Skeptic Terminator or Chicken?

By Noel Sheppard

Multi-millionaire filmmaker James Cameron on Sunday backed out of a global warming debate that he asked for and organized.

For those that haven’t been following the recent goings on concerning Nobel Laureate Al Gore’s favorite money-making myth, an environmental summit was held this weekend in Aspen, Colorado, called AREDAY, which is short for American Renewable Energy Day.

Ahead of this conference, Cameron challenged three noted global warming skeptics to a public debate where he was going to personally “call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads.”

One of the invited skeptics, Ann McElhinney of NotEvilJustWrong.com, wrote about Cameron’s surprise cancellation Sunday…

Read the rest at Newsbusters.

By Dennis T. Avery

James Hansen of NASA, an ardent believer in man-made warming, announced recently that “The 12-month running mean global temperature in the Goddard Space Institute analysis has reached a new record in 2010 . . . NASA, June 3, 2010. The main factor is our estimated temperature change for the Arctic region.” The GISS figures show that recent temperatures in the Arctic have been up to four degrees C warmer than the long-term mean.Should we be alarmed? Probably not very.

My esteemed colleague Art Horn, at the Energy Tribune blog, has blown the whistle on Hansen and GISS. He points out that GISS has no thermometers in the Arctic! It has hardly thermometers that are even near the Arctic Circle. GISS estimates its arctic temperatures from land-based thermometers that supposedly each represent the temperatures over 1200 square kilometers. That’s a pretty heroic assumption.

Read the rest at Exit Stage Right.

By Marc Oestreich

Former Vice President Al Gore spent the last decade as a larger-than-life figure, more of a symbol than a living, breathing human being. Stolen from the pages of a Danielle Steele novel and plopped on stage at the 2000 Democratic Convention, this normally lifeless personality was possessed by the ghost of Madmen’s Jon Hamm and political pop-culture history was made. Al and Tipper’s kiss marked the dawn of Gore’s personal stardom and his pet project: anthropogenic global warming (AGW) alarmism.

Since his mind-numbing PowerPoint presentation An Inconvenient Truth hit theaters, Gore has been married to the AGW cause. And just as Al’s and Tipper’s kiss represented the dawn of the most successful movement in pseudoscience, their divorce aptly marks its end.

A stark trend toward accepting empirical science instead of speculation has caused the ground beneath AGW to cave in quickly. Like the news of the Gore divorce, the scientific evidence hit the public as if from nowhere. But both these cases are results of major, longstanding problems instead of a single cataclysmic event.

For AGW alarmism, what were once dismissed as minor discrepancies are being exposed as major contradictions of the scientific facts.

At first, AGW was a smooth talker. Graphs, models, charts, PowerPoints, and Hollywood movies all worked to persuade. As questions began to arise, however, patronizing and talking down turned small spats into explosive arguments. The Michael Mann “hockey stick” diagram was exposed as being based on a trick that would make any trend look like a spike. Gore’s new mansion was built in an area he had predicted would be underwater in the near future. The Climategate scandal showed us AGW was hiding the facts. Stories weren’t adding up.

Read the rest at Heartland Institute.

Senator Lisa Murkowski (R - Alaska)

By Phil Kerpen

President Obama has been very made clear that his top domestic priorities are health care and global warming. We all know what happened on health care. Now the date is set for the key Senate showdown on global warming: June 10. That’s when the Senate will vote on a resolution introduced by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski (S.J. Res. 26) that would overturn the EPA’s global warming regulations. It’s not subject to filibuster. There is no place for weak-kneed senators to hide. In just two weeks we’ll know where every member of the Senate stands.As I’ve previously discussed here in the Fox Forum and documented on www.ObamaChart.com, the Obama administration is not waiting for Congress to enact a national cap-and-trade program to move ahead with its global warming agenda.

Under the watchful eye of White House Climate czar Carol Browner (who originally developed the legal theory of using the 1970 Clean Air Act as a global warming law, bypassing Congress) the EPA is moving forward on a staggering regulatory power grab that includes about 18,000 pages of appendices and will eventually regulate nearly every aspect of the U.S. economy.

