Quaking Conservative

Inconvenient Truths

2011-12-10T20:56:00.001-06:00

Top 10 Inconvenient Truths about Global Warming

by Human Events

12/10/2011

Global warming alarmists are getting a chilly reception these days as the public is starting to catch on to something that we have been yelling about for years: The whole thing is a scam. And here are the reasons why: The Top 10 Inconvenient Truths about Global Warming.

1. Climategate, Part 2: A second, massive batch of damaging e-mails has been released that casts into question the scientific integrity of climate researchers. In the e-mails, a key group of climate scientists made clear they had a predetermined goal to prove man-made global warming will have dire consequences. References are made to hiding evidence and destroying e-mails, to computer models that aren’t accurate, and some even criticized scientists who are “not helping the cause.” These scientists can’t be trusted, nor do their theories live up to the oft-described label of “settled science.”

2. Evidence of natural causes: Evidence is growing that the small amount of warming seen in the 1980s and 1990s was caused by natural events and was not “man-made.” Prominent scientists have advanced theories that solar eruptions, tidal activity and other natural factors have warming tendencies. Considering the Earth has always had periods of warming and cooling (remember the Ice Age?), why would an increase of 0.8 degrees Celsius over a hundred years be of such concern?

3. Skeptical scientists: Despite the smug claims that man-made global warming is “settled science,” there are plenty of prominent scientists who take exception. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever resigned from his post at the American Physical Society, saying the global temperature has been “amazingly stable,” while condemning the group’s stand that evidence for global warming was “incontrovertible.” And over a thousand international scientists have added their names to a list of those disagreeing with global-warming tenets.

4. Flat temperatures: If you want a laugh, go to the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center near Laurel, Md., run by the U.S. Geological Survey, and look at its global warming exhibit. Installed in the 1990s, it contains a graphic of future temperature gains, with predictions soaring over the next decades. Fifteen years of reality show their dire forecasts were wrong as temperatures instead plateaued.

5. False predictions: Global warming alarmists consistently make predictions that turn out false. After several years of mild winters during the early 2000s in the Northeast, the true-believers bemoaned that snow was gone forever—until the region was socked several years later with a string of severe winters with deep snowfall. Katrina was said to be a harbinger of massive hurricanes, glaciers were supposedly going to disappear by 2035, rainforests were endangered, polar bears dying. All of these are outright falsehoods refuted by evidence.

6. Ground station scandal: Scientists seeking to prove global warming (see No. 1) have been frustrated by the failure of temperatures (see No. 4) to match their vaunted computer models. Their solution hasn’t been to adjust their theories, but to fudge the data. Witness how temperature-monitoring stations around the globe have been eliminated, mostly from colder areas, while remaining stations are more likely placed near urban areas, skewing the data.

7. Economic impact: In order to pacify the climate alarmists, the United States would have to accept the prospect of a long-term moribund economy. Their plan to “save” the planet includes the fantasy of green jobs which, even when heavily subsided, can’t compete in the marketplace. Their cap-and-trade plan would have raised energy costs. Now, Hollywood stars are giving voice to blocking a pipeline that would provide thousands of jobs.

8. Benefits of warmth: A little warming isn’t necessarily a bad thing. What’s wrong about a longer growing season in Northern Europe, a thawed Northwest Passage in Canada, or easier energy extraction in Siberia? Not to mention the economic impact of lower heating bills in New England.

9. Public support drops: For awhile, aided by a compliant media, global warming advocates were successful in swinging public opinion to their cause. No more. Acceptance of global warming as a top concern has steadily been falling, far behind jobs, the economy and immigration, and not even landing in the Top 10 issues for Americans in a recent Rasmussen poll.

10. Hypocrisy: UN delegates jet into Durban, South Africa, to wine and dine like royalty at the latest global warming confab. Al Gore cashes in, making millions by profiteering on the alarm caused by his highly inaccurate An Inconvenient Truth. Hollywood stars denounce the masses while creating enormous carbon footprints. The hypocrisy is so thick that even a dose of global warming couldn’t cut through the fog.

Your Hard Earned Tax Dollars at Work

2011-12-10T11:12:00.001-06:00

Government Waste: 20 Of The Craziest Things That The U.S. Government Is Spending Money On

You are not going to believe some of the things that the U.S. government is spending money on. According to a shocking new report, U.S. taxpayer money is being spent to study World of Warcraft, to study how Americans find love on the Internet, and to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam. Not only that, but money from the federal government is also being used to renovate a pizzeria in Iowa and to help a library in Tennessee host video game parties. These are just some of the examples in a new report on government waste from Senator Tom Coburn entitled "Wastebook 2010". Even as tens of millions of American families find themselves suffering through the worst economic downturn in modern history, the U.S. government continues to spend money on some of the craziest and most frivolous things imaginable. Every single year articles are written and news stories are done about the horrific government waste that is taking place and yet every single year it just keeps getting worse. So just what in the world is going on here?

It almost seems as though Congress actually enjoys inventing new ways to waste U.S. taxpayer money. It seems nearly inconceivable that anyone could keep a straight face while trying to justify spending money on many of the things in the list below.

At a time when the U.S. national debt is closing in on 14 trillion dollars, government waste just seems more out of control than ever. The following are 20 of the craziest things that the U.S. government is spending money on....

#1 A total of $3 million has been granted to researchers at the University of California at Irvine so that they can play video games such as World of Warcraft. The goal of this "video game research" is reportedly to study how "emerging forms of communication, including multiplayer computer games and online virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life can help organizations collaborate and compete more effectively in the global marketplace."

#2 The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave the University of New Hampshire $700,000 this year to study methane gas emissions from dairy cows.

#3 $615,000 was given to the University of California at Santa Cruz to digitize photos, T-shirts and concert tickets belonging to the Grateful Dead.

#4 A professor at Stanford University received $239,100 to study how Americans use the Internet to find love. So far one of the key findings of this "research" is that the Internet is a safer and more discreet way to find same-sex partners.

#5 The National Science Foundation spent $216,000 to study whether or not politicians "gain or lose support by taking ambiguous positions."

#6 The National Institutes of Health spent approximately $442,340 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.

#7 Approximately $1 million of U.S. taxpayer money was used to create poetry for the Little Rock, New Orleans, Milwaukee and Chicago zoos. The goal of the "poetry" is to help raise awareness on environmental issues.

#8 The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs spent $175 million during 2010 to maintain hundreds of buildings that it does not even use. This includes a pink, octagonal monkey house in the city of Dayton, Ohio.

#9 $1.8 million of U.S. taxpayer dollars went for a "museum of neon signs" in Las Vegas, Nevada.

#10 $35 million was reportedly paid out by Medicare to 118 "phantom" medical clinics that never even existed. Apparently these "phantom" medical clinics were established by a network of criminal gangs as a way to defraud the U.S. government.

#11 The Conservation Commission of Monkton, Vermont got $150,000 from the federal government to construct a "critter crossing". Thanks to U.S. government money, the lives of "thousands" of migrating salamanders are now being saved.

#12 In California, one park received $440,000 in federal funds to perform "green energy upgrades" on a building that has not been used for a decade.

#13 $440,955 was spent this past year on an office for former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert that he rarely even visits.

#14 One Tennessee library was given $5,000 in federal funds to host a series of video game parties.

#15 The U.S. Census Bureau spent $2.5 million on a television commercial during the Super Bowl that was so poorly produced that virtually nobody understood what is was trying to say.

#16 A professor at Dartmouth University received $137,530 to create a "recession-themed" video game entitled "Layoff".

#17 The National Science Foundation gave the Minnesota Zoo over $600,000 so that they could develop an online video game called "Wolfquest".

#18 A pizzeria in Iowa was given $60,000 to renovate the pizzeria's facade and give it a more "inviting feel".

#19 The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave one enterprising group of farmers $30,000 to develop a tourist-friendly database of farms that host guests for overnight "haycations". This one sounds like something that Dwight Schrute would have dreamed up.

#20 Almost unbelievably, the National Institutes of Health was given $800,000 in "stimulus funds" to study the impact of a "genital-washing program" on men in South Africa.

In light of all this, is it any wonder why the approval rating of Congress recently hit another new record low?

According to the most recent Gallup poll, only 13 percent of Americans approve of the job that Congress is doing.

Just think about that - only 13 percent!

Our politicians seem very confused about why there is so much anger in the country today. Well, there are certainly a lot of reasons for it, including the fact that the U.S. economy is on the verge of collapse, but it certainly doesn't help that our government is basically flushing our tax dollars down the toilet and spending them on some of the most wasteful things imaginable.

It would be bad enough if the federal government was swimming in money, but the truth is that all of this waste is being committed at a time when the U.S. government is nearing bankruptcy.

Over the last 30 years, the U.S. national debt has gotten 13 times larger. We have accumulated the largest debt in the history of the world and there is no end in sight.

In fact, we are rapidly running out of people to borrow money from. According to the Wall Street Journal, in order to repay maturing bonds and finance the exploding budget deficit, the U.S. government will have to borrow 4.2 trillion dollars in 2011.

Eventually the rest of the world is going to lose confidence in the ability of the U.S. government to repay all of this debt. Once confidence in U.S. Treasuries is totally gone, and there are already signs this is starting to happen, the game will be over and the U.S. financial system will collapse.

But the U.S. Congress just continues to act like it is "business as usual" and the wasteful spending just continues to get worse. Someday historians will look back and think that we must have been a nation full of idiots and morons.

For decades our politicians have been spending us into oblivion, yet we keep sending the vast majority of them back to Washington D.C. every time an election rolls around and the mainstream media keeps assuring us that our "respected leaders" know exactly what they are doing and that everything is going to be okay somehow.

It is almost as if some sort of collective insanity has overtaken most Americans. The path we are on inevitably leads to national bankruptcy and the destruction of our financial system, but only a small percentage of the population seems to care.

Well, in the end we will reap what we have sown. Unfortunately, the economic pain that is coming is going to be devastating for all of us - including those of us who are awake and are trying desperately to change things.

Green Car Initiative Failing - Who Knew?

2011-12-10T11:00:00.002-06:00

No surprise here. Volt sales non-existent, battery makers closing their doors and solar companies going under. Government intervention in free markets is stupid any time it is tried. Courtesy of NRO/Planet Gore.

Shocker: Obama’s Green-Car-Initiative is Failing, Too

December 8, 2011 6:26 A.M.

By Greg Pollowitz

The Washington Post catches up to Henry Payne:

The Obama administration has poured roughly $5 billion in taxpayer funds into the electric-car industry, offering incentives to manufacturers, their suppliers and even car buyers who might want to go green.

But analysts say the risk is rising that taxpayers in many cases will not see a return on their money soon, if ever. Instead, they warn that some federally subsidized companies could be forced to shut down in coming months.

For President Obama, who has made clean-technology investment a hallmark of his job creation efforts, troubles in the electric-car sector pose a potential new political problem after the collapse of solar-panel maker Solyndra, which recently defaulted on a half-billion-dollar federal loan after filing for bankruptcy. The administration has channeled an estimated $80 billion of the stimulus recovery effort into grants and loans to clean energy and energy efficiency programs, companies and research.

Obama predicted in 2008 that green cars would create thousands of new U.S. jobs as demand soared. But in recent months, production lines and sales expectations have been dramatically scaled back.

A123 Systems, a battery maker that received $380 million in government support, announced recently that declining orders had forced layoffs. Instead of up to 3,000 new Michigan jobs as Obama and the company had predicted, it now has 690 employees.

Battery maker EnerDel, recipient of a a $118 million federal grant, took a hit when its key customer, electric-car maker Think, declared bankruptcy this year. Johnson Controls, which received a $299 million stimulus grant, opted to build one factory instead of two because of lower-than-projected demand, a company official said, and that one is now operating at half capacity.

California electric-car maker Aptera announced it was shutting its doors because of problems raising capital. And General Motors — whose moderately priced Volt was supposed to drive Obama’s push for 1 million alternative vehicles by 2015 — revealed last week that it would fall roughly 38 percent shy of its goal of selling 10,000 Volts this year.

“Many in this industry have jumped the gun on how aggressive the growth of electric vehicles will be,” said Kevin C. See, an analyst at Lux Research.

The rest here.

Government Waste & Fraud Cost You Money

2011-12-10T10:47:00.002-06:00

Food Stamp Fraud Costing Taxpayers Billions

Rachel Sheffield

December 9, 2011 at 3:15 pm

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The Washington Examiner recently reported that the two states bordering the nation’s capital are two of the five worst states for food stamp fraud.

The above table shows the inverse relationship between the number of food stamp recipients and the percentage of cases investigated for fraud in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. While the number of food stamp recipients has significantly increased (now up to a total of 45 million Americans) the percentage of cases investigated for fraud has not increased or even remained constant. The result is that fraudsters are duping taxpayers of millions, even billions, of dollars.

According to fiscal year 2010 data collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Maryland and Virginia distributed about $130 million in food stamps to individuals who were not eligible. For every $100 in benefits, those two states doled out $6.11 and $5.04, respectively, to those not eligible. The national average for that time was $3.05.

Inefficiency in the food stamp program spending is costing taxpayers billions. Of the $64.7 billion spent on the program last year (a record high that is only slated to increase), an overall $2.5 billion was spent on improper food stamp payments.

Another recent audit by the Department of Agriculture on the state of Kansas showed three major sources of inefficiency in the distribution of food stamp funds. While many recipients had invalid Social Security numbers and were double-dipping between federal and state programs, many of the recipients also happened to be dead. This has become a pervasive problem in the realm of government benefits. (The Social Security Administration also sends millions of dollars to recipients who are dead.)

Beyond protecting against fraud, the federal government should ensure that food stamps—not to mention the roughly 70 other federally funded welfare programs—are helping individuals become self-reliant rather than dependent on government. Half of food stamp recipients have received the benefit for 8.5 years or more.

Fortunately, some lawmakers are taking action. Representative Jim Jordan (R–OH) and Senator Jim DeMint (R–SC) are proposing legislation that, among other things, would attach work requirements to food stamps. The legislation would also roll back total welfare spending—which now stands at nearly $1 trillion per year—to pre-recession levels once the unemployment rate recedes to 6.5 percent.

Additionally, in a recent letter to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (the “super committee”), Senator Jeff Sessions (R–AL) pointed to the food stamp program as an area with great potential for reform:

Like welfare reform in the 1990’s, smart reforms to the food stamp program will improve outcomes and help more Americans achieve financial independence. Unmonitored welfare programs, over time, can hurt the very people we are seeking to help.

As Ronald Reagan noted in 1968, “We should measure welfare’s success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added.” He also stated in 1970 that “welfare’s purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.” Unfortunately, the federal welfare system fails to accomplish this purpose. Welfare reforms that promote work are key to achieving the goal of helping those in need become once again self-reliant and independent.

Eco-Fascists Show Up at Durban Conference

2011-12-10T10:14:00.002-06:00

UN Calls For Eco-Fascist World Government At Durban Summit

“International Climate Court of Justice” would force western nations to pay “climate debt”

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Friday, December 9, 2011

Bureaucrats at the UN Climate Summit in Durban have outlined plans for the most draconian, harebrained and madcap climate change treaty ever produced, under which the west would be mandated to respect “the rights of Mother Earth” by paying a “climate debt” which would act as a slush fund for bankrolling an all-powerful world government.

