Friday, June 15, 2012

Global Warming: Lucky to be Alive – Harder Scrutiny May Kill it Outright

Propagandists behind the idea of man-caused global warming continually frame it as a problem to be solved, not questioned. For the briefest time earlier this spring, they must have been proud to see it portrayed as settled science during a major league baseball game, when announcer Tim McCarver said he believed climactic changes result in thinner air, thus “balls are carrying much better now than I remember.”

McCarver’s outlandish claim quickly blew up because baseball stats can be checked so easily. Home run totals have declined since 2000.

The mainstream media gets away with many other tougher-to-see faults because most people don’t know much about climate science. Smart-sounding scientists and reporters are saying our CO2 emissions are worsening the climate, who are we to question them?

That is precisely what the propagandists fear the most: the public must never see crippling faults in narratives about any facet of the issue. If doubt gets out of control, it’s no less deadly than the loss of confidence that implodes any ponzi scheme. Here, the issue is kept afloat not by infusions of cash, but with ceaseless unquestioned media reports supporting the issue and about allegedly corrupt skeptic scientists.

Ocean acidification caused by CO2 absorption? A melting Arctic, drowning polar bears? Unprecedented extreme weather? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is beyond reproach?

Skeptic scientists and their supporters point to meticulous analysis of faulty IPCC methodology, and to screaming newspaper weather headlines from from long ago, and to the Arctic Ice Cap returning to its 1979-2000 average extent, and the oceans’ current alkalinity, just to name a few contradictions.

But we have a monstrous public disconnect when the mainstream media is a gatekeeper to that information. Why report it when skeptic scientists are corrupt, and nothing they say is worthy of consideration?

With remarks at the White House in March 1995, Al Gore has long insinuated that skeptics operate no differently than ‘expert shills’ paid by the tobacco industry to ‘manufacture doubt’ about cigarette smoking risks. In his 2006 movie, he directly equated a supposedly leaked coal industry memo to the infamous Brown & Williamson Tobacco “Doubt is our Product” memo, yet neither he nor his followers show how scientific doubt about global warming has not existed from the start, or more specifically, that skeptics fabricated demonstratively false climate assessments after receiving industry money.

Despite those two massive faults, Gore’s loyal followers, including many in the mainstream media, rely on this to imply there’s no legitimate scientific criticism worthy of discussion.

Problem is, when anyone digs into the accusation, all they find are bigger problems.

Al Gore says investigative reporter / Pulitzer winner Ross Gelbspan discovered leaked evidence from 1991 coal industry memos ‘proving’ skeptics are corrupt. But Gelbspan never won a Pulitzer and other authors and reporters quoted fragment sentences from those memos prior to Gelbspan’s 1997 book exposé, including Gore’s own 1992 book. Worst of all, no accuser shows the memos in full context, so how are we to know this is no less problematic than the Peter Gleick / Heartland Institute memo controversy four months ago?

Gore equates these coal industry memos to the infamous Brown & Williamson Tobacco “Doubt is our Product” memo, but an actual comparison falls flat. The full context B&W memo is found within seconds on the internet. It took me seven months to find the coal industry memos, but only my articles link to their location at Greenpeace archive scans. Anyone reading them soon sees they are merely a small pilot project PR campaign and not any kind of sinister industry directive.

Skeptic scientists have exposed the IPCC’s faulty science for two decades. Any ordinary citizen can easily spot massive faults in the efforts to smear skeptics.

We don’t need to solve a climate crisis. We instead have a politically-driven agenda begging for a top-to-bottom investigation.

SOURCE (See the original for links)





Britain has wettest June since records began

Temperatures up to 10C below normal and sunshine is down 60 per cent

Britain is set to be lashed by 80mph hurricane force winds bringing three months worth of rain over the next three days with forecasters predicting it will be the wettest June since records began.

Emergency services issued a 'major flood event' alert in the South-West and Wales last night with eight inches of rain expected as a massive front of terrible weather sweeps in from the Atlantic.

Forecasters said England and Wales’ appalling June weather is officially the worst since records began more than 100 years ago. The countries are on course for the wettest ever June, temperatures are up to 10C below normal and sunshine is down 60 per cent.

