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ith more than 30 percent of Argentina’s total greenhouse gas emissions coming out the rear end of cows, here’s an Argentine global warming solution that’s as serious as any other.

It’s a real picture of a real global warming research project headed by Guillermo Berra, a researcher at Argentina’s National Institute of Agricultural Technology. He found that if cow’s diets are switched to alfalfa and clover from grain, bovine GHG emissions (known by the technical term “farts”) can be cut by 25 percent.

Oh yeah, sure … I’m not jumping up quite yet to become a bigtime anti-grain activist ‘cuz I bet Berra’s just another of the thousands of so-called “scientists” who are really nothing more than brains for hire who have sold out to the all-powerful alfalfa/clover lobby.

(source)

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MSM Still Blowing Off Edwards Love Child Story

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just ran a Nexis search of newspapers and newswires over the last week for “John AND Edwards AND Enquirer” and it’s obvious that the MSM are not the least bit interested in reporting on John Edwards’ affair while his wife fights cancer.

Here’s the Nexis tally for Edwards: Six stories total, appearing in the Miami Herald, SF Wrongicle, Boston Herald, The Columbian in Wash. state, the Kansas City Star and the Philly Daily News. No major papers at all, no newswires. This after the story has now been verified by Fox News.

Meanwhile, the foreign press is doing the job journalists are supposed to do. Here’s the stodgy London Sunday Times:

Sleaze scuppers Democrat golden boy

Gotcha: Senator John Edwards, whose wife has cancer, has been caught in a sex scandal that ends his vice-presidential hopes

SCRATCH John Edwards off the list of potential vice-presidential candidates. The former White House contender, who had been hoping to get the nod from Barack Obama, is in the midst of a full-blown sex scandal.

Every supermarket shopper knows that the preternaturally youthful former senator for North Carolina may have fathered a love child with a film-maker while Elizabeth, his saintly wife, is dying of cancer. There are sensational new details on the National Enquirer website, although most of the media have done their best to ignore them.

The tabloid magazine cornered Edwards, 55, leaving a Los Angeles hotel where Rielle Hunter, his alleged mistress, and her baby were staying, at 2.40am last Tuesday. He ran down a hallway and dived into the men’s bathroom. A hotel security guard confirmed the encounter. “His face just went totally white,” the guard said.

The story has been bubbling away for months, but so far there has been not a word about it in the mainstream newspapers, even though Edwards was John Kerry’s running mate in 2004 and has been tipped for a prominent job in an Obama administration – if not vice-president, then attorney-general or antipoverty tsar. (Read more here)

See, it’s not that hard to report this story … if you’re not an American newspaper in the pocket of the DNC.
Continue Reading »

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ake an environmental group (please!) … any environmental group … and ask what it thinks about global warming. Here’s what the Center for Biological Depravity Diversity has to say about it:

The Earth is heating up, and the overwhelming scientific consensus is that human activity is at the heart of the matter. Fossil fuel combustion — which drives most cars and power plants — is producing a critical mass of greenhouse gases that has already shifted the planet’s climate system into new and dangerous territory.

The Center has built an aggressive and highly successful litigation and lobbying campaign to address global warming. First and foremost, we take direct legal action to protect species and places across the globe that are in the vanguard of climate-change extinction.

Well, that’s sure nice. Here in California, the Center is using the unproven excuse of global warming to file lawsuits that have succeeded in stopping development and water supply projects. But the Center’s global warming initiatives, like all Greenie initiatives, are smashing headlong into their forest initiatives, leaving them stuck in a serious policy conundrum.

Here’s the Center’s statement on its forest initiatives:

Ancient forests are the lungs of the planet, absorbing vast amounts of carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen for life. They’re also our richest repository of biodiversity, home to more than half of all known species worldwide.

But these forests are disappearing fast. Logging, mining, livestock grazing, recreation, urbanization, and other threats have destroyed 80 percent of the world’s ancient forests in the past few centuries. Deforestation is now the number-one cause of species extinction. And in the United States, ancient forests on public lands continue to be liquidated by timber corporations.

To save our country’s most species-rich habitat, the Center seeks to protect and restore forest ecosystems throughout the Southwest, southern California, the Pacific Northwest, the Northeast, and southeastern Alaska. We bring a potent combination of litigation, policy advocacy, and collaboration to protect forest-dependent species, challenge misguided logging proposals, and restore forests degraded by a century of mismanagement.