Even as the tattered shreds of whatever credibility global warming alarmists had left evaporate in the aftermath of Climategate 2.0, the monstrous bureaucracy behind ManBearPig continues to lurch forward.

Lord Christopher Monckton’s extensive report breaks down the key aspects of the current draft text.

“Here – and, as always, you heard it here first, for the mainstream media have conspired to keep secret the Madness of King Rajendra and his entire coterie of governmental and bureaucratic lunatics worldwide – is what the dribbling, twitching thrones and dominions, principalities and powers of the world will be asked to agree to,” he writes, adding that actual climate science has not been a topic of debate at the summit.

- The treaty calls for the west to achieve a 50% CO2 emissions reduction within the next eight years, a feat that would completely bankrupt the global economy and spark a new great depression, as well as a “more than 100%” reduction by 2050, which presumably could only be accomplished by killing billions of humans to prevent them from exhaling carbon dioxide.

“So, no motor cars, no coal-fired or gas-fired power stations, no aircraft, no trains. Back to the Stone Age, but without even the right to light a carbon-emitting fire in your caves,” writes Monckton.

- The text calls for a 2 degree Celsius drop in global temperatures, which as Monckton points out “would kill hundreds of millions” and herald a new ice age.

- The reduction in CO2 concentration the text calls for would actually begin to kill all plant life and trees on the planet because they need levels of carbon dioxide above 210 ppmv to survive.

- All military forces would be abolished because they contribute to climate change. Presumably the United Nations would then take on the role of world army to police the globe.

A d v e r t i s e m e n t

- The process will be enforced by an “International Climate Court of Justice” under a bureaucracy of world government that will force western nations to pay “climate debt,” as well as reparations to third world nations to pay for carbon cuts that wouldn’t be as drastic. The burden of “historical responsibility” has been applied to industrialized nations, implying they are guilty for whatever the weather decides to do and must be punished for it.

- All the money will be collected by the UN and whatever is left after they have taken their considerable cut will be doled out according to the wishes of UN bureaucrats. “As a senior UN diplomat told me last year, “The UN exists for only one purpose: to get more money. That, and that alone, is the reason why it takes such an interest in climate change,” writes Monckton.

- Environmental enforcement arms of the UN will be given the power of a global government in the name of fighting climate change. “The draft “agrees that common principles, modalities and procedures as well as the coordinating and oversight functions of the UNFCCC are needed” – in short, global centralization of political, economic and environmental power in the manicured hands of the Convention’s near-invisible but all-powerful secretariat. No provision is made for the democratic election of key members of the all-powerful secretariat – in effect, a world government – by the peoples of our planet,” writes Monckton.

- This world government will mandate that western nations submit reports every two years on their progress and then implement the measures demanded by the world government.

- The UN will create several new slush funds from which to enrich its coffers, including a tax on shipping and aviation fuel, a new “green climate fund” and a worldwide cap and trade. Most of the costs will be handed down to taxpayers.

This merely scratches the surface of what the UN is trying to include in its “legally-binding treaty,” which represents eco-fascism on steroids. Despite press reports that the text is once again likely to be rejected, Monckton points out that UN bureaucrats are confident they can get some form of deal rammed through on this occasion.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.

Awwww. Bad News From Durban

2011-12-09T18:45:00.002-06:00

Climate change conference in trouble as China rejects proposals for new treaty

China's chief negotiator says proposals on final day of Durban talks were unacceptable as they would lead to the end of the Kyoto protocol.

John Vidal and Fiona Harvey in Durban
guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 December 2011 13.46 EST
Article history

Delegates at COP17. Photograph: Nic Bothma/EPA

The climate change talks in Durban were in trouble on Friday night as China's chief negotiator firmly rejected proposals for a new global treaty on greenhouse gas emissions.

Su Wei said the proposals were unacceptable because they would lead to the end of the Kyoto protocol, the world's only existing treaty stipulating emissions cuts. He told the Guardian: "The G77 [group of more than 100 developing countries] could not take this [proposal] as the basis for discussion. This is killing the Kyoto protocol. They want to finish the Kyoto protocol."

Seyni Nato, spokesman for the Africa group at the talks, said: "We are not happy with the [negotiating] text." He said he too feared the proposals as tabled would mean the end of the Kyoto protocol. However, he acknowledged: "This is only a first draft. We are in for a very long night."

Their words were at odds with the upbeat assessment given by European negotiators, who said the "tempo" of the negotiations had picked up and were moving in the direction of an agreement. They said it was untrue that the G77 had rejected the proposals, and that most developing countries were still in support.

Governments from 194 nations were wrangling into the early hours of the morning over what form any future agreement on global warming should take, and whether poor countries should carry legal obligations to cut their emissions, as well as the rich.

At stake was also the future of the Kyoto protocol, the only legal treaty forcing rich countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. If the talks collapse, the protocol will be in effect dead after its current provisions expire at the end of next year.

EU member states, with a handful of allies including Norway and Switzerland, are the only developed countries prepared to carry on with the Kyoto protocol. The US has always rejected the 1997 pact, and Japan, Canada and Russia have declared they will not take on new emissions targets under the protocol beyond 2012.

But the EU will only agree to a "second commitment period" covering emissions from 2012, probably until 2020, if other countries sign up to a "roadmap" for a new global agreement, to kick in from 2020.

If the roadmap were accepted, it would mean that all the world's major emitters – both developed and developing countries – would negotiate a new pact in 2015 to cut emissions from 2020 onwards.

From now until 2020, most of the world's governments – including all of the biggest emitters – are covered by their own national emissions-cutting targets. But these are voluntary and not legally binding, in the way the Kyoto protocol is. Although some governments, including the US, are happy to continue with a voluntary system, the EU and many developing nations are concerned that it is too open to political meddling, and allows countries too easily to renege on their commitments – and that could harm the climate. They are pushing for the new post-2020 agreement to be legally binding.

The US is unhappy with agreeing so far in advance that the outcome of years of negotiations should be legally binding, and China has long refused to take on international legally binding commitments while insisting that developed countries should do so, arguing that the rich world bears responsibility for most of the stock of emissions now in the atmosphere.

The EU was confident that it had the support of more than 120 countries, including major developing economies such as Brazil, South Africa, Argentina, many African countries and the world's least developed economies in pushing the deal through. However, under UN rules, every country must agree the text of any agreement for it to be passed.

Senator Inhofe Sends Greetings to the Durban Climate Change Gathering

2011-12-09T18:27:00.004-06:00

It's nice to see our government in action. Especially when it's addressing the important issue of globull warming. Statement follows below.

Hi. I’m Senator Jim Inhofe, a Republican senator from Oklahoma. Today I’m happy to bring you the good news about the complete collapse of the global warming movement and the failure of the Kyoto process, as world leaders meet for the United Nations global warming conference in Durban, South Africa. For the past decade, I have been the leader in the United States Senate standing up against global warming alarmism and cap and trade, which would have been the largest tax increase in the history of America. This victory is especially important today, as families in America and around the world continue to face really tough economic times. And tossing out any remote possibility of a U.N. global warming treaty is one of the most important things we can do for the economy.

I’m making this announcement from Washington, D.C., where I am confident that the only person left talking about global warming is me. The message from Washington to the U.N. delegates in South Africa is this, this week, could not be any clearer: you are being ignored.

Up in Flames!! Wind Too Much for Windmill

2011-12-09T18:06:00.001-06:00

Wind turbine bursts into flames as hurricane-force winds hit Scotland

The turbine in a North Ayrshire wind farm caught fire on Thursday afternoon as storms hit the country.

By Mike Farrell

08 December 2011 16:54 GMT

Fire: The wind turbine in North Ayrshire went up in flames on Thursday. Pic: © Stuart McMahon

A wind turbine went up in flames as gust of up to 160mph battered parts of Scotland.

The turbine in a North Ayrshire wind farm caught fire on Thursday afternoon.

Fire engines attended the blaze which died out after a matter of minutes at the wind farm situated above Ardrossan at around 3.40pm.

Ardrossan resident Stuart McMahon said the turbine had not been in operation due to the severe weather warning.

Mr McMahon, who captured the spectacular fire in photos, added: "I didn’t hear any explosion or anything, but my wife shouted for me to come down and see the fire.

"There are around 13 or 15 wind turbines in the farm above Ardrossan. They were all off today because of the high winds, so something has obviously shorted out and gone on fire.

"The fire was out quickly, but some debris fell from it and drifted quite a distance in the winds. The fire brigade are there, but the turbine was turning in the wind for a while after the fire."

Another resident, Tom Young, caught the blaze on video. He said: "Loads of fire engines and police have been called out, but the fire was out pretty quickly.

Climate Change: Political Fad

2011-12-09T17:55:00.003-06:00

Interesting stuff from PJ Media. Looks like the Buddhists fell for the AGW propaganda hook, line and sinker. Heh.

As the second wave of Climategate emails gums-up the Durban Climate Change Conference, it’s instructive to revisit the Buddhist position on climate change. In May of 2009 just before the first batch of Climategate emails hit, a group of 20 Buddhist teachers from all traditions released The Time to Act is Now: A Buddhist Declaration on Climate Change.

The authors urged members of the international Buddhist community to sign the document in the run-up to the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009. The Dalai Lama was the first to sign, endorsing a “sustainable” atmospheric carbon dioxide limit of no more than 350 parts per million.

The declaration is a peculiar document. At its core, Buddhism is the practice of cultivating compassion to dissipate preoccupation with one’s self — to experience the truth of impermanence by surrendering attachment to things, feelings, and perceptions.

Does the declaration mesh with Buddhism?

The declaration makes note of the “overwhelming” scientific consensus that human activity is triggering environmental breakdown on a global scale. It states with assurance that if humans continue on their current energy-consuming ways, half the species on the planet will be extinct by the end of this century.

To avert catastrophe, the declaration urges fundamental changes in Western civilization. It insists we “de-carbonize” energy systems “by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources that are limitless, benign, and harmonious with nature.” It calls for an end to all coal plant construction.

The document stresses that wind, solar, tidal, and geothermal power are sufficient to meet all of the world’s energy needs. If political leaders refuse to make these changes, putting the long-term good of humankind above the short-term benefits of fossil-fuel corporations, the declaration calls for “sustained campaigns of citizen action.”

The crisis is so pressing that the Dalai Lama indicated he would shelve the issue of Tibetan independence and Chinese oppression, and instead focus on the threats climate change poses to the glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau. This is according to leaked diplomatic cables between “His Holiness” and Timothy Roemer, U.S. ambassador to India.

The most disturbing aspect of this unwavering Buddhist stance is not so much the blindness it exhibits to the corruption, data manipulation and suppression, willful deception, intolerance, and even violent sadism infecting the climate change movement. It’s not even the scientific and evidentiary fallacies embedded in the declaration itself. (Example: The Himalayan glacier “crisis” the Dalai Lama notes was based largely on an environmental activist group’s press report and a typo. While some Himalayan glaciers appear to be in retreat, others are expanding, and there is no evidence to suggest that they will disappear by the end of this century as some climate alarmists argue.)

Also contrary to the declaration, science is never certain and isn’t the result of “consensus.” The latest findings from CERN indicating that neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light potentially upend the “consensus” of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

The declaration insists that alternative energy sources are “benign.” Far from being “limitless” and “sustainable,” wind, geothermal, and solar power systems consume vast amounts of very limited land and groundwater resources. Windmill and solar panel manufacturing and maintenance are energy-intensive, generate toxic chemicals, and require mining processes that are often environmentally destructive. Windmills also kill thousands of birds annually.

While the declaration’s suggested abolition of carbon-based fuels might thrill most Buddhists, in reality it would likely unleash a plague of famine and disease to rival the darkest scenarios posited by the climate change alarmists. Fertilizers and pesticides that maintain global food supplies are almost exclusively derived from petroleum. As are virtually all of the life-saving drugs and many of the medical supplies used to treat injury and disease.

Also: fossil fuels are crucial to providing reliable base load power, or the minimum amount of energy required to power essential services such as hospitals, water treatment plants, communications, and traffic signals and airports. Would the Buddhist community accept mass starvation, chaos, injury, infection, and disease as the price of assuaging its offense over widespread fossil fuel use?

The most disturbing element of the declaration: it is in direct conflict with Buddhism itself.

Among the central tenets of Buddhism is the reality of impermanence and the ignorance generated by ego-consciousness. The ego not only attempts to cement experience into permanence, it strives for control over its surroundings, struggling to conform reality to its personal perceptions. This leads to suffering.

But while the term “climate change” acknowledges impermanence — the climate after all is constantly in flux — the movement itself obsesses over maintaining ill-defined or arbitrary points of stability. The core implication of the climate change movement is that there exists some ideal average global temperature that we must strive at all costs to maintain. What is this temperature? No one ever says. Most likely it’s the average global temperature measured in 1967 — the Summer of Love — since the climate change priesthood consists mostly of Baby Boomers who seem reflexively nostalgic for their “Youthquake” years.

The declaration also implies that humans have the capability via massive citizen action to dramatically alter the Earth’s climate — to stop planetary change through the sheer force of human effort. What is this if not the height of conceit — ego on steroids?

It’s a conceit that assumes we know far more about the ebbs and flows of the planet than we actually do; one that presumes the narrow parameters that describe the Earth at this moment are the benchmark of how the Earth must always be — “sustainability.”

Example: the declaration assigns a “sustainable” atmospheric CO2 limit of 350 parts per million. Yet over the course of geological history, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have varied widely, reaching as high as 2,000 parts per million during the Jurassic Period, for example. The declaration’s 350 ppm limit is actually a low-end outlier in the context of geological history.

In fact for much of the 19th century CO2 concentrations were higher — at times more than 400 ppm — than they are today. Yet the Earth and life survived, even thrived, during these episodes. Far from an awareness of impermanence, the declaration seems to reflect a fetish for contrived stasis.

Our “ecological emergency” stems from a sense of disconnection from the Earth itself, the declaration states — from the illusion of separateness. But doesn’t the declaration reinforce that sense of separateness by emphasizing the illusion that humans can control the climate? Doesn’t it “disconnect” humans from the Earth by suggesting they are a disturbance in the natural order rather than a part of it? If the Earth is indeed becoming “sick” (whatever that means) as a result of human activity, isn’t that simply another manifestation of the planet’s dynamism and impermanence?

After all, the Earth has “sickened” itself many times over the course of geological history. Massive toxic gas releases from its bowels via supervolcanoes have resulted in catastrophic destruction and mass extinctions. “Ecological emergencies” far more severe than anything envisioned by the climate change movement are a regular feature of the global lifecycle. Far from extraordinary, species extinction is a constant: 99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are extinct. Virtually all became extinct without the disturbances of human activity.

To reach the conclusions posited in the Buddhist Declaration on Climate Change, you must discard the Buddhist principles of the truth of impermanence and the illusions of ego. The alleged climate change crisis stems from the three poisons of greed, ill will, and delusion, notes the declaration. It is disheartening that the Buddhist community seems unaware of these festering poisons in the climate change movement.