Read the rest of this editorial at Fox News.

By Sindya Bhanoo

To meet the Obama administration’s targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, some researchers say, Americans may have to experience a sobering reality: gas at $7 a gallon.

To reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the transportation sector 14 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, the cost of driving would simply have to increase, according to a report released Thursday by researchers at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The research also appears in the March edition of the journal Energy Policy.

The 14 percent target was set in the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget for fiscal 2010.

In their study, the researchers devised several combinations of steps that United States policymakers might take in trying to address the heat-trapping emissions by the nation’s transportation sector, which consumes 70 percent of the oil used in the United States.

Most of their models assumed an economy-wide carbon dioxide tax starting at $30 a ton in 2010 and escalating to $60 a ton in 2030. In some cases researchers also factored in tax credits for electric and hybrid vehicles, taxes on fuel or both.

In the modeling, it turned out that issuing tax credits could backfire, while taxes on fuel proved beneficial.

“Tax credits don’t address how much people use their cars,” said Ross Morrow, one of the report’s authors. “In reverse, they can make people drive more.”

Read the rest of this revealing piece at the New York Times’ DotEarth Blog.

Editor’s note: It seems it’s not really about carbon dioxide or fossil fuel. It’s about making the unwashed masses drive less – even if it’s an electric car. Elitists to peasants: “Get in the trains and stay out of my way!”

By Dr. Richard Lindzen

In November last year a file appeared on the internet containing thousands of emails and other documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. How this file got into the public domain is still uncertain, but the emails, whose authenticity is no longer in question, provided a startling view into the world of climate research.

In what has become known as Climategate, one could see unambiguous evidence of the unethical suppression of information and opposing viewpoints, and even data manipulation.

Moreover, the emails showed collusion with other prominent researchers in the US and elsewhere. The CRU supplies many of the authors for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

One might have thought the revelations would discredit the science underlying proposed global warming policy. Indeed, the revelations may have played some role in the failure of last December’s Copenhagen climate conference to agree on new carbon emissions limits.

But with the political momentum behind policy proposals and billions in research funding at stake, the effect of the emails appears to have been small.

The general approach of the scientific community (at least in the US and Britain) has been to see whether people will bother to look at the files in detail (they mostly have not) and to wait until time diffuses the initial impressions to reassert the original message of a climate catastrophe that must be fought with widespread carbon control. This reassertion, however, continues to be suffused by illogic, nastiness and outright dishonesty.

There were, of course, the inevitable investigations of individuals such as Penn State University’s Michael Mann (who manipulated data to create the famous “hockey stick” climate graph) and Phil Jones (director of the CRU).

The investigations were brief, lacked depth and were conducted mainly by individuals already publicly committed to the popular view of climate alarm. The results were whitewashes that are incredible given the data.

Read the rest of this article at The Australian.

By Paul Chesser

Last fall I alerted Spectator readers to the start-up nonprofit Alliance for Climate Education, which spreads the global warming alarmism gospel to students one school assembly at a time.

It turns out that the slick ACE lecturers are more than just preachers; they are recruiters too. After they dazzle teens with hip talk, animation and jokes, they work to sign them up for their anti-consumption (Americans are to blame) cause, often collecting cell phone numbers and email addresses without parents’ knowledge.

Earlier this month ACE visited Northampton (Mass.) High School, where a teacher persuaded colleagues to let students skip final period classes in order to attend their assembly. One student reported on the presentation by ACE’s Julian Rodriguez-Drix:

He dealt with issues of climate change in a positive and non-judgmental way by raising students’ awareness of the problem at hand and the methods by which they are actively polluting and contributing to global warming. The presentation explained how climate change has been caused and continued by social influence and our culture of consumption. Students learned how their seemingly minimal consumption is connected to huge companies, large usage of fossil fuels, and incredible amounts of waste. Julian clearly summarized his message in his statement, “We’re all wrapped up in [an] economic cycle that just leads to garbage.” He also discussed “super-sized” American living, excessive use of non-renewable resources, and the results of pollution in an urgent, but humorous, manner.