MeteoGroup forecaster Julian Mayes said: 'We cannot find a period of June weather worse than this month since records began. For a 12-day period, it’s as bad as it can be.

'There’s no parallel with this month’s combination of very high rainfall, very low sunshine and very low daytime temperatures.

'The outlook is unsettled and although we don’t yet know for sure if it will be the wettest June, it’s well on the way.'

Cornwall Fire and Rescue Service said its 650 firefighters and 100 support staff were ready to take flood action. A spokesperson said: 'Ourselves, the police and county council are monitoring the weather forecast and will take appropriate action when needed. We have vast experience dealing with flooding, in particular floods which devastated Cornwall in November 2010.'

When 80mm of rain fell in 24 hours in west Wales last Friday, 150 people were rescued and 850 relocated as 5ft floods swept through caravan parks and villages.

Government forecasters predicted 15-20mm of rain today, plus 70-100mm over higher ground in 48 hours from midnight, with 30-50mm on lower ground.

The Weather Channel forecast more than 100mm on higher ground and warned of a 'major flooding event.' Rivers running off higher ground will fill rapidly.

The fresh deluges will fall on top of 42mm of rain in Culdrose, Cornwall, in 24 hours to 10am yesterday, plus yesterday afternoon’s expected 50-60mm from localised 'torrential downpours.'

SOURCE





Obama’s war on resource industries

As much as President Barack Obama claims to be concerned about jobs for Americans, he has a strange way of showing it.

Three recent actions in Alaska, West Virginia, and Arizona reveal the astonishing ways in which the Obama administration is twisting our nation's environmental laws in order to block natural resource production, and destroy jobs in the process.

On May 11, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released an assessment of the Bristol Bay watershed, an area of approximately 20,000 square miles (roughly twice the size of Maryland) in southwest Alaska.

The assessment is a superficial cut-and-paste job designed to give the EPA a basis for denying a Clean Water Act permit for a major mining project known as the Pebble Mine.

The EPA's watershed assessment concludes that a big mine could lead to the loss of 54 to 88 miles of small streams and 3.9 to 6.7 square miles of wetlands.

The Region 10 administrator claimed that a mine such as Pebble could have an adverse impact, mostly through loss of habitat, on Bristol Bay's salmon fishery, which produces half the world's wild sockeye salmon.

This claim is preposterous. The Bristol Bay watershed has thousands of miles of rivers and streams. A loss of 6.7 square miles of wetlands in a State that has 175,000 square miles of wetlands is not even a drop in the bucket.

The proposed Pebble Mine would be one of the world's largest copper, gold, and molybdenum mines. It would directly employ approximately 1,000 people for at least 30 years in high-paying jobs and indirectly create thousands more manufacturing and service jobs.

The EPA spent less than a year throwing its assessment together.

By contrast, the company developing the Pebble Mine has spent $120 million over the past eight years in commissioning an exhaustive array of environmental studies from top scientists and experts.

In February, they released an environmental baseline document of 27,000 pages.

Yet, the Obama EPA plans to use its sketchy 338-page assessment as the basis for denying a wetlands permit for the Pebble Mine — before the company even applies for it and submits the voluminous documentation required.

Even more mendaciously, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson doesn't pretend to be objective. She was the featured speaker at an anti-Pebble event last year.

The EPA is using similarly outrageous methods to shut down a coal mine in West Virginia. In early May, the Obama administration appealed a federal court decision that blocked the EPA's attempt to revoke a Clean Water Act permit for the mine.

After the Army Corps of Engineers issued the permit in 2007, the Arch Coal Co. began the $250 million investment in the Spruce No. 1 Mine that will eventually employ 250 people.

The mine has been operating for several years, but the EPA wants to shut it down even though it is not claiming that the mine has violated any of the stringent environmental protections required by the permit.

And in Arizona, it's the National Park Service that is out of control. In January, the Park Service announced a 20-year ban on any uranium mining on 1 million acres of federal lands in northern Arizona near Grand Canyon National Park.

An ongoing investigation by the House Natural Resources Committee under Chairman Doc Hastings, R-Wash., recently revealed that the Park Service's estimates of the possible impacts of uranium mining on the Grand Canyon were strongly criticized by one of its own scientists.