Another Global Warming Myth Exposed

2010-12-07T09:56:00.003-06:00

Add this one to growing list of errors and propaganda spewed by the IPCC. Globull Warming is dead. RIP

Deforestation 'not so important for climate change'

18:45 06 December 2010 by Fred Pearce, Cancun, Mexico
For similar stories, visit the Climate Change Topic Guide

Climate negotiations were dealt a bombshell at the weekend when ecologists reported that carbon emissions from the destruction of tropical forests are probably only half previous estimates.

If we are emitting less carbon dioxide from deforestation that's got to be good news, surely. The trouble is the findings seriously question the only success so far of the UN negotiations on curbing climate change under way in Cancun, Mexico. If cutting down trees emits far less CO₂ than we thought, where's the incentive to stop chopping?

This is a dismaying thought when negotiators feel they are close to a deal on compensating tropical countries for curbing deforestation.

Four years ago, the UN's Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change estimated that deforestation was responsible for up to 20 per cent of CO₂ emissions. A more recent study by Richard Houghton of Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, revised that down to 15 per cent for the period 2000 to 2005. Both estimates relied on national declarations of forest loss made to the UN, coupled with simple estimates to convert that loss into carbon emissions.

But now ecologists at Winrock International, a respected US consultancy based in Arlington, Virginia, whose work was funded by the World Bank and the Norwegian government, says a more detailed analysis puts the figure for 2000 to 2005 at around 8 per cent, with a possible range between 5 and 12 per cent. Nancy Harris of Winrock said in Cancun that the estimate was "the lowest reported to date".

The analysis, which has yet to be formally published, used more than 3 million data points from a laser-radar satellite measurement technique known as lidar and 4000 carbon inventories from forest plots on the ground. Harris said it did not include forest regrowth after deforested land had been abandoned by farmers, which could reduce the figure further.

Brazil cuts

The statistics only cover the period to 2005, when a fault in the Landsat satellite restricted new data on forest cover. More recent figures could be even lower, since some countries such as Brazil are believed to have dramatically reduced their rates of deforestation.

But Harris estimates that up to 2005, Brazil's emissions, at 1.6 billion tonnes of CO₂ a year, were four times that of the next nation, Indonesia – a much bigger difference that other studies have found. The third biggest source of deforestation emissions, she says, is Malaysia (mostly from its provinces on the island of Borneo), followed by Argentina, Burma and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Some forest scientists New Scientist spoke to questioned the idea that deforestation is not so important to climate change. They said that while the figures may accurately reflect deforestation by farmers, they may underestimate the carbon emissions from logging and the conversion of natural forests to plantations such as palm oil.

Under UN definitions palm oil can count as forest. The scientists believe this may be why Winrock's estimate of emissions in southeast Asia is so low.

Nonetheless, if the new figures accurately reflect the amount of carbon being emitted from changes in land use, then they do indeed threaten to undermine one of the few success stories in the climate negotiations – the talks on REDD, for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest degradation.

Global Warming Strikes Florida!!

2010-12-07T08:59:00.003-06:00

Hat tip to the Sun Sentinel in south Florida. Its early December an its in the low teens in Chicago. Record cold now in Florida. Is it cold in Cancun?

FORT LAUDERDALE —

South Floridians woke up Tuesday morning to temperatures hovering around the very low 40s that sometimes felt like the mid-30s because of the wind chill factor.

In Fort Lauderdale, a low temperature record of 42 degrees for Dec. 7 that had been in place for 169 years was broken, said Dan Gregoria, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Miami.

"It was at 7:24 a.m. when the temperature reached 40 degrees," Gregoria said.

Clutching a steaming cup of coffee and rushing to her job at a downtown bank, Roxanne Moss, 48, said, "It's nice, it's a change, but I hope it doesn't last long."

Raul Urbina, 43, spends much of his workday outdoors, tending to the landscaping and maintenance of some Fort Lauderdale businesses, and finds exceedingly cold temperatures bothersome.

"I work outside every day," he said. "It makes everything more difficult."

Broward County officials declared a state of emergency because of the cold weather early Monday afternoon, while Palm Beach County activated its cold weather emergency shelter plan. Both actions prompted homeless shelters to open early to crowds seeking a warm place to sleep.

Agriculture businesses were also preparing for potential heavy damage to crops.

The arrival of a "modified Arctic air mass," or cold air from the north, was expected to lower temperatures to the mid- to upper 20s in the inner parts of Palm Beach County from 1 a.m. to 9 a.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, the weather service said. During the same period, Broward and Miami-Dade counties are forecast to reach the lower to mid-30s.

Early Tuesday, most agents with the Palm Beach County Cooperative Extension Service went into the fields to check on crops in the Glades and along the coast, according to agency Director Audrey Norman.

It's still too early to measure the impact of the frigid weather, Norman said. The agency will likely have a better idea Tuesday afternoon.

By late afternoon Monday, small crowds were already appearing at the front steps of shelters throughout Broward and Palm Beach counties.

Workers at the Salvation Army in Fort Lauderdale spent most of the day cooking burgers and rolling out mattresses. To keep from overcrowding, staffers planned to bus shelter-seekers to three different facilities, said Lilly Gallardo, the group's social service director.

Staffers were hoping this week's cold spell doesn't stay as long as a cold stretch last January and February that left shelters filled beyond capacity.

"Last year we had people sleeping in hallways," said Gallardo. "We'll be prepared regardless."

William Macer, who says he has been homeless for several months, was among those at the Salvation Army seeking shelter.

"I know there are many people who are going to suffer tonight," he said. "A lot of them are afraid to seek services."

Freezing temperatures also endanger millions of dollars of agricultural crops.

At Runway Growers in Dania Beach, owner Jamie Hayes spent Monday afternoon on his tractor spraying water and protective chemicals for his crops and plants. The grower lost about $500,000 in damaged crops in January.

"This is never good news," he said. "We are always going to expect some damage, but hopefully nothing like last winter."

Steve Bedner, of Bedner's Farm Fresh Market west of Boynton Beach, covered his small squash, cucumber and bean crops overnight, but expects his commercial pepper crop to survive the low temperatures.

"Normally, we wouldn't have this stuff growing this time of year, but we do grow a minimal amount for the market so everybody can have fresh produce," he said.

In Palm Beach County, helicopters were standing by to keep warm air circulating over crops if cold winds become a problem overnight, said Arthur Kirstein, of the county's Cooperative Extension Service.

"We feel like if we can get through tonight, then tomorrow we'll have similar conditions, but maybe with less wind," said John Hundley, of Hundley Farms east of Belle Glade.

Schools remained open Tuesday, and the Broward school district on Monday sent notices to parents encouraging students to wear warm clothes, such as caps and mittens.

In Fort Lauderdale, the coldest temperature for a Dec. 7 was recorded 169 years ago — at 42 degrees.

For Dec. 7, the record low for Palm Beach County is 36, set in 1937; Miami's record is 35, set in 1937. (Fort Lauderdale had a higher temp for a record because its sensor was closer to the coast, where the weather tends to stay slightly warmer.)

For Dec. 8, the record low for Palm Beach County is 43, set in 1937; Fort Lauderdale is 43, set in 1959; and Miami is 38, set in 1937.

The weather service also posted a fire alert — mainly for brush fires — from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday and Tuesday. The increased fire risk stems from the combination of warm daytime temperatures, low humidity and strong winds.

Global Warming Halted!!

2010-12-07T08:49:00.004-06:00

An inconvenient truth from the Daily Mail in Great Britain. This was brought out at the CCC (Cancun Climate Conference). Don't hold your breath if you're waiting to see MSM coverage of this little nugget.

What happened to the 'warmest year on record': The truth is global warming has halted

By David Rose
Last updated at 4:17 PM on 5th December 2010

A year ago tomorrow, just before the opening of the UN Copenhagen world climate summit, the British Meteorological Office issued a confident prediction. The mean world temperature for 2010, it announced, 'is expected to be 14.58C, the warmest on record' - a deeply worrying 0.58C above the 19611990 average.

World temperatures, it went on, were locked inexorably into an everrising trend: 'Our experimental decadal forecast confirms previous indications that about half the years 2010-2019 will be warmer than the warmest year observed so far - 1998.'

Met Office officials openly boasted that they hoped by their statements to persuade the Copenhagen gathering to impose new and stringent carbon emission limits - an ambition that was not to be met.

Winter's icy grip: Drivers and pedestrians battle through blizzards in Kent last week

Last week, halfway through yet another giant, 15,000delegate UN climate jamboree, being held this time in the tropical splendour of Cancun in Mexico, the Met Office was at it again.

Never mind that Britain, just as it was last winter and the winter before, was deep in the grip of a cold snap, which has seen some temperatures plummet to minus 20C, and that here 2010 has been the coolest year since 1996.

Globally, it insisted, 2010 was still on course to be the warmest or second warmest year since current records began.

But buried amid the details of those two Met Office statements 12 months apart lies a remarkable climbdown that has huge implications - not just for the Met Office, but for debate over climate change as a whole.

Read carefully with other official data, they conceal a truth that for some, to paraphrase former US VicePresident Al Gore, is really inconvenient: for the past 15 years, global warming has stopped.

This isn't meant to be happening. Climate science orthodoxy, as promulgated by bodies such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), says that temperatures have risen and will continue to rise in step with increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, and make no mistake, with the rapid industrialisation of China and India, CO2 levels have kept on going up.

According to the IPCC and its computer models, without enormous emission cuts the world is set to get between two and six degrees warmer during the 21st Century, with catastrophic consequences.

Last week at Cancun, in an attempt to influence richer countries to agree to give £20billion immediately to poorer ones to offset the results of warming, the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute warned that global temperatures would be 6.5 degrees higher by 2100, leading to rocketing food prices and a decline in production.

Grip of winter: A woman and girl sit under a tree on a bench in South Weald Park, Brentwood, Essex, this week

The maths isn't complicated. If the planet were going to be six degrees hotter by the century's end, it should be getting warmer by 0.6 degrees each decade; if two degrees, then by 0.2 degrees every ten years. Fortunately, it isn't.

Actually, with the exception of 1998 - a 'blip' year when temperatures spiked because of a strong 'El Nino' effect (the cyclical warming of the southern Pacific that affects weather around the world) - the data on the Met Office's and CRU's own websites show that global temperatures have been flat, not for ten, but for the past 15 years.

They go up a bit, then down a bit, but those small rises and falls amount to less than their measuring system's acknowledged margin of error. They have no statistical significance and reveal no evidence of any trend at all.

When the Met Office issued its December 2009 preThere-diction, it was clearly expecting an even bigger El Nino spike than happened in 1998 - one so big that it would have dragged up the decade's average.

But though it was still successfully trying to influence media headlines during Cancun last week by saying that 2010 might yet end up as the warmest year, the small print reveals the Met Office climbdown. Last year it predicted that the 2010 average would be 14.58C. Last week, this had been reduced to 14.52C.

That may not sound like much. But when one considers that by the Met Office's own account, the total rise in world temperatures since the 1850s has been less than 0.8 degrees, it is quite a big deal. Above all, it means the trend stays flat.

Meanwhile, according to an analysis yesterday by David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, 2010 had only two unusually warm months, March and April, when El Nino was at its peak.

The data from October to the end of the year suggests that when the final figure is computed, 2010 will not be the warmest year at all, but at most the third warmest, behind both 1998 and 2005.

There is no dispute that the world got a little warmer over some of the 20th Century. (Between 1940 and the early Seventies, temperatures actually fell.)

But little by little, the supposedly settled scientific ' consensus' that the temperature rise is unprecedented, that it is set to continue to disastrous levels, and that it is all the fault of human beings, is starting to fray.

Earlier this year, a paper by Michael Mann - for years a leading light in the IPCC, and the author of the infamous 'hockey stick graph' showing flat temperatures for 2,000 years until the recent dizzying increase - made an extraordinary admission: that, as his critics had always claimed, there had indeed been a ' medieval warm period' around 1000 AD, when the world may well have been hotter than it is now.

Other research is beginning to show that cyclical changes in water vapour - a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide - may account for much of the 20th Century warming.

Even Phil Jones, the CRU director at the centre of last year's 'Climategate' leaked email scandal, was forced to admit in a littlenoticed BBC online interview that there has been 'no statistically significant warming' since 1995.

One of those leaked emails, dated October 2009, was from Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the US government's National Centre for Atmospheric Research and the IPCC's lead author on climate change science in its monumental 2002 and 2007 reports.

He wrote: 'The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can't.'

After the leak, Trenberth claimed he still believed the world was warming because of CO2, and that the 'travesty' was not the 'pause' but science's failure to explain it.

The question now emerging for climate scientists and policymakers alike is very simple. Just how long does a pause have to be before the thesis that the world is getting hotter because of human activity starts to collapse?

Global Warming Strikes Britain!!

2010-11-29T14:01:00.003-06:00

Britain’s worst November snowfall for decades shut schools and roads from Cornwall to Scotland as forecasters warned that Siberian winds could bring temperatures as low as minus 20C in the coming days.

Deep snow and freezing conditions in the North East and Scotland were causing widespread travel disruption today, with icy temperatures everywhere else creating similar problems for commuters.

There is no sign of a let-up in the wintry weather, with bitter winds increasing and more parts of the UK including London facing snow in the coming days.

So far Scotland and the North East have been worst hit by snow, with more than 40cm in parts, and police have advised people to stay indoors for all but essential travel.

2010-11-11T14:06:00.003-06:00

Here's another tasty morsel for the AGW flat earth society. Just like Spain who ruined their economy with a "Green" program it seems the Aussies are having issues with their efforts to counteract the global climate catastrophe. Oooops. Lifted from NRO, the Planet Gore Blog.

Australia’s Solar-Rebate Program: Failure

Some honesty here:

“The Australian Government ran a renewable energy program in the 2000s that provided rebates to householders who acquired solar photovoltaic (PV) energy systems. Originally called the Photovoltaic Rebate Program (PVRP), it was rebranded the Solar Homes and Communities Program (SHCP) in November 2007.

“This paper evaluates both the PVRP and SHCP using measures of effectiveness and fairness. It finds that the program was a major driver of a more than six-fold increase in PV generation capacity in the 2000s; however, the increase was off a low base and, in 2010, solar PV’s share of the Australian electricity market was still only around 0.1 per cent. The data suggest there were equity issues associated with the program, with 66 per cent of all successful applicants residing in postal areas that were rated as medium-high and high on a socio-economic status (SES) scale.

“The program was also environmentally ineffective and costly. It will reduce emissions by 0.09 MtCO2-e/yr over the life of the rebated PV systems (0.015 per cent of Australia’s 2008 emissions) at an average social abatement cost of between $257/tCO2-e and $301/tCO2-e. Finally, the program appears to have had a relatively minor impact as an industry assistance measure, with much of the associated benefit flowing to foreign manufacturers and most of the domestic benefit being focused outside of the high value- added manufacturing areas.

The whole report can be read here

Chicago Climate Credit Exchange - CCX - The Goracle Takes It On The Chin!!