It all makes for one entertaining guilt trip — for students to lay on others. The Left is so clever in not offending their recruits: “It’s not your ‘minimal consumption’ that’s causing the problem — it’s those large corporations and fat Americans that are the problem!” And then they continue living their own privileged lives.

Of course, they pretend otherwise. ACE trainers like Rodriguez-Drix belch greenhouse gases driving across several state lines to give their talks, when a simple Webcast would deliver the message and serve as a good example of energy efficiency. But when asked how he would “Do One Thing” (an ACE campaign) to fight climate change, he came up with the innovative idea to turn off his lights (video). Wish I’d thought of that one.

Read the rest of this story at the American Spectator.

We need a more authoritative world. We’ve become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say. It’s all very well, but there are certain circumstances – a war is a typical example – where you can’t do that. You’ve got to have a few people with authority who you trust who are running it. And they should be very accountable too, of course.

But it can’t happen in a modern democracy. This is one of the problems. What’s the alternative to democracy? There isn’t one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.

By Leo Hickman

When I recently interviewed James Lovelock for the G2 section of the Guardian, we spoke for nearly two hours about the various events of the past few months – a period in which he’d remained silent because he’d been over-wintering with his wife Sandy in her native Missouri. There was a lot to talk about: the stolen emails from the University of East Anglia, the UN climate summit in Copenhagen, the intense scrutiny placed on the IPCC, and the rather nippy winter experienced across much of the Northern Hemisphere. As is inevitable with an interview appearing in the newspaper, space was at a premium so the quotes used were tightly edited. But, just as I did with my interview with Al Gore last year, I have decided to publish a transcript of his key points here online for anyone interested in hearing in much more detail what Lovelock had to say on some of these controversial and much-discussed topics. 

Lovelock’s reaction to first reading about the stolen CRU emails [he later clarified that he hadn't read the originals, saying: "Oddly, I felt reluctant to pry"]: 

I was utterly disgusted. My second thought was that it was inevitable. It was bound to happen. Science, not so very long ago, pre-1960s, was largely vocational. Back when I was young, I didn’t want to do anything else other than be a scientist. They’re not like that nowadays. They don’t give a damn. They go to these massive, mass-produced universities and churn them out. They say: “Science is a good career. You can get a job for life doing government work.” That’s no way to do science.

I have seen this happen before, of course. We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science in that was so bad that something like 80% of the measurements being made during that time were either faked, or incompetently done.

Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I’m not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It’s the one thing you do not ever do. You’ve got to have standards.

You can make mistakes; they’re helpful. In the old days, it was perfectly OK to make a mistake and say so. You often learned from it. Nowadays if you’re dependent on a grant – and 99% of them are – you can’t make mistakes as you won’t get another one if you do. It’s an awful moral climate and it was all set up for the best of reasons. I think it was felt there was far too much inequality in science and there was an enormous redress. Looking around the country [at the wider society] this was good on the whole, but in some special professions you want the best, the elite. Elitism is important in science. It is vital.

Read the rest at the London Guardian.

By Jenna Greene

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation Thursday finalized the first-ever national greenhouse gas emission levels for cars and light trucks, a move that is likely to bring a gust of new lawsuits.

The main target may not be the rule itself, which came after painstaking negotiations with the auto industry, but what it portends.

“It will trigger other requirements under the Clean Air Act that other companies outside the auto industry don’t like,” said Columbia Law School professor Michael Gerrard, director of the school’s Center for Climate Change Law. “The Chamber of Commerce and other industry associations have been trying to fight this in every possible venue.”

The rules announced today establish increasingly strict fuel economy standards and greenhouse gas emission standards for 2012 to 2016 model year vehicles. By 2016, new cars and trucks will average 35.5 miles per gallon. Carbon dioxide emissions will be reduced by about 960 million metric tons over the lifetime of the vehicles regulated.

