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lease don’t tell the Obamacrats because they really want to seize control of our pocketbooks and our will via the insatiable need to control anthropgenic global warming, and they don’t want any news that runs counter to their dreams of climatic totalitarianism, but shoot, these pesky facts just keep showing up.

But don’t blame me; blame Bluegrass Pundit:

The Argos sensor buoys were deployed in hope of getting better ocean temperature data. This data was to support the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. The actual result is the buoys have found a slight ocean cooling in the six years they have been deployed.

The biggest problem with the Argos sensor buoy findings is the readings fly in the face of major climate change computer models. These models postulate that as much as 80-90 per cent of global warming will result from the oceans warming rapidly then releasing their heat into the atmosphere. The data is proving the global warming model wrong. Surface temperature sensors have been finding the additional evidence of global cooling.

Here’s some more, from the source material he used:

When they were first deployed in 2003, the Argos were hailed for their ability to collect information on ocean conditions more precisely, at more places and greater depths and in more conditions than ever before.

No longer would scientists have to rely on measurements mostly at the surface from older scientific buoys or inconsistent shipboard monitors.

So why are some scientists now beginning to question the buoys’ findings? Because in five years the little blighters have failed to detect any global warming. They are not reinforcing the scientific orthodoxy of the day, namely that man is causing the planet to warm dangerously. They are not proving the predetermined conclusions of their human masters. Therefore [the buoys], and not their masters’ hypotheses, must be wrong.

Here’s my question:  Why do some scientists – those that would question the buoy’s findings – allowed anywhere close to the global warming debate?  They obviously have lost all objectivity if they’ve gone from attacking folks like me who ask questions and start attacking inanimate scientific equipment.

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hat’s not a typo in the headline – it’s the greenhouse gag, not generic greenhouse gas, because the depravity of declaring the fourth most common element in the universer, carbon, a pollutant and carbon dioxide, the byproduct of human breathing, something needing regulating is coming home to roost.  Like an 800-pound chicken.

In her confirmation hearing, EPA Director of Air and Radiation nominee Regina McCarthy put an end to EPA Director Lisa Jackson’s curt dismissal of concerns by manufacturers and chambers of commerce that EPA was poised to impose greenhouse gas regs on small business.  “It is a myth … EPA will regulate cows, Dunkin Donuts, Pizza Huts, your lawnmower and baby bottles,” Jackson said, according the the WSJ, the primary source for this post.

McCarthy countered her boss, telling lawmakers that litigation could force her office to draft emission rules for small emitters like hospitals, schools and farms.  And, true to form, the Center for Biological Depravity Diversity promptly piped up with Kassie Siegel, its climate warmonger director of the CBD’s Climate Law Institute, saying she is poised to sue for regulation of smaller emitters if the EPA stops at simply large emitters.

The administration is now set to regulate only about 13,000 large emitters, including refiners, smelters and cement plants. The position seems radical next to Siegel’s stand, but when you consider that refiners, smelters and cement plants are all backbones to our industrialized, mobile society, you’ll understand that there’s nothing moderate about Obama’s position; it’s no less extreme, only more efficient, than the CBD approach.

Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) has put a hold on Ms. McCarthy’s nomination in part because of her responses on the greenhouse gas issue.  Barrasso wrote on the Heritage Foundation blog The Foundary (which could, I suppose, itself be regulated under the new regime),

Special interest groups around the country are scheming to sue the EPA to prosecute hospitals, farms, nursing homes, commercial buildings and any other small emitter of greenhouse gasses. These regulations are a dangerous loose cannon in the wrong hands.

When asked about potential lawsuits, Regina McCarthy, the Administration’s nominee as Assistant Administrator of the EPA Office of Air and Radiation said that she will “request that I be informed if any such notice is filed with regard to a small source, and I will follow-up with the potential litigants.”

The solution to this problem is not to have government officials go around asking litigants not to sue. That is not a solution and entirely unrealistic. I quite frankly expect more.

The only jobs this option will create are in law firms as the litigation bonanza begins.

In considering the economic impact of this lunacy, Barrasso cautions that the 1.2 million businesses that might fall under EPA regulation as a result of GHG emission controls would face something akin to the EPA’s current pre-construction permit process, which the agency itself says costs each applicant $125,000 and 866 hours to obtain - and that was in 2007; I’m sure it’s become more costly and less streamlined since then.