2010-11-11T13:25:00.005-06:00

This didn't receive much coverage last week but its worth noting as more fallout from the Dem smackdown a week ago last Tuesday. Read & enjoy. Courtesy of Investors Business Daily (IBD). Heh.

The $10 Trillion Climate Fraud

Posted 04/28/2010 07:11 PM ET

Al Gore is co-founder of an investment management firm that is now the fifth-largest shareholder in the Chicago Climate Exchange. AP View Enlarged Image

Cap-And-Trade: While senators froth over Goldman Sachs and derivatives, a climate trading scheme being run out of the Chicago Climate Exchange would make Bernie Madoff blush. Its trail leads to the White House.

Lost in the recent headlines was Al Gore's appearance Monday in Denver at the annual meeting of the Council of Foundations, an association of the nation's philanthropic leaders.

"Time's running out (on climate change)," Gore told them. "We have to get our act together. You have a unique role in getting our act together."

Gore was right that foundations will play a key role in keeping the climate scam alive as evidence of outright climate fraud grows, just as they were critical in the beginning when the Joyce Foundation in 2000 and 2001 provided the seed money to start the Chicago Climate Exchange. It started trading in 2003, and what it trades is, essentially, air. More specifically perhaps, hot air.

The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) advertises itself as "North America's only cap-and-trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide." Barack Obama served on the board of the Joyce Foundation from 1994 to 2002 when the CCX startup grants were issued. As president, pushing cap-and-trade is one of his highest priorities. Now isn't that special?

Few Americans have heard of either entity. The Joyce Foundation was originally the financial nest egg of a widow whose family had made millions in the now out-of-favor lumber industry.

After her death, the foundation was run by philanthropists who increasingly dedicated their giving to liberal causes, including gun control, environmentalism and school changes.

Currently, CCX members agree to a voluntary but legally binding agreement to regulate greenhouse gases.

The CCX provides the mechanism in trading the very pollution permits and carbon offsets the administration's cap-and-trade proposals would impose by government mandate.

Thanks to Fox News' Glenn Beck, we have learned a lot about CCX, not the least of which is that its founder, Richard Sandor, says he knew Obama well back in the day when the Joyce Foundation awarded money to the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, where Sandor was a research professor.

Sandor estimates that climate trading could be "a $10 trillion dollar market." It could very well be, if cap-and-trade measures like Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer are signed into law, making energy prices skyrocket, and as companies buy and sell permits to emit those six "greenhouse" gases.

So lucrative does this market appear, it attracted the attention of London-based Generation Investment Management, which purchased a stake in CCX and is now the fifth-largest shareholder.

As we noted last year, Gore is co-founder of Generation Investment Management, which sells carbon offsets of dubious value that let rich polluters continue to pollute with a clear conscience.

Other founders include former Goldman Sachs partner David Blood, as well as Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris, also of Goldman Sachs. In 2006, CCX received a big boost when another investor bought a 10% stake on the prospect of making a great deal of money for itself. That investor was Goldman Sachs, now under the gun for selling financial instruments it knew were doomed to fail.

The actual mechanism for trading on the exchange was purchased and patented by none other than Franklin Raines, who was CEO of Fannie Mae at the time.

Raines profited handsomely to the tune of some $90 million by buying and bundling bad mortgages that led to the collapse of the American economy. His interest in climate trading is curious until one realizes cap-and-trade would make housing costlier as well.

Amazingly, none of these facts came up at Senate hearings on Goldman Sachs' activities, which may be nothing more than Ross Perot's famous "gorilla dust," meant to distract us from the real issues.

The climate trading scheme being stitched together here will do more damage than Goldman Sachs, AIG and Fannie Mae combined. But it will bring power and money to its architects.

Down the Memory Hole

2009-11-29T15:38:00.003-06:00

Looks like the eggheads took a page out of the ACORN book. That is, they pulled a data dump. Seems like ACORN did just that last week out in California. So, they dumped the raw data (for 150 years) that forms the basis of their predictions for globull warming. How convenient.

Still, expect the media here in the US to continue to ignore the whole thing. The Messiah heads to the land of socialists to get his medal and make his promises for emissions reductions.

Climate change data dumped

Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.

Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.

He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is “unequivocally” linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.

Worst Scientific Scandal of the Century!!!!

2009-11-29T10:53:00.003-06:00

Climate gate is still at the top of the news cycle in Europe. And why not? They've bought into (or been forced into!) drinking the AGW kool aid. Think they're starting to regret all the climate based laws and restrictions? How about the pols? Starting to sweat no doubt.

And a the bottom of it all are the egg heads. Rigging the data, marginalizing those who disagree, conspiring to advance a political agenda. This story has it all. Of course its being suppressed in the US by the MSM. The current administration is ignoring the whole thing. The One is even going to Copenhagen to make some climate commitments. I'd be worried except he never keeps any of his promises. Why should this be any different?

Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation

Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash, says Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:10PM GMT 28 Nov 2009

Comments 391 | Comment on this article

CO2 emissions will be on top of the agenda at the Copenhagen summit in December Photo: Getty

A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.

Christopher Booker's The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with 'Climate Change' Turning Out to be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History? (Continuum, £16.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £14.99 plus £1.25 p & p.

Crap & Tax, Crash & Burn?

2009-11-29T10:42:00.002-06:00

Once again we go overseas for coverage of climate gate since the MSM here continue to act as though nothing has happened. This from the UK Telegraph. The smart money is on crap & tax failing in the senate. You wouldn't know that if you listen to the network news or read the major papers in the US. Talk radio and FNC are covering it. I heard that CNN mentioned it but only to minimize its impact.

Climategate e-mails sweep America, may scuttle Barack Obama's Cap and Trade laws

By Gerald Warner Politics Last updated: November 26th, 2009

214 Comments Comment on this article

Just a few considerations in addition to previous remarks about the explosion of the East Anglia Climategate e-mails in America. The reaction is growing exponentially there. Fox News, Barack Obama’s Nemesis, is now on the case, trampling all over Al Gore’s organic vegetable patch and breaking the White House windows. It has extracted some of the juiciest quotes from the e-mails and displayed them on-screen, with commentaries. Joe Public, coast-to-coast, now knows, thanks to the clowns at East Anglia’s CRU, just how royally he has been screwed.

Senator James Inhofe’s Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has written to all the relevant US Government agencies, acquainting them with the nature of the e-mails. But the real car crash for Obama is on Capitol Hill where it is now confidently believed his Cap and Trade climate legislation is toast. It was always problematic; but with a growing awakening to the scale of the scientific imposture sweeping the world, as far as the Antipodes, the clever money is on Cap and Trade laws failing to pass, with many legislators sceptical and the mid-term elections looming ever closer.

At the more domestic level, the proposed ban on incandescent light bulbs, so supinely accepted in this servile state of Britain, is now provoking a huge backlash in America. US citizens do not like the government coming into their houses and putting their lights out. Voters may not understand the cut and thrust of climate debate at the technical level, but they know when the Man from Washington has crossed their threshold uninvited.

The term that Fox News is now applying to the Climategate e-mails is “game-changer”. For the first time, Anthropogenic Global Warming cranks are on the defensive, losing their cool and uttering desperate mantras such as “You can be sceptical, not denial.” Gee, thanks, guys. In fact we shall be whatever we want to be, without asking your permission.

At this rate, Copenhagen is going to turn into a comedy convention with the real world laughing at these liars. Now is the time to mount massive resistance to the petty tyrants and hit them where it hurts – in the wallet. Further down the line there may be, in many countries, a question of criminal prosecution of anybody who has falsified data to secure funds and impose potentially disastrous fiscal restraints on the world in deference to a massive hoax. It’s a new world out there, Al, and, as you may have noticed, the climate is very cold indeed.

Oh The Humanity!!!

2009-11-29T10:36:00.003-06:00

How about this? George Monbiot is a true believer. Even he is dismayed by the deceit and scheming of the AGW Gore slaves. See what he has to say below. How agonizing it must be for poor George. I am almost ready to sympathize with him. Not.

Pretending the climate email leak isn't a crisis won't make it go away

Climate sceptics have lied, obscured and cheated for years. That's why we climate rationalists must uphold the highest standards of science

• Climate email hackers had access for more than a month

Research and rationalism: ice core drilling on the summit of Quelccaya ice cap, Peru. Photograph: Peter Essick/Getty

I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can't possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.

The response of the greens and most of the scientists I know is profoundly ironic, as we spend so much of our time confronting other people's denial. Pretending that this isn't a real crisis isn't going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We'll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again.

It is true that much of what has been revealed could be explained as the usual cut and thrust of the peer review process, exacerbated by the extraordinary pressure the scientists were facing from a denial industry determined to crush them. One of the most damaging emails was sent by the head of the climatic research unit, Phil Jones. He wrote "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

One of these papers which was published in the journal Climate Research turned out to be so badly flawed that the scandal resulted in the resignation of the editor-in-chief. Jones knew that any incorrect papers by sceptical scientists would be picked up and amplified by climate change deniers funded by the fossil fuel industry, who often – as I documented in my book Heat – use all sorts of dirty tricks to advance their cause.

Even so, his message looks awful. It gives the impression of confirming a potent meme circulated by those who campaign against taking action on climate change: that the IPCC process is biased. However good the detailed explanations may be, most people aren't going to follow or understand them. Jones's statement, on the other hand, is stark and easy to grasp.

In this case you could argue that technically he has done nothing wrong. But a fat lot of good that will do. Think of the MPs' expenses scandal: complaints about stolen data, denials and huffy responses achieved nothing at all. Most of the MPs could demonstrate that technically they were innocent: their expenses had been approved by the Commons office. It didn't change public perceptions one jot. The only responses that have helped to restore public trust in Parliament are humility, openness and promises of reform.

When it comes to his handling of Freedom of Information requests, Professor Jones might struggle even to use a technical defence. If you take the wording literally, in one case he appears to be suggesting that emails subject to a request be deleted, which means that he seems to be advocating potentially criminal activity. Even if no other message had been hacked, this would be sufficient to ensure his resignation as head of the unit.

I feel desperately sorry for him: he must be walking through hell. But there is no helping it; he has to go, and the longer he leaves it, the worse it will get. He has a few days left in which to make an honourable exit. Otherwise, like the former Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, he will linger on until his remaining credibility vanishes, inflicting continuing damage to climate science.

Some people say that I am romanticising science, that it is never as open and honest as the Popperian ideal. Perhaps. But I know that opaqueness and secrecy are the enemies of science. There is a word for the apparent repeated attempts to prevent disclosure revealed in these emails: unscientific.

The crisis has been exacerbated by the university's handling of it, which has been a total trainwreck: a textbook example of how not to respond. RealClimate reports that "We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day." In other words, the university knew what was coming three days before the story broke. As far as I can tell, it sat like a rabbit in the headlights, waiting for disaster to strike.

When the emails hit the news on Friday morning, the university appeared completely unprepared. There was no statement, no position, no one to interview. Reporters kept being fobbed off while CRU's opponents landed blow upon blow on it. When a journalist I know finally managed to track down Phil Jones, he snapped "no comment" and put down the phone. This response is generally taken by the media to mean "guilty as charged". When I got hold of him on Saturday, his answer was to send me a pdf called "WMO statement on the status of the global climate in 1999". Had I a couple of hours to spare I might have been able to work out what the heck this had to do with the current crisis, but he offered no explanation.

By then he should have been touring the TV studios for the past 36 hours, confronting his critics, making his case and apologising for his mistakes. Instead, he had disappeared off the face of the Earth. Now, far too late, he has given an interview to the Press Association, which has done nothing to change the story.

The handling of this crisis suggests that nothing has been learnt by climate scientists in this country from 20 years of assaults on their discipline. They appear to have no idea what they're up against or how to confront it. Their opponents might be scumbags, but their media strategy is exemplary.

The greatest tragedy here is that despite many years of outright fabrication, fraud and deceit on the part of the climate change denial industry, documented in James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore's brilliant new book Climate Cover-up, it is now the climate scientists who look bad. By comparison to his opponents, Phil Jones is pure as the driven snow. Hoggan and Littlemore have shown how fossil fuel industries have employed "experts" to lie, cheat and manipulate on their behalf. The revelations in their book (as well as in Heat and in Ross Gelbspan's book The Heat Is On) are 100 times graver than anything contained in these emails.

But the deniers' campaign of lies, grotesque as it is, does not justify secrecy and suppression on the part of climate scientists. Far from it: it means that they must distinguish themselves from their opponents in every way. No one has been as badly let down by the revelations in these emails as those of us who have championed the science. We should be the first to demand that it is unimpeachable, not the last.

Proof of Fraud All Along

2009-11-29T10:29:00.002-06:00

Courtesy of PJM. This says it all. Vince Gray has been involved with the whole debate for years. This just confirms what he's said all along.

Vincent Gray on Climategate: ‘There Was Proof of Fraud All Along’ (PJM Exclusive)

IPCC expert reviewer Gray — whose 1,898 comments critical of the 2007 report were ignored — recently found that proof of the fraud was public for years.

November 27, 2009 - by Vincent Gray

Page 1 of 2 Next ->

Nothing about the revelations surprises me. I have maintained email correspondence with most of these scientists for many years, and I know several personally. I long ago realized that they were faking the whole exercise.

When you enter into a debate with any of them, they always stop cold when you ask an awkward question. This applies even when you write to a government department or a member of Parliament. I and many of my friends have grown accustomed to our failure to publish and to lecture, and to the rejection of our comments submitted prior to every IPCC report.

But only recently did I realize that I had evidence of their fraud in my possession almost from the birth of my interest in the subject.

I had copies of these two papers in 1990:

Jones, P. D., P. Ya. Groisman, M. Coughlan, N. Plummer, W. C. Wang & T. R. Karl 1990. Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land, Nature 347 169- 172.

Wang, W-C, Z. Zeng, T. R Karl, 1990. Urban Heat Islands in China. Geophys. Res. Lett. 17, 2377-2380.

The first paper has been the major evidence presented by Jones in all of the IPCC reports to dismiss the influence of urban change on the temperature measurements, and also has been used as an excuse for the failure to mention most of the unequivocal evidence that such urban effects exist. The paper was even dragged out again for the 2007 IPCC report.

The second paper, which shared authors Wang and Karl from the first paper, used the very same data from China which the first paper used to demonstrate the absence of urban influence — yet instead concluded that same data to be proof of the existence of urban influence.

In 2007, the following paper exposed the whole business:

Keenan, D.”The Fraud Allegation Against Some Climatic Research of Wei-Chyug Wang. Energy and Environment, 18, 985-995.

The author Keenan obtained the original Chinese data and found the claim that the data referred to a continuous series was unfounded. He accused Wang of fraud — and it is interesting to read that Tom Wigley (of the CRU emails) agrees with him.

Wigley fails to say, however, that his colleagues Jones and Karl are guilty of much worse than Wang — as they continued to use their fraudulent paper to boost their constant and sometimes daily assertion that recent global temperatures are unprecedented.

Wang was cleared of fraud by his university. But what about Jones and Karl?