In an internal 2011 email, NPS hydro-geologist Larry Martin wrote: "My personal and professional opinion is that the potential impacts stated in the DEIS (Draft Environmental Impact Statement) as grossly overestimated and even then they are very minor and even negligible."

In another email uncovered by the House committee's investigation, Dr. Bill Jackson, chief of the Park Services' Water Resources Division, wrote about Martin's findings: "There exists no information we could find that would contradict his conclusion, nor any hypothesis suggested as to how contamination of park waters might physically occur."

But the Obama administration was determined to ban uranium mining, and Jackson, being a loyal bureaucrat, went on to discuss "the best way to 'finesse' " these inconvenient scientific facts.

As destructive as these three actions are, they are unfortunately not isolated incidents. They are part of a broad campaign to restrict access to oil and natural gas as well as coal and hardrock minerals.

New mining projects could provide a major boost to the economy, but will not do so as long as Congress and the American people allow President Obama to persist in his regulatory onslaught.

SOURCE





Smoke and mirrors in Obama's energy policy

Petroleum is always in the news, especially in an election year, when politicians fear that voters angered by high gas prices will do them in. In addition, much attention has focused on upcoming economic sanctions on imports of Iranian oil (which will soon be imposed by the Europeans) and on financial institutions in other countries that undertake transactions with the Iranian central bank to buy Iranian oil (which will be imposed by the United States) — in the quixotic attempt to get Iran to give up its nuclear program. This nuclear program would provide security and prestige to the radical but unpopular Iranian government. But blocking Iran’s oil from the world market would theoretically tend to reduce the world’s oil supply, thus causing the higher fuel prices that politicians fear most.

To get around this electoral problem and have his cake and eat it too, Obama has gotten a wink and a nod from Saudi Arabia, a major foe of Iran, that the desert kingdom will pump more oil onto the world market to offset the reduction in Iranian oil exports. In the end, however, a worldwide glut of oil may ensue, because trade embargoes, especially those on relatively fungible items like oil, are usually sieves, rife with opportunities for evasion. Iran will discount its oil, making the product difficult to resist for oil-thirsty economies in the industrializing world. Oil tankers will mysteriously change their destinations while at sea. Even prohibitions on financial transactions can be evaded — for example, China, the world’s largest customer for Iranian oil, can use channels to buy such oil that circumvent the Iranian central bank, thus providing a loophole for Chinese financial institutions to avoid being shut out of the U.S. banking system. The probable petroleum glut may become significant when lower demand from a slowing world economy is added to augmented Saudi production and surreptitious Iranian supplies

Severely leaky sanctions that fail to bite economically, however, may be a boon to the Obama administration. Because of the likely oil glut, the oil price will stay low for the election, while Obama retains the symbolism of “doing something” about Iran’s nuclear program.

In another example of the administration’s “smoke and mirrors” in energy policy, it has touted lessening U.S. dependence on foreign oil because of lowered demand from increasing auto fuel efficiency and because of the rapid rise of U.S. oil production (production has risen by a quarter in the last four years). And that is true as far as it goes, which is not far. Net imports of U.S. petroleum have been reduced from about 60% of total consumption in 2005 to just over 40% today. Yet protectionism (euphemistically called “energy security” or “energy independence”) is as economically inefficient in energy as it is in any other product. In a worldwide petroleum market, U.S. companies should buy from the cheapest source, no matter where the oil is produced. In fact, some new U.S. production may be sold overseas.

Even with American demand declining and domestic production increasing, however, it is unlikely that the United States will become energy independent anytime soon. Although this goal is one of the few things that both political parties can agree on, it is a canard and is not even desirable. No one ever tells American voters and consumers that energy independence, even if possible, would cost them dearly in inefficiency-induced price increases. Technology has increased U.S. production, but many overseas sources of oil are still cheaper than such domestic drilling.

Even for those politicians unable to shake the erroneous notion that oil is a “strategic” commodity coming to the United States from dangerous or unfriendly Middle Eastern countries, increased production in Brazil and from Canadian tar sands will render this notion obsolete. Contrary to popular belief, the United States doesn’t currently import that much of its oil from the Persian Gulf and will likely import less in the future as production in the United States and Western Hemisphere rises.