Do the math – that’s $150 billion in new regulatory burdens and a billion hours of productivity down the drain.  If you’re sill in school, go into environmental law – the guys who work on regs like these will be the only people making real money in Obamaland.  Meanwhile, our competitors presumably will have avoided this lunacy, making America even less competitive and more vulnerable to foreign business domination.

As all this insanity looms, Rasmussen reports that only about a third of Americans believe human activities are causing climate change, about 50 percent less than believe it is caused by global climatic cycles, so there is opportunity for the GOP to position itself as the party of sanity on climate issues – something McCain reused to do.

And for those who feel the system will have to be on the edge of collapse before we will be able to reign in runaway regulators should keep their eyes on the regulation of GHG emissions in all its ramifications.  This baby is setting up to be one spectactular, collossal train wreck.

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he Center for Biological Depravity Diversity was its hyperbolic self yesterday in an email sent to its supporters (and watchers, like me):

[Interior Sec. Ken] Salazar confirmed our worst fears for his tenure as Secretary of the Interior — he announced that he will adopt Bush’s polar bear extinction plan …

You have to hand it to the folks at the CBD; they know how to gin up the language, turning a simple rule that allows the careful, ongoing use of existing oil production facilities as “Bush’s polar bear extinction plan.” Of course, it’s easier to turn a phrase like that when you don’t need to worry about facts, ethics or honesty like the rest of us.

Leaving CBD’s hyperbole aside, here’s what Salazar did, from DOI’s news release:

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced today that he will retain a special rule [a "4(d) rule"] issued in December for protecting the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, but will closely monitor the implementation of the rule to determine if additional measures are necessary to conserve and recover the polar bear and its habitat. …

Section 4(d) of the ESA allows the Fish and Wildlife Service to tailor regulatory prohibitions for threatened species as deemed necessary and advisable to provide for the conservation of the species. Hence, the special rule is referred to as a 4(d) rule. …

The rule also states that incidental take of polar bears resulting from activities outside the bear’s range, such as emission of greenhouse gases, will not be prohibited under the ESA.

“Incidental take” means harming, harrassing or killing, when done incidental to other legal activities; stated less bureaucratically, it means “not deliberate.” The polar bear is classified as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, so if you go out and just shoot one for sport, you’re in big trouble. But with Salazar’s action yesterday, it remains legal to go about the legal activities of maintaining oil production facilities and exploring for oil on oil lease land, even if by some unprovable nexus, your activities cause a chunk of ice to melt, a polar bear to tumble into the sea, somehow forget how to swim, and drown.

The greens pushed hard to get the polar bear listed as endangered, because the 4(d) rule can only be applied to threatened species, not endangered ones.  Bush was justified in not listing the polar bear at all – their populations are stable, even growing in some regions, and there’s no proof that polar icemelt is permanent; indeed, last winter’s ice build-up was record-breaking.  But in one of his weaker moves, Bush gave in and took the middle ground, listing it as threatened and writing the 4(d) to protect energy production and other activities.

I’ve lived through this myself.  In the early 1990s, Hugh Hewitt and I orchestrated the campaign to keep the California gnatcatcher from being listed under Cailfornia’s ESA, then eked out a “threatened” listing from the incoming Clinton administration, dodging the “endangered” bullet.  As a result, thousands of new homes and commercial/industrial facilities were built that otherwise would have been stopped dead by the less flexible endangered listing.

And the gnatcatcher, God bless it, is thriving.

The same will certainly be true of the polar bear, which has survived previous warming spells.  I’m not sure if the same can be said now of Obama’s cap and trade tax movement, which is already unpopular in Congress.  If you doubt the signficance of the hurdles Obama’s facing with this madcap scheme, just ask the free market: The price of CO2 credits has dropped dramatically.

Now Obama must defend the urgency of imposing cap and trade on a crippled, job-shedding economy even while admitting through Salazar’s action that things really aren’t all that urgent.  If global warming were the immediate threat the hysterics Obama campaigned to say it is, Salazar would have suspended the 4(d) rule at a minimum and could have even re-opened the process to go for an endangered listing.

That  he didn’t is solid evidence that the Obama administration is watching gas prices, which are beginning to creep up again.  They know that a repeat of last year’s run-up in gas costs will spell doom to cap and trade, and cost any politician who’s anti-drilling points in the polls.  So to keep his numbers up and the changes of cap and trade alive, Obama approved the continuation of the 4(d) in spite of howling opposition from the environmentalists.