In 1999, I had a stroke of luck. I asked one of the IPCC officials for the data from which one of their maps was compiled, and I received it. I wrote a paper analyzing the results and submitted it to Geophysical Research Letters. They just sat on it. I instead published it on John Daly’s website. Today, it is still the only paper recognized by Google on “Regional Temperature Change.”

I now know my paper was not critical enough, since we have proof that the basic data and its processing is far more dubious than I had envisaged.

I tried to update my paper and resubmit it. Nothing doing. Since the small group — revealed within the CRU emails — control most of the peer reviewers, very few peer reviewed papers which criticize that group are allowed to appear in the most prominent published literature which dominates the academic establishment.

I have only been able to find a place to release my criticisms on the internet, now the only realm where unfettered scientific discussion is possible.

Obama administration: Cap and trade could cost families $1,761 a year

2009-09-16T19:29:00.003-05:00

How would you like to support the Goracle (Al Gore) and his various eco related business schemes with what amounts to a 15% tax hike. Read the article below from CNET.

Obama administration: Cap and trade could cost families $1,761 a year

by Declan McCullagh

The Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent.

A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. At the upper end of the administration's estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year.

A second memorandum, which was prepared for Obama's transition team after the November election, says this about climate change policies: "Economic costs will likely be on the order of 1 percent of GDP, making them equal in scale to all existing environmental regulation."

The documents (PDF) were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute and released on Tuesday.

These disclosures will probably not aid the political prospects of the Democrats' cap and trade bill. The House of Representatives approved it by a remarkably narrow margin in June--the bill would have failed if only six House members had switched their votes to "no"--and it faces significant opposition in the Senate.

Cap and trade--or emissions trading--is an approach to reducing pollutants by offering companies financial incentives to clean up their acts. The current bill focuses specifically on reducing greenhouse gases linked to climate change.

One reason the bill faces an uncertain future is concern about its cost. House Republican Leader John Boehner has estimated the additional tax bill would be at $366 billion a year, or $3,100 a year per family. Democrats have pointed to estimates from MIT's John Reilly, who put the cost (PDF) at $800 a year per family and noted that tax credits to low income households could offset part of the bite. The Heritage Foundation says that, by 2035, "the typical family of four will see its direct energy costs rise by over $1,500 per year."

One difference is that while Heritage's numbers are talking about 26 years in the future, the Treasury Department's figures don't have a time limit.

"Heritage is saying publicly what the administration is saying to itself privately," says Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who filed the FOIA request. "It's nice to see they're not spinning each other behind closed doors."

"They're not telling you the cost--they're not telling you the benefit," says Horner, who wrote the Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming. "If they don't tell you the cost, and they don't tell you the benefit, what are they telling you? They're just talking about global salvation."

The FOIA'd document written by Judson Jaffe, who joined the Treasury Department's Office of Environment and Energy in January 2009, says: "Given the administration's proposal to auction all emission allowances, a cap-and-trade program could generate federal receipts on the order of $100 (billion) to $200 billion annually." (Obviously, any final cap-and-trade system may be different from what Obama had proposed, and could yield higher or lower taxes.)

Because personal income tax revenues bring in around $1.37 trillion a year, a $200 billion additional tax would be the equivalent of a 15 percent increase a year. A $100 billion additional tax would represent a 7 percent or 8 percent increase a year.

One odd point: The document written by Jaffee includes this line: "It will raise energy prices and impose annual costs on the order of XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX." The Treasury Department redacted the rest of the sentence with a thick black line.

The Freedom of Information Act, of course, contains no this-might-embarrass-the-president exemption (nor, for that matter, should federal agencies be in the business of possibly suppressing dissenting climate change voices). You'd hope the presidential administration that boasts of being the "most open and transparent in history" would be more forthcoming than this.

Update 9/16/2009: The Environmental Defense Fund has responded to the documents' release with a statement saying, in part:

Even if a 100 percent auction was a live legislative proposal, which it's not, that math ignores the redistribution of revenue back to consumers. It only looks at one side of the balance sheet. It would only be true if you think the Administration was going to pile all the cash on the White House lawn and set it on fire. The bill passed by the House sends the value of pollution permits to consumers, and it contains robust cost-containment provisions. Every credible and independent economic analysis of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (such as those done by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the Energy Information Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency) says the costs will be small and affordable -- and that the U.S. economy will grow with a cap on carbon.

NOAA: Summer Temperature Below Average for U.S.

2009-09-11T07:53:00.003-05:00

Well, here's another stunner. The midwest has its 6th coolest summer. No surprise to anyone in the region (I'm in the Chicago area). We've had only a couple of 90 degree days all summer. I've had to wear a jacket for the morning commute more days than I can remember. Oh but wait. I forgot about the glowbull warming thing. I must be imagining the year without a summer. Whatever, this cooling must be caused by AGW. At least that's the claim I expect to hear as a rebuttal to this report.

NOAA: Summer Temperature Below Average for U.S.

September 10, 2009

The average June-August 2009 summer temperature for the contiguous United States was below average – the 34th coolest on record, according to a preliminary analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. August was also below the long-term average. The analysis is based on records dating back to 1895.

U.S. Temperature Highlights – Summer

High resolution (Credit: NOAA)

For the 2009 summer, the average temperature of 71.7 degrees F was 0.4 degree F below the 20th Century average. The 2008 average summer temperature was 72.7 degrees F.
A recurring upper level trough held the June-August temperatures down in the central states, where Michigan experienced its fifth, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota their seventh, Nebraska its eighth, and Iowa its ninth coolest summer. By contrast, Florida had its fourth warmest summer, while Washington and Texas experienced their eighth and ninth warmest, respectively.
The Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota region experienced its sixth coolest summer on record. Only the Northwest averaged above normal temperatures.

U.S. Temperature Highlights – August

High resolution (Credit: NOAA)

The average 2009 August temperature of 72.2 degrees F was 0.6 degree F below the 20th Century average. Last year’s August temperature was 73.2 degrees F.
Temperatures were below normal in the Midwest, Plains, and parts of the south. Above-normal temperatures dominated the eastern seaboard, areas in the southwest, and in the extreme northwest.
Several northeastern states were much above normal for August, including Delaware and New Jersey (eighth warmest), Maine (ninth), and Rhode Island and Connecticut (10th). In contrast, below-normal temperatures were recorded for Missouri and Kansas.

U.S. Precipitation Highlights – Summer

High resolution (Credit: NOAA)

The Northeast region had its eighth wettest June-August summer on record. By contrast, the South, Southeast and Southwest regions, were drier than average. Arizona had its third driest summer, while both South Carolina and Georgia had their sixth driest.

U.S. Precipitation Highlights – August

In August, precipitation across the contiguous United States averaged 2.34 inches, which is 0.26 inch below the 1901-2000 average.
Above-normal averages were generally recorded across the northern U.S., west of the Great Lakes. The South and Southeast regions experienced below-normal precipitation.
Precipitation across the Southwest region averaged 0.85 inches, which is 1.10 inches below normal and ranks as the 4th driest August on record. Arizona had its fourth driest, New Mexico its fifth, and it was the eighth driest August on record for Colorado, Utah and Texas.

High resolution (Credit: NOAA)
By the end of August, moderate-to-exceptional drought covered 14 percent of the contiguous United States, based on the U.S. Drought Monitor. Drought intensified in parts of the Pacific Northwest and new drought areas emerged in Arizona and the Carolinas. Montana, Wisconsin and Oklahoma saw minor improvements in their drought conditions.
About 27 percent of the contiguous United States had moderately-to-extremely wet conditions at the end of August, according to the Palmer Index (a well-known index that measures both drought intensity and wet spell intensity).

Other Highlights

There were more than 300 low temperature records (counting daily highs and lows) set across states in the Midwest during the last two days of August.
A total of 7,975 fires burned 1,646,363 acres in August, according to the National Interagency Coordination Center. August 2009 ranked fifth for the number of fires and sixth for acres burned in August this decade. From January through August, 64,682 fires have burned 5.2 million acres across the nation.

NCDC’s preliminary reports, which assess the current state of the climate, are released soon after the end of each month. These analyses are based on preliminary data, which are subject to revision. Additional quality control is applied to the data when late reports are received several weeks after the end of the month and as increased scientific methods improve NCDC’s processing algorithms.

NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth's environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources.

Twenty-six Lies About H.R. 3200

2009-09-07T09:17:00.003-05:00

So, what's the deal with HR 3200 (better known as Obamacare or Kennedy's legacy)? There have been many claims by both sides that are misleading or just plain false. I personally want only 3 things from a healthcare overhaul. 1: Coverage for pre-existing conditions. 2: No denial of coverage. 3: Tort reform. Oh, and no coverage for illegal immigrants. Anyway, check out the fact check below from FactCheck.org. It lays out the facts on healthcare reform and sets the record straight on misleading and false claims made by someone on the internet (conservative?). Its a helluva long read but slog through it if you can.

Twenty-six Lies About H.R. 3200

A notorious analysis of the House health care bill contains 48 claims. Twenty-six of them are false and the rest mostly misleading. Only four are true.

August 28, 2009

Summary

Our inbox has been overrun with messages asking us to weigh in on a mammoth list of claims about the House health care bill. The chain e-mail purports to give "a few highlights" from the first half of the bill, but the list of 48 assertions is filled with falsehoods, exaggerations and misinterpretations. We examined each of the e-mail’s claims, finding 26 of them to be false and 18 to be misleading, only partly true or half true. Only four are accurate. A few of our "highlights":

The e-mail claims that page 30 of the bill says that "a government committee will decide what treatments … you get," but that page refers to a "private-public advisory committee" that would "recommend" what minimum benefits would be included in basic, enhanced and premium insurance plans.
The e-mail says that "non-US citizens, illegal or not, will be provided with free healthcare services" but points to a provision that prohibits discrimination in health care based on "personal characteristics." Another provision explicity forbids "federal payment for undocumented aliens."
It says "[g]overnment will restrict enrollment of SPECIAL NEEDS individuals." This provision isn’t about children with learning disabilities; instead, it pertains to restricted enrollment in "special needs" plans, a category of Medicare Advantage plans. Enrollment is already restricted. The bill extends the ability to do that.
It claims that a section about "Community-based Home Medical Services" means "more payoffs for ACORN." ACORN does not provide medical home services. The e-mail interprets any reference to the word "community" to be some kind of payoff for ACORN. That’s nonsense.

Analysis

This chain e-mail claims to give a run-down of what’s in the House health care bill, H.R. 3200. Instead, it shows evidence of a reading comprehension problem on the part of the author. Some of our more enterprising readers have even taken it upon themselves to debunk a few of the assertions, sending us their notes and encouraging us to write about it. We applaud your fact-checking skills and your skepticism. And skepticism is warranted.

Chain e-mail: Subject: A few highlights from the first 500 pages of the Healthcare bill in congress Contact your Representatives and let them know how you feel about this. We, as a country, cannot afford another 1000 page bill to go through congress without being read. Another 500 pages to go. I have highlighted a few of the items that are down right unconstitutional. ⬐ Click to expand/collapse the full text ⬏
• Page 22: Mandates audits of all employers that self-insure! • Page 29: Admission: your health care will be rationed! • Page 30: A government committee will decide what treatments and benefits you get (and, unlike an insurer, there will be no appeals process)• Page 42: The "Health Choices Commissioner" will decide health benefits for you. You will have no choice. None.• Page 50: All non-US citizens, illegal or not, will be provided with free healthcare services.• Page 58: Every person will be issued a National ID Healthcard. • Page 59: The federal government will have direct, real-time access to all individual bank accounts for electronic funds transfer. • Page 65: Taxpayers will subsidize all union retiree and community organizer health plans (read: SEIU, UAW and ACORN) • Page 72: All private healthcare plans must conform to government rules to participate in a Healthcare Exchange. • Page 84: All private healthcare plans must participate in the Health care Exchange (i.e., total government control of private plans) • Page 91: Government mandates linguistic infrastructure for services; translation: illegal aliens • Page 95: The Government will pay ACORN and Americorps to sign up individuals for Government-run Health Care plan. • Page 102: Those eligible for Medicaid will be automatically enrolled: you have no choice in the matter. • Page 124: No company can sue the government for price-fixing. No "judicial review" is permitted against the government monopoly. Put simply, private insurers will be crushed. • Page 127: The AMA sold doctors out: the government will set wages. • Page 145: An employer MUST auto-enroll employees into the government-run public plan. No alternatives. • Page 146: Employers MUST pay healthcare bills for part-time employees AND their families. • Page 149: Any employer with a payroll of $400K or more, who does not offer the public option, pays an 8% tax on payroll • Page 150: Any employer with a payroll of $250K-400K or more, who does not offer the public option, pays a 2 to 6% tax on payroll • Page 167: Any individual who doesn’t’ have acceptable health care (according to the government) will be taxed 2.5% of income. • Page 170: Any NON-RESIDENT alien is exempt from individual taxes (Americans will pay for them). • Page 195: Officers and employees of Government Health care Bureaucracy will have access to ALL American financial and personal records. • Page 203: "The tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as tax." Yes, it really says that. • Page 239: Bill will reduce physician services for Medicaid. Seniors and the poor most affected." • Page 241: Doctors: no matter what specialty you have, you’ll all be paid the same (thanks, AMA!) • Page 253: Government sets value of doctors’ time, their professional judgment, etc. • Page 265: Government mandates and controls productivity for private healthcare industries. • Page 268: Government regulates rental and purchase of power-driven wheelchairs. • Page 272: Cancer patients: welcome to the wonderful world of rationing! • Page 280: Hospitals will be penalized for what the government deems preventable re-admissions. • Page 298: Doctors: if you treat a patient during an initial admission that results in a readmission, you will be penalized by the government. • Page 317: Doctors: you are now prohibited for owning and investing in healthcare companies! • Page 318: Prohibition on hospital expansion. Hospitals cannot expand without government approval. • Page 321: Hospital expansion hinges on "community" input: in other words, yet another payoff for ACORN. • Page 335: Government mandates establishment of outcome-based measures: i.e., rationing. • Page 341: Government has authority to disqualify Medicare Advantage Plans, HMOs, etc. • Page 354: Government will restrict enrollment of SPECIAL NEEDS individuals. • Page 379: More bureaucracy: Telehealth Advisory Committee (healthcare by phone). • Page 425: More bureaucracy: Advance Care Planning Consult: Senior Citizens, assisted suicide, euthanasia? • Page 425: Government will instruct and consult regarding living wills, durable powers of attorney, etc. Mandatory. Appears to lock in estate taxes ahead of time. • Page 425: Government provides approved list of end-of-life resources, guiding you in death. • Page 427: Government mandates program that orders end-of-life treatment; government dictates how your life ends. • Page 429: Advance Care Planning Consult will be used to dictate treatment as patient’s health deteriorates. This can include an ORDER for end-of-life plans. An ORDER from the GOVERNMENT. • Page 430: Government will decide what level of treatments you may have at end-of-life. • Page 469: Community-based Home Medical Services: more payoffs for ACORN. • Page 472: Payments to Community-based organizations: more payoffs for ACORN. • Page 489: Government will cover marriage and family therapy. Government intervenes in your marriage. • Page 494: Government will cover mental health services: defining, creating and rationing those services.