“The standards themselves are noncontroversial, and EPA has done a strong job building consensus with other states, the auto industry, and environmental groups on those standards. Thus, it is unlikely industry would seek to challenge those standards themselves,” said Roger Martella Jr., a partner in Sidley Austin‘s environmental practice group and former general counsel of the EPA, in an email. “The determining factor likely will be how EPA decides an upcoming rule, called the PSD tailoring rule, to mitigate the impacts on stationary sources.”

Stationary sources of air pollution include facilities like factories and power plants.

Read the rest of this story at Law.com

By Richard of EUReferendum

It’s been a heady few months for climate sceptics – or “deniers” as the opposition loves to call us. Starting with “climategate”, through a progression of “gates” with much else in between – including the apparent collapse at Copenhagen – it seemed as if we had the warmists on the run.Certainly, we’ve scored some hits and, aided and abetted by Mother Nature who has been generous in her deliveries of global warming this winter, we have seen a turnaround in public opinion, with a distinct loss of enthusiasm for the surfeit of alarmism on offer.

The successes have led to a certain amount of triumphalism amongst the sceptics, with a feeling in certain quarters that we are winning the game. But any such sentiment is, to say the very least, premature. In fact, a more realistic appraisal might suggest that we have not even dented the underlying agenda.

Herein lies a certain definitional problem, as we have certainly dented the confidence of many so-called climate “scientists”, worried some of the hangers-on and made serious inroads into the intellectual argument, challenging the science.

But as to the “agenda”, this has nothing to do with science or even climate change. The climate change scare is merely a front used to conceal on the one hand and, on the other, to legitimise a far more sinister movement which has at its root politics, power and money. And its agenda might have suffered a few setbacks and some delays, but it is essentially intact.

Read the rest of this piece at EUReferendum.

Michael Mann

R.I.P. Global Warming 1992-2010

By Dr. Goldstein

2010 will be remembered as the year Global Warming died.  Global Warming was Mann made using clever computer ‘tricks’ and ‘massaged’ data. After slowly developing in the womb of junk science for several years, the primary birth announcement and christening occurred when Al Gore published Earth in the Balance in 1992.  Gore, the self proclaimed genius who had “created the internet” , eagerly adopted Global Warming and put his new baby in the public spotlight.

 Global Warming was a very good earner who attracteded billions of investor’s dollars to Gore’s for-profit corporation called Generation Investment Management.  From day one Global Warming was all about making money. His detractors dared to call him a fraudster and a control freak who wanted to tell everyone how to live.

Gore’s book was really quite boring and it failed to get Global Warming the attention (and money) Gore felt his baby deserved, so Gore followed up with An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. The movie will go down in history as an excellent example of what happens when one person, with a hidden financial agenda, tells one side of a story.

Despite it’s success, the wildly popular movie was the beginning of the end for Global Warming. It triggered a quick and lethal downward spiral. The movie galvanized scientists who recognized a bogus pseuo-scientific scam when they saw one. Powerful opposition groups formed around the world. Books were written by scholars that destroyed the credibility of Al Gore’s pride and joy.

Global Warming was a cash cow, and his opposition had no money, but the opposition (“skeptics”) had something more powerful than money: The Truth.

Read the rest of this piece at TPM.

By Gerald Warner

It is becoming difficult to keep pace with the speed at which the global warming scam is now unravelling. The latest reversal of scientific “consensus” is on livestock and the meat trade as a major cause of global warming – one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to eco-vegetarian cranks. Now a scientific report delivered to the American Chemical Society says it is nonsense. The Washington Times has called it “Cowgate”.

The cow-burp hysteria reached a crescendo in 2006 when a United Nations report ominously entitled “Livestock’s Long Shadow” claimed: “The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalents). This is a higher share than transport.” This led to demands in America for a “cow tax” and a campaign in Europe at the time of the Copenhagen car crash last December called Less Meat=Less Heat.