To “save the forests” the Center routinely sues the U.S. Forest Service challenging any program to actively manage forests through thinning to reduce fire risks. By its own accounting, the Center wins 50 percent of the appeals and 40 percent of the lawsuits against these projects, for a total success rate of 70 percent.

The result is pretty simple to see: Forest fires have become more intense. Greenies blame this on global warming, but they really have their litigation to blame – and now it’s become obvious that their lawsuits have led to massive spikes in greenhouse gas emissions. Thomas Bonnicksen, PhD, has just completed a study for The Forest Foundation that evaluated the emissions from four California wildfires. It has the snappy name, Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Four California Wildfires: Opportunities to Prevent and Prevers Environmental and Climate Impacts.

The study uses a “forest carbon and emissions model” to study the supposed climate impact of four fires that together burned 144,825 acres of forestland. Litigation against forest thinning made the average tree density in these forests 350 trees per acre, while Bonnicksen says 50 to 60 trees per acre better represents a forest in its natural state. This greater density lead to bigger, hotter fires, and more greenhouse gases.

Consequently, when the massive amounts of fuel in these forests burned, they released an estimated 9.5 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere just from combustion. That is an average of about 63 tons per acre. However, combustion is only part of the story because dead trees also gradually release CO2 as they decay. CO2 emissions from decay are generally three times greater than emissions from combustion because large quantities of wood and other plant material remain unburned after a forest fire.

Combining combustion and decay emissions, FCEM estimates that these four fires will emit a staggering 38 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The fires released one fourth of the gases during combustion, and post-fire decay will release the remainder during the next 100 years, most of it during the next 50 years.

To put these emissions from combustion and decay into perspective, they are equivalent to adding an estimated 7 million more cars onto California’s highways for one year, each spewing tons of greenhouse gases out the tailpipe. Stated another way, this means 50 percent of all cars in California would have to be locked in a garage for one year to make up for the global warming impact of these four wildfires.

Yet Greenie groups with forest programs continue to litigate to stop any thinning program that would reduce these massive carbon impacts. They can’t help themselves. Cutting trees is no different – worse, actually – than cutting down people in their theology, so they continue to fight thinning programs even while they fret about global warming.

On the other hand, they’re good at raising money for both programs, so they get to stuff their coffers full of contributions from their easily manipulated members.

hat-tip: Jim

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bama’s Berlin speech provided so much grist for the blogmill that I never got around to covering the global warming hysteria lines that set my jaw grinding. You remember them, don’t you?

As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.

“Kansas to Kenya” – how nice … alliterating The One’s mystical roots. But this global warming clap-trap is of course mythical, not just mystical. There’s no truth to be found in Obama’s Warmie pontifications, and we can thank TigerHawk for disposing of the methane-producing pile of crap.

“As we speak”? You have to love the royal “we.”

In any case, as we write, Barack Obama is just wrong.

Tigerhawk notes that sea levels have not been rising lately … in fact, they’ve been dropping over the last few years. Here’s the chart he provides as proof:

Note the clearly visible downturn at the top of the line. By the way, since the oceans started rising at the end of the last ice age, they’ve swelled by well over 100 feet, so these eensy fractions of inches we’re measuring are real yawners.

Turning to Obama’s Kansas to Kenya kvetching, TigerHawk says:

What about drought to farms in Kansas “as we speak”? Again, not so much. With the exception of one “moderately dry” area in the southwest, this year (at least) Kansas has been normal to “exceptionally moist,” depending on the part of the state you are talking about.

And again, he provides some colorful proof:

TigerHawk didn’t provide data on Kenya, but in about two seconds I found this:

TANA, 17 June 2008 (IRIN) – Thousands of people have been displaced in the Tana Delta District on the Kenyan coast following heavy rain over the past few days, according to a senior official with the provincial administration.

“The floods have also submerged crops and the situation could get worse if the River Tana bursts its banks,” District Commissioner Charles Monari said on 16 June.

At least 2,000 families have been forced to abandon their homes and farms for higher ground to avoid being marooned by the flood waters, Monari said.