A few readers alerted us to the fact that a state representative in North Carolina, Rep. Curtis Blackwood, published a version of the e-mail in a newsletter to constituents, telling them that while going through e-mail, he came across "some interesting information on the Democrats’ big health care bill, H.R. 3200. … While this is federal legislation and not state, the topic is of enough significance that I thought many of you would be interested in reading it." We’d refer Rep. Blackwood to our special report on viral messages titled, "That Chain E-mail Your Friend Sent to You Is (Likely) Bogus. Seriously."

We can trace the origins of this collection of claims to a conservative blogger who issued his instant and mostly mistaken analyses as brief "tweets" sent via Twitter as he was paging through the 1,017-page bill. The claims have been embraced as true and posted on hundreds of Web sites, and forwarded in the form of chain e-mails countless times. But there’s hardly any truth in them. We’ll go through each of the claims in this message:

Claim: Page 22: Mandates audits of all employers that self-insure!

False: This section merely requires a study of “the large group insured and self-insured employer health care markets.” There’s no mention of auditing employers, only of studying “markets.” The purpose of the study is to produce “recommendations” to make sure the new law “does not provide incentives for small and mid-size employers to self-insure.”

Claim: Page 29: Admission: your health care will be rationed!

False: This section says nothing whatsoever about “rationing” or anything of the sort. Actually, it’s favorable to families and individuals, placing an annual cap on what they could pay out of pocket if covered by a basic, “essential benefits package.” The limits would be $5,000 for an individual, $10,000 for a family.

Claim: Page 30: A government committee will decide what treatments and benefits you get (and, unlike an insurer, there will be no appeals process)

False: Actually, the section starting on page 30 sets up a “private-public advisory committee” headed by the U.S. surgeon general and made up of mostly private sector “medical and other experts” selected by the president and the comptroller general. The advisory committee would have only the power “to recommend” what benefits are included in basic, enhanced and premium insurance plans. It would have no power to decide what treatments anybody will get. Its recommendations on benefits might or might not be adopted.

Claim: Page 42: The “Health Choices Commissioner” will decide health benefits for you. You will have no choice. None.

False: The new Health Choices Commissioner will oversee a variety of choices to be offered through new insurance exchanges. The bill itself specifies the “minimum services to be covered” in a basic plan, including prescription drugs, mental health services, maternity and well-baby care and certain vaccines and preventive services (pages 27-28). We find nothing in the bill that prevents insurance companies from offering benefits that exceed the minimums. In fact, the legislation allows (page 84) any company that offers an approved basic plan to offer also an “enhanced” plan, a “premium” plan and even a “premium plus” plan that could include vision and dental benefits.

Claim: Page 50: All non-US citizens, illegal or not, will be provided with free healthcare services.

False. That’s simply not what the bill says at all. This page includes "SEC. 152. PROHIBITING DISCRIMINATION IN HEALTH CARE," which says that "[e]xcept as otherwise explicitly permitted by this Act and by subsequent regulations consistent with this Act, all health care and related services (including insurance coverage and public health activities) covered by this Act shall be provided without regard to personal characteristics extraneous to the provision of high quality health care or related services." However, the bill does explicitly say that illegal immigrants can’t get any government money to pay for health care. Page 143 states: "Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States." And as we’ve said before, current law prohibits illegal immigrants from participating in government health care programs.

Claim: Page 58: Every person will be issued a National ID Healthcard.

False. There is no mention of any “National ID Healthcard” anywhere in the bill. Page 58 says that government standards for electronic medical transactions "may include utilization of a machine-readable health plan beneficiary identification card,” to show eligibility for services. Insurance companies typically issue such cards already, but if such a standard were issued the cards would need to be in a standard form readable by computers. The word “may” is used to permit such a standard, but it does not require one.

Claim: Page 59: The federal government will have direct, real-time access to all individual bank accounts for electronic funds transfer.

False. This section aims to simplify electronic payments for health services, the same sort of electronic payments that already are common for such things as utility bills or mortgage payments. The bill calls for the secretary of Health and Human Services to set standards for electronic administrative transactions that would "enable electronic funds transfers, in order to allow automated reconciliation with the related health care payment and remittance advice." There is no mention of "individual bank accounts" nor of any new government authority over them. Also, the section does not say that electronic payments from consumers is required.

Claim: Page 65: Taxpayers will subsidize all union retiree and community organizer health plans (read: SEIU, UAW and ACORN)

Misleading. Page 65 is the start of a section (SEC. 164. REINSURANCE PROGRAM FOR RETIREES) that would set up a new federal reinsurance plan to benefit retirees and spouses covered by any employer plan, not just those run by labor unions or nonprofit groups. Specifically, it covers “retirees and . . . spouses, surviving spouses and dependents of such retirees” who are covered by “employment-based plans” that provide health benefits. It’s open to any “group health benefits plan that . . . is maintained by one or more employers, former employers or employee associations,” as well as voluntary employees’ beneficiary associations (page 66). Furthermore, the aim of the fund is to cut premiums, copays and deductibles for the retirees. Payment “shall not be used to reduce the costs of an employer.”

Claim: Page 72: All private healthcare plans must conform to government rules to participate in a Healthcare Exchange.

True. This page begins a section setting up a new, national Health Insurance Exchange through which individuals and employers may choose from a variety of private insurance plans, much like the system that now covers millions of federal workers. Any private insurance plans offered through this exchange must meet new federal standards. For example, such plans can’t deny coverage for preexisting medical conditions (page 19).

Claim: Page 84: All private healthcare plans must participate in the Health care Exchange (i.e., total government control of private plans)

Partly true. Nothing like this appears on page 84. No insurance company is required to sell plans through the exchange if it doesn’t want to. Any employer may choose to buy coverage elsewhere. In fact, the vast majority of employers will still be buying private plans through the normal marketplace, because only employers with 10 or fewer employees are even allowed to buy through the exchange in the first year. The limit rises to 20 employees in the second year. However, new plans sold directly to individuals will only be sold through the exchange. Individuals who currently buy their own coverage can keep those plans if they wish, and if the insurance company continues to offer them.

Claim: Page 91: Government mandates linguistic infrastructure for services; translation: illegal aliens

Misleading. It’s true that page 91 says that insurance companies selling plans through the new exchange “shall provide for culturally and linguistically appropriate communication and health services.” The author’s “translation,” however, assumes that anyone speaking a foreign language or from another culture is an illegal immigrant, which is false.

Claim: Page 95: The Government will pay ACORN and Americorps to sign up individuals for Government-run Health Care plan.

False: This page is the start of “SEC. 205. OUTREACH AND ENROLLMENT OF EXCHANGE-ELIGIBLE INDIVIDUALS AND EMPLOYERS IN EXCHANGE-PARTICIPATING HEALTH BENEFITS PLAN.” It says a newly established Health Choices Commissioner “shall conduct outreach activities” to get people covered by private or government health insurance plans. The section says on page 97 that the Commissioner “may work with other appropriate entities to facilitate … provision of information.” But there is no authorization anywhere in the entire section for the Commissioner to pay money to any group to engage in outreach.

Claim: Page 102: Those eligible for Medicaid will be automatically enrolled: you have no choice in the matter.

Partly true. Page 102 says certain Medicaid-eligible persons will be “automatically enrolled” in Medicaid (which is the state-federal program to provide insurance to low-income workers and families) IF they are not already covered by private insurance. That would happen only if they had “not elected to enroll” in one of the private plans offered through the new insurance exchanges, however. So on paper at least, they would have a choice. Also, it’s estimated that one in four persons who lacks health insurance is already eligible for Medicaid or its offshoot, the state Children’s Health Insurance Program, but simply haven’t signed up or been enrolled by their parents.

Claim: Page 124: No company can sue the government for price-fixing. No “judicial review” is permitted against the government monopoly. Put simply, private insurers will be crushed.

Half true. It’s true that page 124 forbids any review by the courts of rates the government would pay to doctors and hospitals under the new “public option” insurance plan. But there’s no mention of “price fixing” in the bill; that’s the e-mail author’s phrase. It also remains to be seen if the “public option” plan would grow to become a “government monopoly,” as the author predicts.

Claim: Page 127: The AMA sold doctors out: the government will set wages.

Misleading. Nothing in the bill would “set wages” for doctors in general. Page 127 says the government would ask doctors to accept below-market rates set by the government for their patients who are covered by a new “public health insurance option,” just as they now are asked to do so for patients covered by Medicare. Physicians would still be free to charge what they wish for other patients, and free not to accept patients covered by the new program just as they are now free to refuse Medicare patients. That’s not a choice many doctors make, however, so as a practical matter the government would be setting rates (not “wages”) for many patients. On the other hand, the new “public” plan is aimed mainly at covering people who have no insurance now and can afford to pay doctors little if anything.

Claim: Page 145: An employer MUST auto-enroll employees into the government-run public plan. No alternatives.

False. It’s true that employers would be required to sign up their workers for coverage automatically, but it doesn’t have to be the “public plan.” It would be the employer-offered plan “with the lowest applicable employee premium” (pages 147- 148). This would only be the "public option" if the employer was eligible to buy coverage through the Health Insurance Exchange (not likely, at least during the first two years when only small businesses would have access), and the "public option" was the cheapest plan (which would be likely). Furthermore, while the employer isn’t given an alternative, the workers are. They may reject auto-enrollment under an opt-out provision (page 148).

Claim: Page 146: Employers MUST pay healthcare bills for part-time employees AND their families.

Half true. There’s nothing in this section about part-time employees’ families, but this provision does call for employers to contribute toward part-time employees’ health insurance. The bill says that “for an employee who is not a full-time employee … the amount of the minimum employer contribution” will be a proportion of the minimum contribution for full-time employees. This proportion will depend on the average weekly hours of part-time employees compared with the minimum weekly hours required to be a full-time employee, as specified by the Health Choices Commissioner. (For a point of reference: The minimum contribution for individual plans of full-time employees is not less than 72.5 percent of the premium of the cheapest plan the employer offers.)

Claim: Page 149: Any employer with a payroll of $400K or more, who does not offer the public option, pays an 8% tax on payroll Claim: Page 150: Any employer with a payroll of $250K-400K or more, who does not offer the public option, pays a 2 to 6% tax on payroll.

Both Partly True. The bill requires employers either to offer private health insurance coverage or pay a percentage of their payroll expenses to help finance a public plan. The 8 percent payment would indeed apply to employers with payrolls over $400,000 in the previous year, and lesser amounts would apply to smaller firms. Those with payrolls of $250,000 or less would pay nothing. But the penalty isn’t incurred if an employer "does not offer the public option," as the e-mail claims. Rather, it’s a penalty for not offering health insurance to employees.

Claim: Page 167: Any individual who doesn’t have acceptable health care (according to the government) will be taxed 2.5% of income.

True. This is the mechanism in the bill to enforce the individual mandate requiring everyone to have insurance. A person who doesn’t have insurance that meets minimum benefit standards (or other acceptable coverage, such as a plan that was grandfathered in) would pay a penalty of 2.5 percent of modified adjusted gross income for the year. The total penalty can’t exceed a national average premium for individual coverage, or family coverage if applicable.

Claim: Page 170: Any NON-RESIDENT alien is exempt from individual taxes (Americans will pay for them).

False. “Non-resident aliens” are generally those who have spent less than 31 days in the U.S. during the year. The claim that “Americans will pay for them” assumes that such visitors would somehow be getting federal benefits that would cost taxpayers money. In any case, they are not “exempt from individual taxes” at all. Under current law, the Internal Revenue Service says: “If you are a nonresident alien, you must file Form 1040NR (PDF) or Form 1040NR-EZ (PDF) if you are engaged in a trade or business in the United States, or have any other U.S. source income on which the tax was not fully paid by the amount withheld.” All that page 170 says is that non-resident aliens who don’t obtain health coverage don’t have to pay an additional 2.5 percent federal tax that would apply to U.S. workers who fail to get coverage, or to immigrants who are working here legally under green cards and who fail to obtain coverage. The tax is spelled out in subsection (a) starting on page 167.

Claim: Page 195: Officers and employees of Government Health care Bureaucracy will have access to ALL American financial and personal records.

False. This section of the bill discusses “Disclosures To Carry Out Health Insurance Exchange Subsidies.” It says that government employees of the health insurance exchange will have access to federal tax information for purposes of determining eligibility for affordability credits available for low- and moderate-income Americans. In other words, in order to qualify for a government subsidy to purchase health insurance, the government needs to confirm your income. And, no surprise, the government already has access to your federal tax information. The bill also says nothing about “ALL … financial and personal records.” Instead it says “Such return information shall be limited to—(i) taxpayer identity information with respect to such taxpayer, (ii) the filing status of such taxpayer, (iii) the modified adjusted gross income of such taxpayer (as defined in section 59B(e)(5)), (iv) the number of dependents of the taxpayer, (v) such other information as is prescribed by the Secretary by regulation as might indicate whether the taxpayer is eligible for such affordability credits (and the amount thereof).” The bill goes on to limit use of this information “only for the purposes of, and to the extent necessary in, establishing and verifying the appropriate amount of any affordability credit … and providing for the repayment of any such credit which was in excess of such appropriate amount.”

Claim: Page 203: “The tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as tax.” Yes, it really says that.

Misleading. What this actually says is: “The tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as tax imposed by this chapter for purposes of determining the amount of any credit under this chapter or for purposes of section 55,” which deals with the Alternative Minimum Tax. It would limit the ripple effects of the new taxes the bill would impose on individuals making over $350,000 a year.

Claim: Page 239: Bill will reduce physician services for Medicaid. Seniors and the poor most affected. Claim: Page 241: Doctors: no matter what specialty you have, you’ll all be paid the same (thanks, AMA!)

Both False. Both of these claims pertain to Section 1121, which updates the physician fee schedule for 2010 for Medicare. It doesn’t "reduce physician services for Medicaid" (which wouldn’t pertain to seniors anyway); instead it modifies a section of the Social Security Act that defines physicians’ services. The section also doesn’t say that doctors will be paid the same “no matter what specialty you have.” Instead it sets up two categories of physician services with different growth rates for fees under those categories. As the Kaiser Family Foundation says of this section of the bill: "Allows the revised formula to be updated by the gross domestic product (GDP) plus 2% for evaluation and management services and GDP plus 1% for all other services." The measure will cost $228.5 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation.

Claim: Page 253: Government sets value of doctors’ time, their professional judgment, etc.

Misleading. It’s true that page 253 refers to “relative value units” to be used when determining payment rates for doctor’s services, and that such RVUs would weigh factors “such as time, mental effort and professional judgment, technical skill and physical effort, and stress due to risk.” But this is nothing new; the government already uses RVUs when setting rates it will pay under Medicare. For example, the RVUs assigned to a colonoscopy are currently double the RVUs assigned to an intermediate office visit. In fact, page 253 is part of a section (Sec. 1122) that sets up a process for correcting existing but “potentially misvalued” rates.

Claim: Page 265: Government mandates and controls productivity for private healthcare industries.