SOURCE






UN Climate Scientists Plead for Immunity from Criminal Prosecution

Who are the real flat-earthers?

Climate researchers working for the United Nations have issued an astonishing plea for immunity from prosecution. Government-funded personnel sought the ruling on the eve of the latest round of climate talks scheduled for Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (June 20, 2012).

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) issued it’s formal request for immunity from prosecution that includes researchers providing “evidence” supportive of the man-made global warming scare story. The perplexing plea will likely reverberate throughout the general scientific community as further affirmation that many climate scientists were not conducting honest research after all. John Bolton, a former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, questioned the motives, “The creeping expansion of claims for privileges and immunities protection for UN activities is symptomatic of a larger problem.”

High Price of Get Out of Jail Free Card

Especially worrisome is that in conjunction with the application for a sweeping “get out of jail free card” for all it’s scientists the UNFCCC is promoting a mammoth Green Climate Fund, intended to help mobilize as much as $100 billion a year for projects to lower global greenhouse gases. At the Rio conference the UN plans to trumpet a new draft planning and agenda document, “The Future We Want,” that will compel American families to pay $1,325 per year to “stop” climate change.

Bolton, alongside many savvy taxpayers, is right to worry when such an organization seeking to manage a $100 billion a year fund based on dodgy science is at the same time demanding immunity from prosecution. Can you think of a better recipe for corruption?

Worse yet, climatologists have never provided any credible evidence to back their doomsaying claims that Earth’s climate is ‘catastrophically’ warming due to human emissions of carbon dioxide. Indeed, if anything the most telling graph of U.S. temperatures, as per the latest NOAA/NCDC temperature dataset, shows cooling for the last 15 years (H/T: C3Headlines). Regardless of all such facts the Obama Administration strongly supports the Green Climate Fund and its tax-hiking objective.



Climate Fraud Akin to Banking Fraud?

But critics argue the worst crime has been inflicted upon the poorest among us. The least well off in our communities have been hit hardest by increased food and energy prices – all at a time when well-funded climatologists continue to oppose any and all independent auditing of their computer climate models. It is little wonder such ‘scientists’ are increasingly cast in the same shadow as Wall Street banksters. Worse still, latest evidence from independent researchers here, here and here suggests the greenhouse gas effect (GHE), the very cornerstone of global warming science, is also discredited.

We are seeing an increasing number of scientists insisting that it is not possible for CO2 - or any so-called “greenhouse” gas - to “trap” energy in Earth’s atmosphere – one of the most often cited claims of global warming alarmists. Critics of the GHE say the latest findings comport with satellite data and indicate that Earth emits as much infrared heat as it receives from the sun and thereby proves there is no magical atmospheric effect in play making our planet warmer than it would otherwise be. Despite these new findings dozens of government agencies aren’t interested in addressing the scientific flaws. Instead they remain firmly clamped to the teat of the climate cash cow while issuing crass statements that our atmosphere actually does act “like a greenhouse.”

Shamelessly, the sham is sustained wholesale in those well funded institutions that despite billions in funding are still using computer programs that model Earth as a flat disk lit by constant and frigid twilight. This government “flat earth modeling technique” has persisted since the early 1980′s when computers had far less processing power than today. But by sticking to their now antiquated calculating method a small and diminishing clique of climatologists think they can still get away with a fudge factor in their calculations that accounts for the additional heat they say is the “trapped” energy of the GHE.

For too long the tight-knit climate science community has been conducting a phony debate that never questions the so-called “settled science” of the GHE and only disputes the amount of warming from CO2 – a monumental intellectual travesty. But 21st Century satellite and computing power is leaving the charlatans with no room to hide their bad accounting practices.

Adept critics say that by sticking to their outmoded flat earth physics formula climatologists thus avoid the otherwise inconvenient fact that the sun actually shines on only half the planet. Is this important? Yes, because by continuing to treat Earth as if it were a flat disk is a needless statistical anomaly (or perhaps a deliberate trick?) in our age of super computers that merely serves to hide the fact that all gases in our atmosphere help to distribute solar energy around the globe and thus cool our planet. Without such gases the sun-facing side of our earth would become unbearably hot and the dark-side of our earth would be unbearably cold; an undeniable moderating effect by those gases (including carbon dioxide) that counters the pseudo scientific claims of the UN that more CO2 in the atmosphere results in more warming.