Yeah, yeah.  Just change “global warming” to “climate change” and we’ve got both drought and flood covered.

You get the point. All this stuff can be fact-checked in a matter of moments if anyone’s interested. Apparently no one at the sold out for Obama, drank the global warming Kool Aid media appears to be interested in mere facts.

hat-tip: Greenie Watch

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t’s official! Real scientists – not those global warming skeptic scientists – have studied the impact of climate change on eight states and, boy, are they bally-hooing the results that they’ve released today. The real scientists say in their news release:

Climate change will carry a price tag of billions of dollars for a number of U.S. states, says a new series of reports from the University of Maryland’s Center for Integrative Environmental Research (CIER). The researchers conclude that the costs have already begun to accrue and are likely to endure.

Combining existing data with new analysis, the eight studies project the long term economic impact of climate change on Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey and Ohio. Studies on additional states are in the works.

“We don’t have a crystal ball and can’t predict specific bottom lines, but the trend is very clear for these eight states and the nation as a whole: climate change will cost billions in the long run and the bottom line will be red,” says Matthias Ruth, who coordinated the research and directs the Center for Integrative Environmental Research at the University of Maryland. “Inaction or delayed action will make the ink run redder.”

And here’s what they’ve got on their eight states:

• Colorado: More than $1 billion in losses due to impacts on tourism, forestry, water resources and human health from a predicted drier, warmer climate.

• Georgia: Multi-million dollar losses from predicted higher seas along Georgia’s coast.

• Kansas: Losses exceeding $1 billion from impact on agriculture of predicted warmer temperatures and reduced water supply in much of the state.

• Illinois: Billions of dollars in losses from impact on shipping, trade and water resources. Warmer temperatures and lower water levels predicted for much of the state.

• Michigan: Billions of dollars in losses from damage to the state’s shipping and water resources. Warmer temperatures and lower water levels predicted for much of the state.

• Nevada: Billions of dollars in losses from a much drier climate and pressure on scarce water resources. Water limitations could affect tourism, real estate, development and human health. Many western states may confront similar challenges.

• New Jersey: Billions of dollars in losses from higher sea levels and the impact on tourism, transportation, real estate and human health.

• Ohio: Billions of dollars in losses from warmer temperatures and lower water levels and the resulting impact on shipping and water supplies.

Two points: Continue Reading »

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ASA’s James Hansen is the premier “rocket scientist” (he’s not one, really) jacking up the hysteria on global warming. But not all rocket scientists agree. Check this out:

I DEVOTED six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

That’s David Evans, the guy who pretty much wrote the book on global warming for Australia, writing in The Australian last week. He’s reached a very different conclusion than Hansen & the Hysterics:

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

He then lays out and explains what we do know about global warming as “the most basic salient facts:”

1. Scientists have looked everywhere and they can’t find a greenhouse gas signature. Without it, the greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming.
2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None.
3. The satellites that measure the world’s temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980).
4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. (In other words, the hysterics are wrong on the whole chicken or egg thing.)

All this is common knowledge and the Warmies can’t refute them, although Evans acknowledges that Warmies will argue that the most basic salient facts aren’t particularly relevant. If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.

The new ice core data was known by 2003, but Al Gore produced An Inconvenient Truth in 2005 based on earlier ice core data that had become as defunct as a coal-fired computer. And for that he got a Nobel Peace Prize.

Evans puts the Warmie research price tag thus far at $50 billion, “and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming.” And what happens if we never do?

Hopefully the people who fathered this mess – Dems here, Socialist/Labor in Europe and Australia, and Greenies everywhere – will be rejected, shunned, tossed aside, ridiculed and maybe even tarred and feathered in a great show of petrol-symbolism.

Or they’ll just move on to their next great sham and continue getting away with it.

Hat-tip: Jim

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Not content with their victory in convincing duping the Bush Admin into listing the polar bear as an endangered species – despite its swelling populations – the Center for Biological Depravity Diversity has already filed another polar bear lawsuit.

WASHINGTON — Conservation groups are threatening to file a lawsuit against the Bush administration for failing to take steps to better protect the polar bear from the effects of offshore oil and gas development in the Arctic.