That he could make so politic a trade at the expense of the polar bear (at least that’s how the Greenies put it) can only be read as proof that Obama doesn’t view global warming and cap and trade to be issues as important as his own popularity.  Smart opponents of cap and trade just got some powerful new ammunition, and I hope they’re loading their legislative and rhetorical weapons as I write.

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his morning, my inbox was smudged with yet another email from Re-Power America, the on-line political lobbying arm for Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Progress.  And as usual, it was interesting.

It was from Steve Bouchard, the campaign manager for Re-Power, and it started by attacking Republicans – one un-named Republican senator in particular, who Bouchard found guilty of going “so low” as to criticize efforts by Greens to close “the carbon pollution loophole,” saying such criticisms are nothing more than “desperate scare tactics.”

And here I thought it was political debate, and that “desperate scare tactics” are more what Bouchard himself got into a few short paragraphs later:

Gore spoke of the economic and environmental damage that would be caused by delaying action, saying “Each day that we continue with the status quo sees more of our fellow Americans struggling to provide for their families. Each day we continue on our current path, America loses more of its competitive edge. And each day we wait, we increase the risk that we will leave our children and grandchildren an irreparably damaged planet.”

So mere delay – not the global warming bogeyman itself, but just delay – will destroy America’s competitiveness, cost jobs and, gee willikers, irreparably damage the planet.  Irreparably, as in permanent nastiness forever … all because we delayed for one session of Congress.

Pretty scary.

One more thing. What’s this “carbon pollution loophole?” There is no loophole; Congress never made a decision to exempt manufacturers from taxes if they polluted used carbon in any way; it just hadn’t come up with a madcap scheme to tax, basically, everything. Every person you hear talking about closing carbon pollution loopholes is either a mindless dupe, a shameless hack, or a brilliant scare-monger, and not a one is honest and worth listening to.

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hen Obama hysteria mixes with global warming hysteria, the results can be ridiculous indeed, as readers of Grist may have noticed today (probably not, lost in hysteria as they are) upon reading Joseph Romm’s Obama’s First 100 Days Make – and May Remake – History.

This is the third nominee in C-SM’s 2009 Most Ridiculous Story of the Year competition.  The rules are simple:  Entries must be work that serious writers present in all seriousness that goes far, far beyond the sublime and settle heavily into the imbecilic.  So, are your shrill-protectors on? Good, let’s get right into it:

The media just keeps missing—or messing up—the story of the century.

Future historians will inevitably judge all 21st-century presidents on just two issues: global warming and the clean energy transition. If the world doesn’t stop catastrophic climate change—Hell and High Water—then all presidents, indeed, all of us, will be seen as failures, and rightfully so.

There is no terror threat. There is no economic crisis. There is nothing you should focus on except global warming and the forced march to alternative energy. I believe the media is on this story well enough, but gosh, they just keep insisting on reporting on other stuff like swine flu, Wall Street, Iraq and politics. Shame on them!

But, shoot, once you understand the threat, you understand why Romm’s so intense:

How else could future generations judge us if the U.S. and the world stay anywhere near our current emissions path, warm most of the inland United States 10 to 15°F by century’s end, with sea levels 3 to 7 feet higher, rising perhaps an inch or two a year, with the Southwest from Kansas to California a permanent dust bowl, and much of the ocean a hot, acidic dead zone — impacts that could be irreversible for 1,000 years if we don’t reverse emissions soon and sharply.

Never mind that we’ve had ten years of cooler temperatures, or that the oceans have been rising steadily at 1/2 to 3/4 inches a year for the last 14,000 years, or that everything he says is based on computer models that didn’t pick up the recent temperature dip. We need to act, and act now! If we don’t, other models might get other things wrong!

But since that is the world as Romm sees it, he just thinks Barack Obama’s first 100 days were peachy:

In that sense, what team Obama has accomplished in its first 100 days is nothing less than an unprecedented reversal of decades of unsustainable national policy forced down the throat of the American public by conservatives. While I will present a longer list below — and welcome your additions — three game-changing accomplishments stand out:

1. Green Stimulus: Progressives, Obama keep promise to jumpstart clean energy, economy — conservatives keep promise to jumpstop the future
2. Sustainable Budget: The first sustainable budget in U.S. history.
3. Regulatory breakthrough: EPA finds carbon pollution a serious danger to Americans’ health and welfare requiring regulation

Obama has clearly demonstrated he has a serious chance to be the first President since FDR to remake the country through his positive vision. Indeed, if Obama is a two-term president, if he achieves even half of what he has set out to, he will likely be remembered as “the green FDR.”