As eminent South African professor, Will Alexander recently stated (14 May 2012):

“The real tragedy is that the global warming community have showed no signs of changing their ways and entering into multidisciplinary discussions in a field where they have neither knowledge nor experience. Do they not realise that they have antagonised those of us in the engineering and applied sciences to the extent that we no longer trust their motives based on their attempts to silence all those who have contrarian views, and their deliberate departures from the truth?“

Freethinkers Oppose Flat Earth Climate Physics

Independent scientists such as those at Principia Scientific International (PSI) echo Professor Alexander’s words. It is concerned specialists from outside scientific disciplines and better skilled in math and thermodynamics who are the most outspoken. They say there is no excuse for the continued use of any computer model that treats Earth as a flat disk. They argue it is this ‘flat Earth physics,’ left uncorrected for so long, that has grown like a cancer infecting all corners of the infant science of ‘climatology.’

Now the penny drops with the UNFCCC. They understand that climate scientists have failed to prove their man-made global hypothesis and are facing increased legal scrutiny. Lawyers are sharpening their legal minds to dissect from the UN’s bloated climate science body the malignant tumor of man-made global warming. If the UNFCCC legal immunity gambit can be resisted we may yet see criminal prosecutions for the worst offenders in the climate fraud.

Regardless of any such remedy Third World starvation - a byproduct of asinine international climate policy over biofuels – will further increase as basic food staples continue to disappear. Such “progress” inflicted on us by the climate strategists to needlessly cut carbon emissions, has already accounted for the irrecoverable loss of six percent of all arable land. Thanks to the greed and hubris of a rich elite eager to profit from trade in carbon credits, global hunger skyrockets unabated and the masses remain otherwise duped by a dilettante mainstream media that still wants to believe it was for the noble cause of “sustainability” and “saving the planet.”

SOURCE (See the original for links)





Huge Australian marine reserve under fire

THE Coalition has promised to review the world's largest single marine reserve off the Queensland coast and warned it would cost Labor seats at the next election.

The Federal Government's 3.1 million sq km national marine reserve, stretching from the tip of Cape York to near Bundaberg, was yesterday welcomed by the tourism industry and environmentalists but slammed by fishing groups.

Nationals Senator Ron Boswell said the reserves would cost Labor marginal seats and the Coalition would review the network, which including about one million sq km of the Coral Sea off Queensland.

But federal Environment Minister Tony Burke said Labor was confident the issue would not prove political poison.

He said virtually all concerns of amateur fishers had been met by providing a large area outside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park for fishing.

Conceding long-line fishers would be the worst affected, Mr Burke said boundaries had been drawn to follow the shape of reefs - a bonus for charter boats and divers, although it would affect spear fishers. About $100 million would be needed to pay out fishermen nationally.

The proposal has angered commercial fishermen, who have warned the decision will shut down business and cost Australians more to buy their favourite seafood imported from China or Vietnam.

The Australian Marine Alliance released a cost-benefit analysis saying it would devastate the country's coastal communities at a $4.35 billion cost and hit 36,000 jobs for "little if any environmental benefit".

In Cairns alone, charter boat operators, game boats, aquarium collectors, spearfishing tours and commercial fisherman estimate it will cost them up to $60 million.

Skipper Graham Johnstone, who headlined the infamous Marlin Wars of the late 1970s, declared the industry would be "back on the warpath". "They think we are a soft touch," said Mr Johnston, one of the pioneers of the north's promotion as an international mecca for black marlin fishing. "We are looking into an abyss and we will not accept them meddling in our affairs."

Daniel McCarthy, president of the Cairns Professional Gamefishing Association, said members felt hijacked by the green lobby in Canberra. "What are we protecting it from?" Mr McCarthy said. "It is not about protection but about exclusion. "It'll end up a huge fattening paddock for poachers."

Queensland Tourism Industry Council chief executive Daniel Gschwind said most concerns on better protection of reefs, dive sites and game boat access had been met and this was welcome.

SOURCE

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