Now a report to the American Chemical Society by Frank Mitloehner, an air quality expert at the University of California at Davis, has denounced such scare-mongering as “scientifically inaccurate”. He reveals that the UN report lumped together digestive emissions from livestock, gases produced by growing animal feed and meat and milk processing, to get the highest possible result, whereas the traffic comparison only covered fossil fuel emissions from cars. The true ratio, he concludes, is just 3 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in America are attributable to rearing of cattle and pigs, compared with 26 per cent from transport.

Mitloehner also makes the deadly serious point: “Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries.” Precisely. The demonising of cows and pigs is just another example of global warmists’ callous indifference to starvation in the developing world, as in the case of the unbelievably immoral and reckless drive for biofuels – pouring Third World resources for subsistence into Western liberals’ fuel tanks – and, notoriously, carbon trading.

Week by week the AGW collapse intensifies. Himalayan glaciers, polar bears, Arctic ice, Amazon rainforests, all discredited. Now it turns out the great cow-burp scare is bovine excrement too. The global warming scam is, to the majority of people, an object of derision. The scientific community has also at last wakened up. They are smelling the coffee in more and more institutions these days.

Read the rest of this article at the London Telegraph.

Rajendra Pachauri, the Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will defend his handling of a crisis that has shaken the world’s faith in his organisation at a meeting of environmental leaders in Bali.

By Geoffrey Lean

He will try to save his job and shore up support for the IPCC in the wake of the discovery of errors in its latest report.

He is attending a special closed meeting of environment and climate ministers in the fringes of the annual assembly of the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Governing Council, the biggest such event since Copenhagen climate summit that ended in confusion and recriminations last December.

The governments are publicly backing Dr Pachauri, who they re-elected unopposed less than 18 months ago – the EU said last night that he had “done a good job, in general” and “deserves full confidence”.  However privately, officials have expressed a wish that he will decide to step down before long.

The IPCC was engulfed in crisis when it emerged that it had relied on unsubstantiated reports from environmental groups to make a headline-grabbing prediction that the glaciers of the Himalayas would disappear by 2035.

Dr Pachauri’s robust response to counterclaims that that the glaciers were not melting so rapidly – which he dismissed as “voodoo science” – only increased pressure on his position.

Read the rest of this article at the Telegraph.

Texas suit one of several to challenge EPA

By Ed Stoddard

Texas and several national industry groups on Tuesday filed separate petitions in federal court challenging the government’s authority to regulate U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Texas, which leads U.S. states in carbon dioxide emissions due to its heavy concentration of oil refining and other industries, will see a major impact if U.S. mandatory emissions reductions take effect.

In December, the Environmental Protection Agency ruled that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide endanger human health, opening the door for the agency to issue mandatory regulations to reduce them.

Texas said it had filed a petition for review challenging the EPA’s “endangerment finding” with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Texas has also asked the EPA to reconsider its ruling.

“The EPA’s misguided plan paints a big target on the backs of Texas agriculture and energy producers and the hundreds of thousands of Texans they employ,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry said.

The National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, and the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association also said on Tuesday they filed a petition challenging the EPA in federal appeals court.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and U.S. iron and steel makers have also signaled they would file lawsuits.

Read the rest or this story at Reuters.

I was a guest on the Michele Tafoya Show on Twin Cites News Talk station, WCCO 830 AM on Tuesday to discuss global warming and our website, GlobalClimateScam.com.

Michele wanted to get both sides of the global warming debate represented in the discussion, so her first guest was Jay Drake-Hamilton, science policy director for Fresh Energy. She advocated for federal dollars to weatherize homes and buildings and renewable energy sources, while arguing that global warming is going to cause increasingly extreme weather events like the snowstorms on the east coast.

I countered that the global warming theory is unraveling before our eyes, citing climategate, Phil Jones’ recent admissions of missing data, lack of warming and unreliable tree ring data to back my case.

Click here to listen to the podcast.