Uh-huh. I’ve heard “sustainable” used every which way, but I’ve never heard it used as “driving future generations into a deep cesspool of debt that will paralyze their options and poison their quality of life.” And isn’t it interesting that the fourth most common element – one that is basically us to our core – is suddenly a serious danger to us?

Romm then launches into a tirade against Ronald Reagan for “making conservatives strongly and permanently on the pro-pollution, anti-efficiency, anti-clean-energy side,” and here I thought he was merely correcting some wayward Carter policies.  But what would a leftist rant be without an attack on Reagan?  That was expected, but his next statement caught me be surprise:

… since establishment historians almost by definition focus on the past …

Have you met any historians, establishment or otherwise, who focus on the future?  Me neither.

He then attacks Time’s Joe Klein for an “utter lack of knowledge or interest in the substance of the global warming problem” because Klein wrote this:

The fate of Obama’s first year in office, if not his Administration, will probably be determined by the way he handles four distinct challenges — two in foreign policy and two domestically….

And that’s the second domestic challenge: the realization that Congress will not give Obama everything he wants. Aides say the President’s moments of frustration almost always have to do with Congress. “We know that not every wagon makes it across the frontier,” says a top Obama adviser. “But we’re not willing to decide yet which wagons are going to make it and which aren’t.” In fact, that decision seems more and more apparent: Congress is unlikely to pass the linchpin of Obama’s alternative-energy initiative — a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions to combat global warming and tilt the market toward energy independence but that would also raise energy prices in the midst of a recession.

“The wagon that needs to get through is health care,” says a second Obama adviser, picking up the metaphor. (emphasis Romm’s)

It seems that Klein has reported pretty accurately on the state of affairs in DC, which has nothing to do with whether or not he has an utter lack of knowledge or interest in the substance of global warming policy.  (Romm argues that cap-and-trade is not the linchpin of Obama’s alternative energy initiative, but rather that alternative energy that is the linchpin of Obama’s effort to avert catastrophic global warming.  So what exactly is cap-and-trade? Just some passing fancy of no real consequence? Sheesh.)  He also says all the hooey about cap and trade raising prices should be summarily dismissed because the higher prices won’t kick in until 2012, and the recession will be over by then.

Romm wraps it up with a list of 11 things he really, really likes about Obama’s first 100 days.  I’m not sure I share his enthusiasm; boldface is Romm, standard is me:

1. Obama began the process of blocking the vast majority of new coal plants. Never mind that no viable replacement is in sight and we do still need energy.
2. He began the process of dramatically increasing the efficiency of our vehicles, by stripping them of protective mass, which will result in a steep upsurge in traffic fatalities.  But you wanted to be sacrificed to the global warming god, didn’t you?
3. He appointed a first-rate Cabinet and then unleashed them to start inconvenient-truth telling to the public after 8 years of Administration denial and muzzling of U.S. scientists. First-rate liars, thieves and tax-dodgers, and please, there was no muzzling – it’s just that Bush let both sides be told.
4. In every single major speech, he has focused on the urgent need for the clean energy transition, for a price for carbon (cap-and-trade and “closing the carbon loophole”), and the unsustainability of our current economic system . I just love it when the president of the world’s most successful capitalist nation hawks failed socialistic platitudes and expresses his desire to move beyond success and into gloomy darkness. Can I say “darkness?”
5. He signed into law the tax credits needed to achieve his ambitious goal of 1 million plug-in hybrids by 2015. Yeah, those hybrids with their nickel smelters, acid and costly recycling.  The other night on Top Gear, they followed a 4-cylinder hybrid Prius with an 8-cylinder BMW M3.  The Prius made 17 mpg; the M3 made 19.
6. He signed into law a massive investment in mass transit and train travel. So what if buses and trains are less efficient per capita than cars?
   