The Center for Biological Diversity and Pacific Environment notified Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne on Monday of their intention to sue regarding the department’s decision to hold oil and gas lease sales in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas without considering the impact on polar bear habitat. (source)

As I wrote at the time, the listing included a Special Rule that set guidelines detailing the rules oil companies would have to follow if they wished to continue exploration and drilling in polar bear habitat:

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne tried to mute the impact of his listing today of the polar bear by assuring us in his comments that he’s covered our fears of economic meltdown by preparing an administrative guidance:

“I am also announcing that this listing decision will be accompanied by administrative guidance and a rule that defines the scope of impact my decision will have, in order to protect the polar bear while limiting the unintended harm to the society and economy of the United States.” …

[Fish & Wildlife Service] Director [Dale] Hall will issue guidance to Fish and Wildlife Service staff that the best scientific data available today cannot make a causal connection between harm to listed species or their habitats and greenhouse gas emissions from a specific facility, or resource development project, or government action.

Forget it; the guidance might as well have been written on toilet paper; it cannot alter the provisions of ESA ….

So now here we are, two months out, and the guidance is being challenged by the same folks who are doing all they can to drive gas prices into the stratosphere. As usual, they are attacking “cumulative impacts,” a lovely little provision of most every environmental regulation special interest groups (i.e., Greenie lobbyists) have placed there so any impact, no matter how small, can be multiplied through largely fictional “cumulative” multipliers.

In a gem of hysterical, unfounded overstatement, the Center’s spokeswacko, Brendon Cummings, said:

“The only thing keeping pace with the drastic melting of the Arctic sea ice is the breakneck speed with which the Department of the Interior is rushing to sell off polar bear habitat for fossil fuel development. For polar bears to survive in the face of global warming, we need to protect their habitat, not auction it off to oil companies.”

Cummings failed to mention that polar bears have survived prior bouts of global warming just fine, that the footprint of oil ops on their habitat is minuscule, and that polar bear populations have grown since the initiation of oil drilling operations in Alaska. And for that matter, that this year’s polar ice melt appears to be far less dramatic than last year’s.

Par for the course for these enviro-propagandists.

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Unhappy PC Birthday

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verything I have to unlearn, I learned in kindergarten – that’s how Incredible Daughter #1 responded to this story, from BBC:

An eight-year-old boy has sparked an unlikely outcry in Sweden after failing to invite two of his classmates to his birthday party.

The boy’s school says he has violated the children’s rights and has complained to the Swedish Parliament.

The school, in Lund, southern Sweden, argues that if invitations are handed out on school premises then it must ensure there is no discrimination.

Violated rights? What right? The right to be an utter jerk and suffer no consequences? For a school to propose that this is discrimination is to tell kids that the most important life lesson is to expect to get everything without investing anything.

One of the boys who didn’t get an invitation didn’t invite the perp of this horrific social crime to his own birthday party. The other boy simply didn’t get along with birthday boy. No matter! Life is happy! We’re all equal! Kumbayah!

Remember: The Dems think Europe is the cat’s meow and won’t be satified until they’ve morphed American independence and frontier spirit into a clone of Sweden. And Obama’s friend, radical educator William Ayres, is at forefront of the effort to use the schools to accomplish that goal.

A China You Haven’t Seen

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piegel has a photo gallery posted along with its story Lives Under Chinese Communist, Caught on Film that you ought to take a look at. Here are the two that moved me the most.

First, let’s look at a photo typical of what we see out of China today, symbolic of its emergence on the global economics playing field.

Relaxing on the hood of his new Mercedes is Li Xiaohua who was previously a Red Guard who was forced to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. His rebirth as a successful capitalist is symbolic of the new China. But we shouldn’t forget that the old China still exists, as shown in this photo of barge-pullers on the upper Yangtse River:

Why are these men naked? Because they own so few clothes that they don’t want to wear them out doing this hard labor.

China has a long way to go, despite the happy face the Beijingoists try to slap on the mess they rule. Continue Reading »

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uick, who won the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore?

That would be Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and termed in today’s LAT a “global warming celebrity.” Pachauri would no doubt rather be referred to as a “climate change celebrity,” but the main rag of Hollywood knows its celebrities when it sees them.

And Pachauri – “green feather in his lapel” – plays the part, touring the world, meeting with legislators and bigwigs, holding multiple press conferences, demandning – trusty PowerPoint in hand – that everyone sacrifice more on the climate change altar.

