recent years to make way for a tree plantation run by a British forestry company, emblematic of a global scramble for arable land.

“Too many investments have resulted in dispossession, deception, violation of human rights and destruction of livelihoods,” Oxfam said in the report. “This interest in land is not something that will pass.” As population and urbanization soar, it added, “whatever land there is will surely be prized.”

Across Africa, some of the world’s poorest people have been thrown off land to make way for foreign investors, often uprooting local farmers so that food can be grown on a commercial scale and shipped to richer countries overseas.

But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming.

Read the rest at the New York Times.

CFACT’s new game trains online players to help “Pal Gore” control the climate by corking cows and watching them float away, only to realize neither humans nor cows are threatening the planet and Al Gore is the one full of hot air!

From CFACT

“Put a cork in it, Al!”

That’s the message students are sending Al Gore, radical climate campaigners and assorted other bohemians, grant-seekers and profiteers cashing in on the global warming craze.

Al Gore is calling on folks to make September 14th a day of climate action through a series of propaganda videos he will be broadcasting worldwide. CFACT calls for a day of genuine “climate realism” instead. CFACT Collegians are spreading the word with a bit of online levity.

CFACT’s Methane Madness game trains online players to help “Pal Gore” control the climate by corking cows and watching them float away. Methane is more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas but less than 1% of atmospheric greenhouse gases come from cattle. Even so, radical climate campaigners call for shutting down our cattle and dairy industries along with much of the rest our economy. They’d like us to go vegan.

Read the rest at CFACT.

Play Methane Madness!

Fox News Story

We’ve all heard of the ravaged rain forests and the plight of the polar bear. But as far as reasons for saving the planet go, the one offered by scientists Thursday is truly out of this world.

A team of American researchers have produced a range of scenarios in which aliens could attack the earth, and curiously, one revolves around climate change.

They speculate that extraterrestrial environmentalists could be so appalled by our planet-polluting ways that they view us as a threat to the intergalactic ecosystem and decide to destroy us.

Read the rest at Fox News.

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.

By Dr. Tim Ball

Traditionally, the older scientists held to the prevailing wisdom and were challenged by the new, skeptical graduates looking for wider answers. In climatology, the opposite has happened. The so-called skeptics challenging the prevailing wisdom are the professors who have researched and taught the subject for 30 years or longer. Their knowledge is much wider than that of the new young scientists because climate science has stagnated for thirty years. All the funding was directed to only one side of climate science, and that was the side promoted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and accepted as the ‘official science’ by governments.

It’s now frightening how little climate science is known by both sides of the debate on human causation of global warming. I wrote this sentence before I saw a paper from Michigan State University that found,

Most college students in the United States do not grasp the scientific basis of the carbon cycle – an essential skill in understanding the causes and consequences of climate change.

The professor says students need to know because they must deal with the buildup of CO2 causing climate change. This discloses his ignorance about the science of the carbon cycle and the role of CO2 in climate. It’s not surprising, and caused by three major factors:

1. a function of the emotional, irrational, religious approach to environmentalism;
2. the takeover of climate science for a political agenda; and
3. funding directed to prove the political, rather than the scientific, agenda.

The dogmatism of politics and religion combined to suppress openness of ideas and the advance of knowledge critical to science.

Read the Rest at Dr. Ball’s “A Different Perspective.”

Energy efficiency standards to expand scope of product confiscation

Washinton Times Editorial

Ice makers are the latest target in the left’s ongoing war against the conveniences of modern life. Earlier this month, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) issued a report that may condemn this essential household item to the contraband list that already includes functional light bulbs, toilets, washing machines and showerheads.

Those looking for an easy way to cool down their drinks with ice cubes are guilty of increasing their refrigerator’s energy consumption by about 12 to 20 percent. That’s unacceptable to global-warming alarmists at the Department of Energy (DOE) who are hard at work finalizing regulatory standards for the fridge. The proposed changes will increase prices by an estimated $2 billion per year, but DOE justifies this added expense by claiming consumers would save $37 in electricity costs over the lifetime of a typical side-by-side.

Read the rest at the Washington Times.

The last we saw such an economy was in the 13th Century

By Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren

“Green” energy such as wind, solar and biomass presently constitute only 3.6% of fuel used to generate electricity in the U.S. But if another “I Have a Dream” speech were given at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, it would undoubtedly urge us on to a promised land where renewable energy completely replaced fossil fuels and nuclear power.How much will this particular dream cost? Energy expert Vaclav Smil calculates that achieving that goal in a decade–former Vice President Al Gore’s proposal–would incur building costs and write-downs on the order of $4 trillion. Taking a bit more time to reach this promised land would help reduce that price tag a bit, but simply building the requisite generators would cost $2.5 trillion alone.

Let’s assume, however, that we could afford that. Have we ever seen such a “green economy”? Yes we have; in the 13th century.

Renewable energy is quite literally the energy of yesterday. Few seem to realize that we abandoned “green” energy centuries ago for five very good reasons.

Read the rest at Forbes.