7. He signed into law the tax credits needed meet his ambitious goal of doubling renewables in his first term. Yeah, let’s check back on that little gem of Really Big Talking.
8. He signed into law the funding needed to jumpstart a 21^st smart grid that is critical to enable the renewable energy, energy efficiency, and plug-in hybrid revolution. Of course the private energy sector could do this themselves with the sort of incentives Obama is showering on “ambitious” goals like “doubling renewables.”
9. He signed into law the single biggest investment in the deployment of energy-efficient technology in U.S. history. He bought some cars and light bulbs – one of the stimulus program elements I actually liked – except I think mercury-laden screw-in fluorescents are a dangerous joke.
10. For the first time in three decades, he more than doubled the annual budget for advanced energy efficiency, renewable energy, and low carbon technology. Why not? He’s spending like there’s no tomorrow on everything else.

My friend Frank has been arguing elegantly about the need for a less mocking tone when confronting environmental issues, and instead engaging in conservative environmentalism, pointing out that there are more cost-effective, free market was to confront our environmental challenges. I like his thinking but think there’s also a need to confront the loons and call them loons, and I offer as exhibit one of my argument this concluding paragraph from Romm:

Of course, it’s entirely possible that this history-making first 100 days won’t remake history. It’s more than possible that we won’t stop catastrophic warming. But if we don’t stop the 100s of years of misery, of Hell and High Water,” [sic] that will almost certainly be because the conservative movement threw their entire weight behind humanity’s self-destruction — because conservative in both chambers refuse to conserve anything, including a livable climate, and willingly sacrificed the health and well-being of the next 50 generations of Americans for their ideology.

It makes my stomach turn. I don’t know a conservative who isn’t also a conservationist, or perhaps more accurately, a believer in stewardship, the biblical concept the enviros have tried to turn into “sustainability.” The Good Lord taught us to use His creation for our sustenance, but also to protect it so future generations could use it. We are not the evil drones Romm portrays; we are just stewards who want rationality, economic sensibility, an end to agenda-driven over-regulation and a return to sanity.

Romm succeeds in moving us farther from all those noble goals.

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lease, whatever you do, don’t call them “swamps” or “bogs” because wetlands, for a lot of very good reasons, are the darlings of the environmental movement.  The classic wetland as you perceive it – you know, wet – serves vital functions in species propagation and water cleaning, and deserve the protections they get.

But with typical regulatory overzealousness, dry ruts and washes like those pictured on the right are now regulated as “ephemeral streams” under the same rules originally designed to protect wetlands. Ditto for drainage ditches and even mud puddles, which you’ll probably feel more like protecting if you take to calling them “seasonal wetlands”: or “vernal pools” like the Greens do.  For heaven’s sake, don’t let your children splash in them!

In any case, wetlands are the darling of the environmental movement.  So what will your Gaea-worshipping, carbon-fearing neighborhood tree-hugger do with this little tidbit?

An expansion of wetlands and not a large-scale melting of frozen methane deposits is the likely cause of a spike in atmospheric methane gas that took place some 11,600 years ago, according to an international research team led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. (Science Daily)

The ice from the last ice age started melting about 20,000 years ago and oceans started rising 14,000 years ago, as the icemelt began getting significant.  Then, about 11,000 years ago, the climb spiked, as shown in the cart below:

The Scripps study explains it:

The burst of methane took place immediately after an abrupt transition between climatic periods known as the Younger Dryas and Preboreal. During this event, temperatures in Greenland rose 10° C (18° F) in 20 years. Methane levels over 150 years rose about 50 percent, from 500 parts per billion in air to 750 parts per billion.

Note that there was a period of abrupt climate change that didn’t involve SUVs and coal-burning power plants.  As the temperatures warmed, wetlands started doing what they do – encouraging life, and with life comes death, and with death comes decomposition, and with decompositions comes methane.  Methane, of course, is a greenhouse gas a dozen times more impactful on climate than carbon dioxide; hence the spike in temps, icemelt and sea level rise.

One could argue, then, that in order to slow global warming, we should fill all the wetlands.  I won’t make that argument because (1) I understand the ecological benefits of wetlands and (2) I’m not hysterically frightened about imminent global warming doom, but Greens who demand both wetland protection and carbon emission caps need to recognize the hypocrisy of their position.

They should also recognize that the ancient wetland connection should take some wind out of their global warming fear-mongering.  Again, from the Science Digest article:

The finding is expected to come as a relief to scientists and climate watchers concerned that huge accelerations of global warming might have been touched off by methane melts in the past and could happen again now as the planet warms. By measuring the amount of carbon-14 isotopes in methane from air bubbles trapped in glacial ice, the researchers determined that the surge that took place nearly 12,000 years ago was more chemically consistent with an expansion of wetlands. Wetland regions, which produce large amounts of methane from bacterial breakdown of organic matter, are known to have spread during warming trends throughout history.