Pachauri’s visit came as the California Air Resources Board (CARB, California’s carbon Nazis) issued new, tougher guidelines in order to save the world from the global warming demons:

The air board Thursday released the first comprehensive carbon-reduction blueprint of any U.S. state, a detailed plan to slash California’s global warming pollution down to 1990 levels in the next 12 years, a 30% cut from projected levels.

But at a breakfast in the Capitol, Pachauri told state senators and environmental activists that California’s plan, though “forward looking,” should go further.

“It would be nice if California, one of the largest economies in the world, cut greenhouse gas emissions to 5% below 1990 levels,” he said. “It would send a strong message to the rest of the U.S.”

What would such a cut mean to the economic well-being of the state, given that to accomplish it, transportation, water, industry, agriculture and every other aspect of life in the state would be touched? Don’t know. They didn’t say. And CARB’s Web site has crashed. So let’s just move on to the irony.

As Pachauri spoke, wildfires were burning across the state, burning up carbon like crazy and filling the atmosphere with more greenhouse gases than all the Hummers of the world combined.

(Now, some would attribute these to global warming, but in fact, California always has wildfires and there’s been no increase in incidents.)

Wildfires, volcanoes, solar flares, changes in cloud cover, alterations in ocean currents – all these have contributed GHGs to our atmosphere since the dawn of Earth Time, but are ignored completely by Al and Rajendra and the other high priests of Gaean earth worship and their followers.

But yesterday, the smoke wafted all around Pachauri wherever he went, as a constant reminder that his Warmie religion is based on mere computer models, not the word of God. And, amazingly, the LAT reminded us of a bit more Warmie irony in Pachauri’s trip:

It was a high-carbon trip for Pachauri. He had flown from New York, where he spoke at a luncheon held by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Then it was on to San Francisco, where he addressed a Commonwealth Club panel and attended a reception with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He was slated to return to New York, then travel to Europe and Abu Dhabi on his mission to spread alarm [and, we note, to spread GHGs by the bucketful. Ed.].

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e had an amazingly good time last night, enjoying Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers with surprise warm-up act Steve Winwood at the Hollywood Bowl. As much as I like Petty, far and away the best song of the night was the old Winwood classic Gimme Some Lovin’, with the Heartbreakers backing Steve up.

The Hollywood Bowl, as you either know or can easily surmise, is in Hollywood, one of the major constellations in the global warming hysteria universe. And Hollywood, in turn, is in the heart of liberal LA, that Dem-voting, Prius-loving, offshore rig-hating megapolis.

Be that as it may, let me just point out that the Hollywood Bowl, which holds just under 18,000 people, would have been packed to the rafters – if it had rafters. Not a seat was vacant, and neither was a parking space for miles around. (We were the epitome of carbon-consciousness, driving four-to-our car to Hollywood & Highland, then taking a shuttle to and from the Bowl.)

Let’s be overly kind and say the cars carried three people each on average. That would be 6,000 cars driving who knows how many total miles. Our round trip was about 90; the guy in the box next to us drove up from Ramona in eastern San Diego County, probably 200 miles.

And that was just the beginning.

I counted almost 100 amps and speakers, plus four very large TV screens, all snorting their full capacity of electron jitter juice.

And that’s hardly the end.

The stage was festooned with at least five layers of electronic eye candy that consumed enough power to meet the needs of a backward African nation for a day or two. The trunk of cables going from the floor to the lighting superstructure appeared to be about 10″ in diameter, and it wasn’t carrying the output of wind power, if you know what I mean.

Everyone loved it. We rocked to the music and cheered most robustly for the most intense, planet-wrecking light displays. Some people around us even burned funny smelling carbon in small hand-rolled cigarettes. All had on clothes carefully selected from full closets, or perhaps bought special for the occasion in a round-trip carbon burn to the mall.

And afterwards, we all trekked out of the Bowl, towards our carbon-burning transportation mode of choice, passing along the way the requisite “Save the Earth! Feel Good About Yourself!” booth. Most of us passed on by without so much as a second thought. A few saw the humor. And the foolish micro-minority, oblivious to their own lifestyle choices, actually stopped in to hear the proselytizing.

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? – Matthew 7:3

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