Misleading. This claim doesn’t even make sense. How can anyone "mandate” that somebody else be productive, or “control” how productive they are? The author has simply misunderstood what this controversial item would do. In fact, page 265 is the start of a section (Sec. 1131) that is among several designed to slow future growth of Medicare payments to help offset the cost of the bill. It would require that “productivity improvements” be taken into account when setting annual “market basket” updates to Medicare rates for hospital-based services. The hospital industry has estimated this would translate into a 1.3 percent cut next year and a total of $150 billion in reduced payments over 10 years, and is opposed to it.

Claim: Page 268: Government regulates rental and purchase of power-driven wheelchairs.

Misleading. What page 268 does is to stop Medicare for paying for “mobility scooters,” which have been widely marketed as a Medicare-financed benefit, leading to ballooning costs to the program. They would no longer qualify as a “power-driven wheelchair.” Only a "complex rehabilitative power-driven wheel chair recognized by the Secretary” would be covered. The Congressional Budget Office estimates this will save the government $800 million over 10 years (see page 2).

Claim: Page 272: Cancer patients: welcome to the wonderful world of rationing!

False. This page merely calls for a study of whether a certain class of hospitals incur higher costs than some others for the cancer care they deliver. It also says the secretary of HHS “shall provide for an appropriate adjustment” in payments “to reflect those higher costs.” It’s hardly “rationing” to pay hospitals more to compensate for higher costs.

Claim: Page 280: Hospitals will be penalized for what the government deems preventable re-admissions.

True: This does say that “the Secretary shall reduce the payments” to hospitals with too many “potentially preventable” readmissions of patients that they previously had discharged.

Claim: Page 298: Doctors: if you treat a patient during an initial admission that results in a readmission, you will be penalized by the government.

False. That section is part of a list of potential physician-centered approaches to reducing excess hospital readmissions. The bill states that the secretary of Health and Human Services will conduct a study on the best ways to enforce readmissions policies with physicians. One of the approaches the secretary must consider is the option to reduce payments to physicians whose treatment results in a hospital readmission. Another is the option to increase payments to physicians who check up on recently released patients. Neither of these approaches is mandated in the bill – what’s mandated is that the secretary consider them, among others.

Claim: Page 317: Doctors: you are now prohibited for owning and investing in healthcare companies!

False. It’s already illegal, with certain exceptions, for doctors to refer Medicare patients to hospitals, labs, medical imaging facilities or other such medical businesses in which they hold a financial interest. Page 317 would modify an exception to that “self-referral prohibition” for rural providers, and says doctors can’t increase their stake in an exempt hospital after the bill becomes law.

Claim: Page 318: Prohibition on hospital expansion. Hospitals cannot expand without government approval.

False. Expansion is forbidden only for rural, doctor-owned hospitals that have been given a waiver from the general prohibition on self-referral. It does not apply to hospitals in general. The bill provides for exceptions to even this limited expansion ban (page 321).

Claim: Page 321: Hospital expansion hinges on “community” input: in other words, yet another payoff for ACORN.

False. Page 321 says rural, doctor-owned hospitals that are exempt from the Medicaid self-referral prohibition can ask to be allowed to expand under rules that must allow “input” from “persons or entities in the community.” Under that language, anybody in the community could offer their opinion, but nobody – not ACORN or anybody else – would be paid for it.

Claim: Page 335: Government mandates establishment of outcome-based measures: i.e., rationing.

Misleading. This section does deal with establishing quality measures for Medicare. It does not make any recommendations for treatment, or empower anyone to make treatment recommendations based on those measures. The only effect of these outcome-based measures established in the bill would be ranking and potential disqualification of underperforming Medicare Advantage plans – that’s disqualification of the plans, not of any medical procedures.

Claim: Page 341: Government has authority to disqualify Medicare Advantage Plans, HMOs, etc.

True. The bill allows for the possibility of disqualifying underperforming Medicare Advantage plans, which include Medicare HMOs. Medicare Advantage plans are private health plans that provide Medicare benefits. Under the bill, the secretary of Health and Human Services has the authority to disallow plans that are providing low-quality care under the new quality measures (which include evaluations of patient health, mortality, safety and quality of life). If a plan is disqualified, this will not leave seniors without care. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that “virtually all” Medicare beneficiaries have access to at least two Medicare Advantage plans, and most have access to three or more. In 2008, 82 percent of beneficiaries had access to six or more private fee-for-service plans, one type of Medicare Advantage plan (along with HMOs, PPOs and medical spending accounts). Beneficiaries are also always free to return to the regular Medicare fee-for-service program.

Claim: Page 354: Government will restrict enrollment of SPECIAL NEEDS individuals.

Misleading. Insurance companies already restrict enrollment in so-called “special needs” plans, a special category of Medicare Advantage plans that were created in 2003. Page 354 merely extends the authority to do that beyond the end of next year, when it was set to expire. Furthermore, what’s being restricted isn’t the number of patients, but the type of patients. Plans can be restricted to accepting only those patients who fall into in one or more special categories. These include those who are institutionalized (think, nursing homes), those who qualify both for Medicare and Medicaid (think, both low-income and over age 65) and those with severe or disabling chronic conditions such as diabetes, emphysema, chronic heart failure or dementia. And of course, this has nothing to do with children with learning problems.

Claim: Page 379: More bureaucracy: Telehealth Advisory Committee (healthcare by phone).

Misleading. The advisory committee would not be a “bureaucracy” or have any administrative functions, but instead would bring together experts from the private sector to give advice on how Medicare and Medicaid should treat the practice of medicine via telecommunication, something used in rural hospitals and such places as cruise ships, battlefield settings and even on NASA space missions. Pages 380-381 call for the committee to consist of five “practicing physicians,” two “practicing non-physician health care workers” and two “administrators of telehealth programs.”

Claim: Page 425: More bureaucracy: Advance Care Planning Consult: Senior Citizens, assisted suicide, euthanasia? Claim: Page 425: Government will instruct and consult regarding living wills, durable powers of attorney, etc. Mandatory. Appears to lock in estate taxes ahead of time. Claim: Page 425: Government provides approved list of end-of-life resources, guiding you in death Claim: Page 427: Government mandates program that orders end-of-life treatment; government dictates how your life ends. Claim: Page 429: Advance Care Planning Consult will be used to dictate treatment as patient’s health deteriorates. This can include an ORDER for end-of-life plans. An ORDER from the GOVERNMENT. Claim: Page 430: Government will decide what level of treatments you may have at end-of-life.

All False. These six claims are a twisted interpretation of a provision in the bill that says Medicare will cover voluntary counseling sessions between seniors and their doctors to discuss end-of-life care. Medicare doesn’t pay for such sessions now; it would under the bill. End-of-life care discussions include talking about a living will, hospice care, designating a health care proxy and making decisions on what care you want to receive at the end of your life. Doctors do the consulting, not the "government" or a "bureaucracy." The e-mail author’s assertion that the bill calls for "an ORDER from the GOVERNMENT" for end-of-life plans rests on language about a patient drawing up such an order stipulating their wishes, and having that order signed by a physician. There’s nothing about "an order from the government." The bill defines an order for life-sustaining treatment as a document that "is signed and dated by a physician …[and] effectively communicates the individual’s preferences regarding life sustaining treatment." See our article "False Euthanasia Claims" for more on such assertions.

Claim: Page 469: Community-based Home Medical Services: more payoffs for ACORN.

False. This section defines the term "community-based medical home" as a "nonprofit community-based or State-based organization" that "provides beneficiaries with medical home services." ACORN does not provide medical home services. The section goes on to say such a medical service is one that "employs community health workers, including nurses or other non-physician practitioners, lay health workers, or other persons as determined appropriate by the Secretary, that assist the primary or principal care physician or nurse practitioner in chronic care management activities." The only thing ACORN has in common with that description is the word "community." It’s a community organization that offers services such as free tax preparation help and first-time home buyer counseling for low- and moderate-income people. It also works to register people to vote, and a few of its canvassers have been investigated for registration fraud, a point of concern during the presidential campaign.

Claim: Page 472: Payments to Community-based organizations: more payoffs for ACORN.

False. This section is referring to community-based medical homes.

Claim: Page 489: Government will cover marriage and family therapy. Government intervenes in your marriage.

Half true. It’s true that pages 489 and 490 make state-licensed “marriage and family therapist” services a covered expense “for the diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses.” But the therapists wouldn’t be employed by the government, and there’s no requirement for anybody to receive their help. So the claim that this would mean that “government intervenes in your marriage” is false.

Claim: Page 494: Government will cover mental health services: defining, creating and rationing those services.

Misleading. The provision amends Section 1861 of the Social Security Act laying out what services Medicare will cover. It expands coverage for mental health services, stipulating that a "mental health counselor" who can perform mental health counseling is someone with a master’s or doctorate degree, a state license, and two years of practice as a counselor. Is this the government "defining" mental health services? Well, it’s certainly the government defining what government programs will cover.

– by Brooks Jackson, Lori Robertson and Jess Henig, with D’Angelo Gore

Global Warming Could Forestall Ice Age

2009-09-07T08:52:00.003-05:00

Oh, this is too good to be true. The Gray Lady (NYT) has an article dated 9/3/09 in the science section about glowbull warming. One has to wonder how this ever snuck in. Be that as it may, the Times is to be congratulated on running this as it offers a perspective on the issue seldom seen in the MSM. Kudos to the NYT.

Global Warming Could Forestall Ice Age

The human-driven buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere appears to have ended a slide, many millenniums in the making, toward cooler summer temperatures in the Arctic, the authors of a new study report.

Scientists familiar with the work, to be published Friday in the journal Science, said it provided fresh evidence that human activity is not only warming the globe, particularly the Arctic, but could also even fend off what had been presumed to be an inevitable descent into a new ice age over the next few dozen millenniums.

The reversal of the slow cooling trend in the Arctic, recorded in samples of layered lakebed mud, glacial ice and tree rings from Alaska to Siberia, has been swift and pronounced, the team writes.

Earlier studies have also shown that the Arctic, more than the planet as a whole, has seen unusual warming in recent decades. But the new analysis provides decade-by-decade detail on temperature trends going back 2,000 years — five times further than previous work at that detailed a scale.

Several climate scientists said the new study was most significant for showing just how powerfully the Arctic climate appears to be responding to a greenhouse-gas buildup that is having more complex and subtle mix of effects elsewhere around the globe.

Darrell S. Kaufman, the lead author and a climate specialist at Northern Arizona University, said the biggest surprise was the strength of the shift from cooling to warming, which started in 1900 and intensified after 1950.

“The slow cooling trend is trivial compared to the warming that’s been happening and that’s in the pipeline,” Dr. Kaufman said.

Several scientists who were not involved with the study concurred that the pace of the temperature reversal far exceeded the natural variability in Arctic temperatures, supporting the idea that the warm-up is human-caused and potentially disruptive.

According to the study, after a slow cooling of less than half a degree Fahrenheit per millennium, driven by a cyclical change in the orientation of the North Pole and the Sun, the region warmed 2.2 degrees just since 1900, with the decade from 1998 to 2008 the warmest in 2,000 years.

In theory, summer temperatures in the Arctic region would be expected to cool for at least 4,000 more years, given the growing distance between the Sun and the North Pole during the summer in the Northern Hemisphere, the study says.

But Jonathan T. Overpeck, a study author and climate specialist at the University of Arizona, said the rising concentration of long-lived greenhouse gases guaranteed warming at a pace that could stress ecosystems and cause rapid melting of Greenland’s great ice sheet.

“The fast rate of recent warming is the scary part,” Dr. Overpeck said. “It means that major impacts on Arctic ecosystems and global sea level might not be that far off unless we act fast to slow global warming.”

In the very long term, the ability to artificially warm the climate, particularly the Arctic, could be seen as a boon as the planet’s shifting orientation to the Sun enters a phase that could initiate the next ice age.

The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling!

2009-09-06T19:48:00.003-05:00

Talk about hyperbole. This article lifted from the Guardian is the ultimate in glowbull warming hype. Mankind will be responsible for tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. All this is in addition to floods, forest fires, famines etc. While this conference looks extreme, I think the lefties are seeing their message fall on deaf ears. The public rejects this nonsense so this would seem to be a last gasp effort to move the issue up in the public awareness. This would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.

Climate change: melting ice will trigger wave of natural disasters

Scientists at a London conference next week will warn of earthquakes, avalanches and volcanic eruptions as the atmosphere heats up and geology is altered. Even Britain could face being struck by tsunamis

Robin McKie
The Observer, Sunday 6 September 2009
Article history

Scientists are to outline dramatic evidence that global warming threatens the planet in a new and unexpected way – by triggering earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches and volcanic eruptions.

Reports by international groups of researchers – to be presented at a London conference next week – will show that climate change, caused by rising outputs of carbon dioxide from vehicles, factories and power stations, will not only affect the atmosphere and the sea but will alter the geology of the Earth.

Melting glaciers will set off avalanches, floods and mud flows in the Alps and other mountain ranges; torrential rainfall in the UK is likely to cause widespread erosion; while disappearing Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets threaten to let loose underwater landslides, triggering tsunamis that could even strike the seas around Britain.

At the same time the disappearance of ice caps will change the pressures acting on the Earth's crust and set off volcanic eruptions across the globe. Life on Earth faces a warm future – and a fiery one.

"Not only are the oceans and atmosphere conspiring against us, bringing baking temperatures, more powerful storms and floods, but the crust beneath our feet seems likely to join in too," said Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre, at University College London (UCL).

"Maybe the Earth is trying to tell us something," added McGuire, who is one of the organisers of UCL's Climate Forcing of Geological Hazards conference, which will open on 15 September. Some of the key evidence to be presented at the conference will come from studies of past volcanic activity. These indicate that when ice sheets disappear the number of eruptions increases, said Professor David Pyle, of Oxford University's earth sciences department.

"The last ice age came to an end between 12,000 to 15,000 years ago and the ice sheets that once covered central Europe shrank dramatically," added Pyle. "The impact on the continent's geology can by measured by the jump in volcanic activity that occurred at this time."

In the Eiffel region of western Germany a huge eruption created a vast caldera, or basin-shaped crater, 12,900 years ago, for example. This has since flooded to form the Laacher See, near Koblenz. Scientists are now studying volcanic regions in Chile and Alaska – where glaciers and ice sheets are shrinking rapidly as the planet heats up – in an effort to anticipate the eruptions that might be set off.

Last week scientists from Northern Arizona University reported in the journal Science that temperatures in the Arctic were now higher than at any time in the past 2,000 years. Ice sheets are disappearing at a dramatic rate – and these could have other, unexpected impacts on the planet's geology.

According to Professor Mark Maslin of UCL, one is likely to be the release of the planet's methane hydrate deposits. These ice-like deposits are found on the seabed and in the permafrost regions of Siberia and the far north.

"These permafrost deposits are now melting and releasing their methane," said Maslin. "You can see the methane bubbling out of lakes in Siberia. And that is a concern, for the impact of methane in the atmosphere is considerable. It is 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas."

A build-up of permafrost methane in the atmosphere would produce a further jump in global warming and accelerate the process of climate change. Even more worrying, however, is the impact of rising sea temperatures on the far greater reserves of methane hydrates that are found on the sea floor.