“This is good news for global warming because it suggests that methane clathrates do not respond to warming by releasing large amounts of methane into the atmosphere,” said Vasilii Petrenko, a postdoctoral fellow at University of Colorado, Boulder, who led the analysis while a graduate student at Scripps.

In other words, we can take one more global warming bogeyman – methane clathrates – off the table.  But whatever you do, don’t stomp in mud puddles, and don’t expect the Warmies to dial back their rhetoric any.

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ver heard of VHEMT, pronouned “vehement?”  It’s the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, a group of earth lovers who must not believe much in evolution because they’re not buying this whole “man as the culmination of evolution” storyline one bit.  Its manifesto:

As VHEMT Volunteers know, the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens … us.

Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, anothe rray of hope shines through the gloom.

When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth’s biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory, and all remaining creatures will be free to live, die, evolve (if they believe in evolution), and will perhaps pass away, as so many of Nature’s “experiments” have done throughout the eons.  It’s going to take all of us going.

Shakers on a global scale!  Fortunately, we know their movement will become extinct long before mankind does.  These folks don’t like themselves, or us, much because we are ” a greedy, amoral parasite on the once-healthy face of this planet.”  That would be the planet that has belched forth volcanos and rivers of sulfurous noxiousness, that has mudslides and billowing sandstorms that choke and suffocate all sorts of critters.  The planet that spawns hurricanes, tornados and earthquakes, which greedily and amorally extinguish all sorts of life.

It would be the planet that once had dinosaurs, which disappeared without any help from man. The same planet that has been through global warming before, without the help of dinosaurs in SUVs:

One theory [of the extinction of dinosaurs] holds that cold, brought on by the Sun’s concealment [after the meteorite strike], is what did them in, but a team of paleontologists led by Pascal Godefroit, of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, argues otherwise. Some dinosaurs (warm-blooded, perhaps) were surprisingly good at withstanding near-freezing temperatures, they say.

Witness the team’s latest find, a diverse stash of dinosaur fossils laid down just a few million years before the big impact, along what’s now the Kakanaut River of northeastern Russia. Even accounting for continental drift, the dinos lived at more than 70 degrees of latitude north, well above the Arctic Circle.

And they weren’t lost wanderers, either. The fossils include dinosaur eggshells – a first at high latitudes, and evidence of a settled, breeding population.

It’s true the Arctic was much warmer back then, but it wasn’t any picnic. The size and shape of fossilized leaves found with the bones enabled Godefroit’s team to estimate a mean annual temperature of 50 degrees Fahrenheit, with wintertime lows at freezing. (source)

How do the VHEMT folks, who put all the blame on us, explain how you can get “dinosaurs,” “well above the arctic circle” and “mean annual temperature of 50 degrees” in the same short story? There’s only one answer: The earth’s clilmate cycles warm and cold whether we’re here or not.

To think that we can stop global warming by hobbling progress and prohibiting comfort takes a grand ego indeed, an ego as large as the folks at VHEMT, who actually think they can argue us into eliminating ourselves. Here’s one of their arguments; see if it makes you want to forgo kids and grandkids:

That little clip has only gotten a couple thousand hits, by the way, but it gets huge positive ratings from its viewers.

Never mind that Paul Erhlich wrote about all this in The Population Bomb 41 years ago and has been proved dead wrong; the evil of the human population and the immorality of procreation are memes far more resiliant than the swine flu virus (at least I hope so!).  Our inherent evilness and the desire to turn us off (either through extinction, like VHEMT would have, or by a government-enforced restrictions on our pleasures, which is the goal of green movement) fuels support for massive government “solutions” to the global warming “problem.”  

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n testimony on Capital Hill yesterday, Green Al Gore was confronted by one of his home state Reps, Marsha Blackburn (R, of course), who grilled him on the profit motives behind his efforts to push cap and trade legislation. Here’s The Hill’s transcript: 

BLACKBURN: I’ve got an article from October 8th, the New York Times Magazine about a firm called Kleiner Perkins. A capital firm called Kleiner Perkins. Are you aware of that company?

GORE: (LAUGHS) Well yes, I’m a partner at Kleiner Perkins.