It was not just the warming of the sea that was the problem, added Maslin. As the ice around Greenland and Antarctica melted, sediments would pour off land masses and cliffs would crumble, triggering underwater landslides that would break open more hydrate reserves on the sea-bed. Again there would be a jump in global warming. "These are key issues that we will have to investigate over the next few years," he said.

There is also a danger of earthquakes, triggered by disintegrating glaciers, causing tsunamis off Chile, New Zealand and Newfoundland in Canada, Nasa scientist Tony Song will tell the conference. The last on this list could even send a tsunami across the Atlantic, one that might reach British shores.

The conference will also hear from other experts of the risk posed by melting ice in mountain regions, which would pose significant dangers to local people and tourists. The Alps, in particular, face a worryingly uncertain future, said Jasper Knight of Exeter University. "Rock walls resting against glaciers will become unstable as the ice disappears and so set off avalanches. In addition, increasing meltwaters will trigger more floods and mud flows."

For the Alps this is a serious problem. Tourism is growing there, while the region's population is rising. Managing and protecting these people was now an issue that needed to be addressed as a matter of urgency, Knight said.

"Global warming is not just a matter of warmer weather, more floods or stronger hurricanes. It is a wake-up call to Terra Firma," McGuire said.

Enviornmentalism as Religion? - In UK, Yes

2009-09-06T19:32:00.004-05:00

In the UK, if you get fired, you may be able to keep your job is if you claim a "philosophical belief in climate change", allowing you the same legal protection against discrimination as religious beliefs.

So, in essence, the UK will now treat climate belief discrimination the same as religious discrimination. That is of course unless common sense prevails. Guess we'll have to wait and see.

Company fights climate change ruling by employment tribunal

• Judge ruled views were philosophical belief
• Discrimination law 'may bring flood of litigation'

Afua Hirsch, legal affairs correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 6 September 2009 20.22 BST
Article history

A controversial tribunal decision that some company practices can discriminate against employees with strongly held views on climate change will be challenged in the courts.

Senior executive Tim Nicholson claimed he was unfairly dismissed by a property investment company because his views on the environment conflicted with other managers' "contempt for the need to cut carbon emissions".

In the first case of its kind, an employment tribunal decided that Nicholson, 41, had views amounting to a "philosophical belief in climate change", allowing him the same legal protection against discrimination as religious beliefs.

Nicholson, the former head of sustainability at Newcastle-based Grainger plc, says he was dismissed after disagreeing with practices including an instance where an IT worker was flown from London to Ireland to collect his BlackBerry, and another where Nicholson's attempts to obtain data to develop a carbon management strategy were blocked.

Despite having written policies on the environment, Grainger executives attended meetings in "some of the most highly polluting cars on the road", Nicholson claimed.

"[My belief] affects how I live my life including my choice of home, how I travel, what I buy, what I eat and drink, what I do with my waste, and my hopes and fears," he said. "For example, I no longer travel by plane, I have eco-renovated my home, I compost my food waste and encourage others to reduce their carbon emissions."

Judge David Sneath said at the employment tribunal: "[Nicholson] has certain views about climate change and acts upon those views in the way in which he leads his life. In my judgment his belief goes beyond a mere opinion."

The decision, which is being challenged by the company, comes two years after the law on religious discrimination was changed so that beliefs no longer had to be "similar" to religious faith to receive protection in the workplace.

Under the new law "philosophical belief" is protected by the law alongside religious belief if it passes a legal test requiring it to be cogent, serious and "worthy of respect in a democratic society".

The case has attracted criticism from some, however, who argue that the removal of the requirement that beliefs are "similar" to religious faith will create a potential minefield for employers.

Caroline Doran, employment partner at London solicitors Sprecher Grier Halberstam, said: "The removal of the word similar has [also] led to a range of employment litigation to determine whether patriotism or loyalty to a flag or support for the British National party are covered as suitable beliefs.

"This … may create an abundance of litigation in the future as the tribunals will have to weigh an individual's belief against the yardstick of current popular thinking."

Nicholson's lawyer said that the case reflected a necessary clarification of the law that would affect large numbers of employees.

"This is a case that will clarify the law for the ever-increasing numbers of people who take a philosophical stance on the environment and climate change, and who lead their lives according to those principles", said Shah Qureshi, head of employment law at solicitors Bindmans.

"These are often deeply held views based on the premise that without change humanity will suffer … people should be able to express such views without fear of retribution or discrimination."

Technology Can Fight Global Warming

2009-08-28T11:02:00.002-05:00

Here's an alternate viewpoint on globull warming. Lomborg is widely known as a critic of the hysteria and science associated with the topic. He's been very outspoken over the years and is worth listening to. Article courtesy of the WSJ.

Technology Can Fight Global Warming

Marine cloud whitening, and other ideas.

By BJøRN LOMBORG

We have precious little to show for nearly 20 years of efforts to prevent global warming. Promises in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to cut carbon emissions went unfulfilled. Stronger pledges in Kyoto five years later failed to keep emissions in check. The only possible lesson is that agreements to reduce carbon emissions are costly, politically arduous and ultimately ineffective.

But this is a lesson many are hell-bent on ignoring, as politicians plan to gather again—this time in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December—to negotiate a new carbon-emissions treaty. Even if they manage to bridge their differences and sign a deal, there is a strong likelihood that tomorrow's politicians will fail to deliver.

Global warming does not just require action; it requires effective action. Otherwise we are just squandering time.

View Full Image

Chad Crowe

To inform the debate, the Copenhagen Consensus Center has commissioned research looking at the costs and benefits of all the policy options. For example, internationally renowned climate economist Richard Tol of Ireland's Economic and Social Research Institute finds that a low carbon tax of $2 a metric ton (1.2 tons U.S.) is the only carbon reduction policy that would make economic sense. But his research demonstrates the futility of trying to use carbon cuts to keep temperature increases under 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), which many argue would avoid the worst of climate change's impacts.

Some economic models find that target impossible to reach without drastic action, like cutting the world population by a third. Other models show that achieving the target by a high CO2 tax would reduce world GDP a staggering 12.9% in 2100—the equivalent of $40 trillion a year.

Some may claim that global warming will be so terrible that a 12.9% reduction in GDP is a small price to pay. But consider that the majority of economic models show that unconstrained global warming would cost rich nations around 2% of GDP and poor countries around 5% by 2100.

Even those figures are an overstatement. A group of climate economists at the University of Venice led by Carlo Carraro looked closely at how people will adapt to climate change. Their research for the Copenhagen Consensus Center showed that farmers in areas with less water for agriculture could use more drip irrigation, for example, while those with more water will grow more crops.

Taking a variety of natural, so-called market adaptations into account, the Carraro research shows we will acclimatize to the negative impacts of global warming and exploit the positive changes, actually creating 0.1% increase in GDP in 2100 among the member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In poor countries, market adaptation will reduce climate change-related losses to 2.9% of GDP. This remains a significant, negative effect. The real challenge of global warming lies in tackling its impact on the Third World. Yet adaptation has other positive benefits. If we prepare societies for more ferocious hurricanes in the future, we also help them to cope better with today's extreme weather.

This does not mean, however, that we should ignore rising greenhouse-gas emissions. Research for the Copenhagen Consensus Center by Claudia Kemfert of German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin shows that in terms of reducing climate damage, reducing methane emissions is cheaper than reducing CO2 emissions, and—because methane is a much shorter-living gas—its mitigation could do a lot to prevent some of the worst of short-term warming. Other research papers highlight the advantages of planting more trees and protecting the forests we have to absorb CO2 and cut greenhouse gases.

Other more speculative approaches deserve consideration. In groundbreaking research, J. Eric Bickel, an economist and engineer at the University of Texas, and Lee Lane, a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, study the costs and benefits of climate engineering. One proposal would have boats spray seawater droplets into clouds above the sea to make them reflect more sunlight back into space—augmenting the natural process where evaporating ocean sea salt helps to provide tiny particles for clouds to form around.

Remarkably, Mr. Bickel finds that about $9 billion spent developing this so-called marine cloud whitening technology might be able to cancel out this century's global warming. The benefits—from preventing the temperature increase—would add up to about $20 trillion.

Climate engineering raises ethical concerns. But if we care most about avoiding warmer temperatures, we cannot avoid considering a simple, cost-effective approach that shows so much promise.

Nothing short of a technological revolution is required to end our reliance on fossil fuel—and we are not even close to getting this revolution started. Economists Chris Green and Isabel Galiana from McGill University point out that nonfossil sources like nuclear, wind, solar and geothermal energy will—based on today's availability—get us less than halfway toward a path of stable carbon emissions by 2050, and only a tiny fraction of the way towards stabilization by 2100.

A high carbon tax will simply hurt growth if alternative technology is not ready, making us all worse off. Mr. Green proposes that policy makers abandon carbon-reduction negotiations and make agreements to seriously invest in research and development. Mr. Green's research suggests that investing about $100 billion annually in noncarbon based energy research could result in essentially stopping global warming within a century or so.

A technology-led effort would have a much greater chance of actually tackling climate change. It would also have a much greater chance of political success, since countries that fear signing on to costly emission targets are more likely to embrace the cheaper, smarter path of innovation.

Cutting emissions of greenhouse gases is not the only answer to global warming. Next week, a group of Nobel Laureate economists will gather at Georgetown University to consider all of the new research and identify the solutions that are most effective. Hopefully, their results will influence debate and help shift decision makers away from a narrow focus on one, deeply flawed response to global warming.

Our generation will not be judged on the brilliance of our rhetoric about global warming, or on the depth of our concern. We will be judged on whether or not we stop the suffering that global warming will cause. Politicians need to stop promising the moon, and start looking at the most effective ways to help planet Earth.

Mr. Lomborg teaches at the Copenhagen Business School and is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is the author of "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming" (Knopf, 2007.)

Eco towns get green light despite local opposition

2009-08-24T18:44:00.002-05:00

More from the Times Online. More eco facism. The British socialists are trying to ram this down the throats of the citizens even in the face of fierce local opposition. But then, what does it matter what the people want? The government always knows best. I sure as hell hope the eco nazis here aren't paying attention. We're likely to wind up with some eco towns that nobody wants too. These people that are pushing this crap are insane.

Jill Sherman, Whitehall Editor

Ministers gave approval yesterday for the building of four “pioneer” eco-towns and insisted that at least 10,000 homes would be in place by 2016 in the face of local opposition.

Despite the depth of the recession and fierce local protests, John Healey, the Housing Minister, approved sites in Oxfordshire, Norfolk, Cornwall and Hampshire. The chosen developers for Gordon Brown’s flagship programme will each be able to bid for part of a £60 million pot of extra cash.

Rural campaigners warned that the zero-carbon developments would threaten greenfield sites and local wildlife. There were also concerns that without more public transport, the extra traffic would increase rather than reduce pollution.

The successful bids, all backed by Conservative local authorities, are: Rackheath, Norfolk; Whitehill Bordon, East Hampshire; North West Bicester and the China Clay Community near St Austell, Cornwall. The Government has dropped plans to develop more controversial sites such as Western Otmoor, near Oxford — opposed by Tim Henman’s father, Tony — Ford, West Sussex, and Pennbury, Leicstershire.

The Campaign to Protect Rural England cautiously welcomed the Government’s decision to scale back its orginal shortlist of 15 sites. “From a list of deeply worrying and unsustainable locations the Government has chosen to go with the least damaging, which is enouraging,” said Kate Gordon, the organisation’s senior planning officer.

The Conservatives accused the Government of presiding over an “eco-con” that was mired in controversy. “All the low-flush toilets in the world can’t make dumping a housing estate on green fields somehow eco-friendly,” said Grant Shapps, the Shadow Housing Minister.

Marliyn Metcalfe, head of Bordon Area Action Group, which opposes the scheme in Whitehill Bordon, said: “It beggars belief that another 15,000 people would not damage the surrounding wildlife, that we could all survive on the same amount of water used now, and that doubling the population would produce no more carbon omissions than Bordon today,” Ms Metcalfe said.

All four in the first wave will be expected to have a zero-carbon school by 2013, and parks, playgrounds and gardens will make up 40 per cent of the towns. At least 30 per cent of affordable housing will be required, with one member of each working couple expected to work in the town.

Biomass fuel, solar panels, insulation, water recycling and double glazing are expected to save a typical home £200 to £500 a year. The homes will also have gadgets such as electronic bus timetables on the walls.

Quangos blackball ... oops, sorry ... veto ‘racist’ everyday phrases

2009-08-24T18:30:00.003-05:00

From the Times Online. More political correctness from our friends across the pond. What is it with these people? Do they think we actually give a rat's ass about these terms? Do they think we associate right hand man with racism? They're just nuts. They just want to interfere with our freedoms. They want to impose their twisted values on us. Its all about control. WTF is a Quango anyway? I suppose I could Google it but I'm too lazy.

It could be construed as a black day for the English language — but not if you work in the public sector.

Dozens of quangos and taxpayer-funded organisations have ordered a purge of common words and phrases so as not to cause offence.

Among the everyday sayings that have been quietly dropped in a bid to stamp out racism and sexism are “whiter than white”, “gentleman’s agreement”, “black mark” and “right-hand man”.

The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission has advised staff to replace the phrase “black day” with “miserable day”, according to documents released under freedom of information rules.

It points out that certain words carry with them a “hierarchical valuation of skin colour”. The commission even urges employees to be mindful of the term “ethnic minority” because it can imply “something smaller and less important”.

The National Gallery in London believes that the phrase “gentleman’s agreement” is potentially offensive to women and suggests that staff should replace it with “unwritten agreement” or “an agreement based on trust” instead. The term “right-hand man” is also considered taboo by the gallery, with “second in command” being deemed more suitable.

Many institutions have urged their workforce to be mindful of “gender bias” in language. The Learning and Skills Council wants staff to “perfect” their brief rather than “master” it, while the Newcastle University has singled out the phrase “master bedroom” as being problematic.

Advice issued by the South West Regional Development Agency states: “Terms such as ‘black sheep of the family’, ‘black looks’ and ‘black mark’ have no direct link to skin colour but potentially serve to reinforce a negative view of all things black. Equally, certain terms imply a negative image of ‘black’ by reinforcing the positive aspects of white.

“For example, in the context of being above suspicion, the phrase ‘whiter than white’ is often used. Purer than pure or cleaner than clean are alternatives which do not infer that anything other than white should be regarded with suspicion.”

The clampdown in the public sector has angered some of the country’s most popular writers.

Anthony Horowitz, author of the Alex Rider children’s spy books, said: “A great deal of our modern language is based on traditions which have now gone but it would be silly — and extremely inconvenient — to replace them all. A ‘white collar worker’, for example, probably doesn’t wear one. An ‘able seaman’, under new regulations, could well be neither. ‘Spanish practices’ can happen all over Europe. We know what these phrases mean and we can find out from where they were derived. Banning them is just unnecessary.”

Marie Clair, spokeswoman for the Plain English Campaign, said: “Political correctness has good intentions but things can be taken to an extreme. What is really needed is a bit of common sense.”

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Marine cloud whitening, and other ideas.

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Eco towns get green light despite local opposition

Quangos blackball ... oops, sorry ... veto ‘racist’ everyday phrases

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