BLACKBURN: So you’re a partner at Kleiner Perkins. OK. Now they have invested about a billion dollars in 40 companies that are going to benefit from cap and trade legislation. So is the legislation that we’re discussing here today, is that something you are going to personally benefit from?

GORE: I believe that the transition to a green economy is good for our economy and good for all of us. And I have invested in it. But every penny that I have made, I have put right into a non-profit, the Alliance for Climate Protection, to spread awareness about why we have to take on this challenge. And Congresswoman, if you’re, if you believe the reason I have been working on this issue for 30 years is because of greed, you don’t know me.

BLACKBURN: I’m not making accusations. I’m asking questions that have been asked of me. And individuals, constituents that were seeking a point of clarity–

GORE: I understand exactly what you’re doing, Congresswoman. Everybody here does.

BLACKBURN: Well, are, you know, are you willing to divest yourself of any profit? Does all of it go to a not-for-profit that is an educational not-for-profit.

GORE: Every penny that I have made has gone to it. Every penny from the movie, from the book, from any investments in renewable energy. I’ve been willing to put my money where my mouth is. Do you think there’s something wrong with being active in business in this country?

Read that last paragraph again and check out the verb structures: have made … has gone … been willing. Past tense. Gore carefully made no pledge of what would happen to the hundreds of millions of dollars (if not more) he will make should his lobbying efforts on behalf of cap and trade succeed.

And yes, I do think there’s something wrong with being in business to use your influence to penalize a couple hundred million Americans with a slower economy and more expensive goods all so you can get richer. Gore may be foolish enough to think that all the alternative energy and carbon credit outfits that like him so much like him because he’s smart and charming, but saner minds realize they like him for his considerable political clout.

As for giving all the proceeds to the Alliance for Climate Protection, note first that Green Al doesn’t really need to make a lot of money since we, the taxpayers, are already paying him over $100,000 a year in a federal pension scheme that ultimately will pay him almost $6 million.  It’s so easy to be philanthropic when you’re sucking at the taxpayer’s teat.

I’d rather he keep the money from his movie and book, and return his government pension to us.

If you want to have some fun, go to the Alliance for Climate Protection page on Mukety and start clicking on the boxes the the names of its Board of Directors in them.  Al’s put together a heck of an interconnected group of power-brokers who are all dedicated to leveraging their considerable influence to burden us with cap and trade. 

Of course, he’s got every right to do that, and do it for free if he wants to.  Not to depricate Al’s largesse, but it’s also worth noting that his salary as a partner of Kleiner Perkins is not among the income sources he’s donating to the cause, nor is income from his own investment firm, Generation Investment Management.  Those parts of Al’s life are where the real money is going to come from, should his use of political influence succeed in tying the cap and trade cement block around the ankle of the American economy.  Over you go, Bub!  Think good thoughts about Al as you sink!

Neither firm is public, so Al’s salary from them is not disclosed in SEC filings, and following rigorous reserach (at least two or three minutes) I haven’t been able to find out how much non-donated money he’s making from those positions. Let’s just assume capitalism is paying him considerably more than his pension.

And that too is OK – but it’s not OK to pretend, as Gore did at the House hearing, that he’s all about goodness and selflessness and being a visionary and is not into cap and trade for the huge personal wealth that will likely accrue to him should Congress give him what he wants.  It certainly is OK to turn what you believe in into your business, but it’s not OK to pretend you’re just in it like a hobby or perhaps even a mission, and deny that you are using political influence to make yourself wealthy by forever changing America at a cost of billions of dollars and millions of jobs.

Gore, like all false Messiahs, is a self-centered liar.

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esterday, a group of unelected know-it-all bureaucrats decided it’s not enough that California residents alread are crushed under the second-highest tax burden in the nation, they will impose a massive new tax so they might tip at global warming windmills and force us into their choices for our cars.

The LA Times happily established the motivation for this newest attack on Californians’ wallets:

California took aim Thursday at the oil industry and its impact on global warming, adopting the world’s first regulation to limit greenhouse gas emissions from the fuel that runs cars and trucks.

Oil built this economy; oil fueled the state; oil made fortunes that created universities and endowed charities, but oil is the bogeyman of the Warmies and must be killed at all cost because they think tiny increases in a negligible atmospheric gas are going to kill us all. So CARB, the California Air Resources Board, voted 9 to 1 to pass a complex new rule that will drive up the cost of gasoline and, they hope, penalize hapless car drivers into reducing their fuel consumption by a quarter in the next decade.

And, of course, they hope this false economy will finally create huge consumer demand for electric and hydrogen-fueled vehicles and, as the LAT hopefully put it, “jump-start a host of futuristic biofuels” from algae, woodchips and other stuff that’s been around forever and has yet to produce energy anywhere near as efficiently as good ol’ God-given crude.

Still, CARB, which calls itself “ARB” in a bold move to reduce electron waste, said:

“The new standard means we can begin to break our century-old dependence on petroleum and provide California with greater energy security” said ARB Chairman Mary D. Nichols. “The drive to force the market toward greater use of alternative fuels will be a boon to the state’s economy and public health – it reduces air pollution, creates new jobs and continues California’s leadership in the fight against global warming.”

Nichols is a long-time California greenie, and one of its most powerful. She started the Los Angeles office of the nation’s richest, most powerful environmental law firm, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and started her many stints on CARB in 1974, when Jerry Brown appointed her its chair. She also was an Assistant Sec at EPA under Clinton. In other words, she’s been forcing environmentalism onto the public for 25 years, and doing quite well at it. The CARB release continues:

According to ARB analyses, to produce the more than 1.5 billion gallons of biofuels needed, over 25 new biofuel facilities will have to be built and will create more than 3,000 new jobs, mostly in the state’s rural areas. Production of fuels within the state will also keep consumer dollars local by reducing the need to make fuel purchases from beyond its borders.

CARB doesn’t bother to tell us how many perfectly good jobs in oil will be displaced by this Quixotic scheme, nor does it deal with the 8,000 pound gorilla in this little matter: water. Many of the rural areas they hope to bring these jobs to already have unemployment rates over 40 percent because water deliveries have been cut back so much farmers can’t grow crops. Where does Nichols expect to find the water to grow the biofuel stock, and where, oh where, does she think she’s going to find the hundreds of gallons of water needed to process each gallon of biofuel?

But they plow on. Forcing the cost of transportation up so they can force us into the cars they want us to drive, or better yet, onto the buses they don’t ride in themselves.

This state is going to Hades in hyperdrive. I’d move, but the LAT tells me 35 states are watching CARB’s action with gleeful anticipation, hoping to follow in California’s path at their earliest convenience. Watch out! California may be coming to a neighborhood near you soon.

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o, this isn’t a post about skinny girls so strung out on horse that they’re just not able to take one more photo shoot.  It’s about climate change and computer models.  Oh, and sell your shares in that Lake Meade houseboat rental business.

If the West continues to heat up and dry out, odds increase that the mighty Colorado River won’t be able to deliver all the water that’s been promised to millions who rely on it for their homes, farms and businesses, according to a new study.

Less runoff the snow and rain that fortify the 1,400-mile river caused by human-induced climate change could mean that by 2050 the Colorado won’t be able to provide all of its allocated water 60 percent to 90 percent of the time, according to two climate researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego.

The more parched the landscape, the more difficult the choices will be for those with dibs on the Colorado’s water and those in charge of divvying it up, said Tim Barnett, lead author of the study.

”The dry year scenarios in the future are going to be absolutely brutal,” he said.

Barnett and fellow Scripps scientist David Pierce made waves last year with a study saying there’s a 50 percent chance that Lake Mead, the reservoir created by the Hoover Dam, could run dry by 2021. (source)

The results were mistakenly published in a scientific journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

The Colorado is a major water source for Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, so we obviously need to plan based on something.  We also need to realize that the computer models favored by the Warmies did not predict the current cooling spell.

So let’s open up the science to all possibilities, run all sorts of models, admit errors in the models that fail, and see what we come up with.  And here’s an idea:  Let’s trying running the models backwards and see what sort of actual and prolonged weather events they miss.  But, please, let’s not do this, from the same article:

Meanwhile, researchers will continue gathering information on climate change and looking for ways to keep the Colorado functioning albeit with a new set of climate-driven rules.

There are no climate-driven rules.  There is just climate-driven speculation.  Oh, wait.  I do have one climate-driven rule:  Build more water conveyance and water storage infrastructure.  Whether it gets hotter or colder, we’re going to need it because our population is growing.

Of course, most Warmies, being Greenies, are earnestly seeking rules to make that impossible.

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