Showing posts with label Climate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Climate. Show all posts

Monday, July 28, 2008

Olympic Officials: Beijing smog is 'mist' akin to Atlanta or LA


International Olympic Committee officials are trying to prepare athletes for the brutal Beijing smog with their own brand of psyops.

...Schamasch said the IOC was monitoring Beijing's air. He said particulate matter on Sunday "was a little bit higher than what's expected but nothing dramatic."

He said readings for ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide fell within 2005 guidelines set by the World Health Organization... He did not disclose the exact levels, saying it was not the IOC's practice.

"Today there is nothing critical preventing an athlete from running, except the visibility," he said. "I can tell you it's mist more than smog."

Schamasch said conditions were "not worse" than in other cities that hosted the games, mentioning Los Angeles, Atlanta and Athens.

Just 12 days before the games open, the AP reported that China's capital city was "shrouded in thick gray smog".

Despite traffic restrictions put in place to reduce pollution, the city's air combined with warm temperatures and high humidity could create "a soupy mix of harmful chemicals, particulate matter and water vapor."

The following are some recent pictures taken in and around Beijing. Judge for yourself whether they look like Atlanta or Los Angeles.




















Before we start eviscerating the U.S. economy with carbon trading, perhaps we could get China on board some sort of cleanup program since it has 16 of the top 20 polluted cities in the world.

Hat tips: Marramark, Pompous Vegan, LA Times, TreeHugger and EarthFirst.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Could Al Gore be any more full of crap?


Yesterday Al Gore thanked bloggers for promoting his global warming climate change agenda.

He also echoed Congressional Democrats' assertions that increasing energy supplies through drilling won't help.

Recent Republican calls to battle rising oil prices with more drilling is “absurd” and a bit like the old hangover cure known as the “hair of the dog,” or having another drink, Gore said.

Absurd? I'd say equating our transportation and energy systems, which today rely almost exclusively on fossil fuels, with a hangover qualifies as not just absurd, but borderline insanity.

Gore said he is trying to enlist 10 million grassroots environmental activists and asked the online organizers for help in doing it. He advocated moving all energy production to renewable sources, such as wind, solar and geothermal, within 10 years.

Meanwhile Gore's monstrous fleet of air-conditioned SUVs and limosines runs on premium unleaded, but not on wind, solar or geothermal.

The accompanying graphs ("Global Cooling (PDF))" were produced by The Herald-Sun of Australia.

A new paper published by the Astronomical Society of Australia has a warning to global warming believers not immediately obvious from the summary:

Based on our claim that changes in the Sun’s equatorial rotation rate are synchronized with changes in the Sun’s orbital motion about the barycentre, we propose that the mean period for the Sun’s meridional flow is set by a Synodic resonance between the flow period (~22.3 yr), the overall 178.7-yr repetition period for the solar orbital motion, and the 19.86-yr synodic period of Jupiter and Saturn.

Or as one of the authors, Ian Wilson, kindly explained to me:

It supports the contention that the level of activity on the Sun will significantly diminish sometime in the next decade and remain low for about 20 - 30 years. On each occasion that the Sun has done this in the past the World’s mean temperature has dropped by ~ 1 - 2 C. 

Oh. Global cooling coming, then. Obvious, really.

As if Gore needed any more support for his intractable position, The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, just reversed its position on climate change.

In the face of all of this, I simply ask: could Al Gore be any more full of crap?


Perhaps his limo drivers know for sure.

Update: Al Gore was a dolt as a student, too.

Linked by: LawHawk and Tom Nelson. Thanks! Hat tip: Catmman

Friday, July 18, 2008

The word 'hypocrite' requires only four letters: G. O. R. E.


In a major announcement yesterday, Al Gore challenged Americans to switch from "carbon-intensive fuels to renewable energy" by 2018. Gore called for a multi-trillion dollar upgrade to the electric grid paid for, in part, by a colossal taxpayer ripoff in the form of a "carbon tax."

A film crew from Americans for Prosperty happened to be on the scene when Gore and his family arrived.









Oh. And more bad news for the global warming climate change scam artist formerly known as the vice president.

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, just reversed its position on climate change.

Hat tips: Michelle Malkin, Gateway Pundit and Larwyn. Linked by: Denny and LawHawk. Thanks!.

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

"Cap-and-Trade": the largest tax increase in U.S. history


What would you say to your Congressional representative if they told you they were going to raise taxes on gasoline by $0.53 a gallon?

Yeah, I know. It's not printable on a family blog.

Democrats are marketing a bill -- "The Climate Security Act" (also known as "Cap-and-Trade") -- which will do precisely that while sinking the economy into a deep recession as surely as night follows day.

The Lieberman-Warner bill (America's Climate Security Act) represents the largest tax increase in U.S. history and the biggest pork bill ever contemplated with trillions of dollars in giveaways. Well-heeled lobbyists are already plotting how to divide up the federal largesse... The federal Energy Information Administration says the bill would result in a 9.5% drop in manufacturing output and higher energy costs.

Senator George Voinovich said that the bill "could result in the most massive bureaucratic intrusion into the lives of Americans since the creation of the Internal Revenue Service."

Liberal blogger Matt Stoller ("The Cap-and-Trade Scam") notes that such a system is already used in Europe... to ill effect.

Given these numerous drawbacks, cap-and-trade’s principal justification appears to its political feasibility. Many environmental activists assume that a global cap-and-trade program is more achievable politically than global carbon taxes, because most of the world agreed to Kyoto and most people resist higher taxes. On close analysis, the Kyoto agreement is too weak to signify a meaningful consensus for an effective cap-and-trade system. As we will see, numerous analyses of Kyoto have found that it would have very little effect on climate change even over a 60-year period; and the first effort to apply it in an enforceable way, the European Emissions Trading Scheme, is expected to have virtually no effect on emissions.

Furthermore, the bill ignores the real polluters and instead penalizes the U.S., which is already among the cleanest of all countries on a per-capita basis.


Satellite data indicates that Beijing, China is the "air pollution capital of the world."


The World Bank has warned China is home to 16 of the Earth's 20 most air-polluted cities.


The World Resources Institute reports that, "air pollution in some Chinese cities is among the highest ever recorded, averaging more than ten times the standard proposed by the World Health Organization... In Beijing, 40 percent of autos surveyed and 70 percent of taxis failed to meet the most basic emission standards."


USA Today reports that, "[d]ecades of... pollution have allowed industrial poisons to leach into groundwater, contaminating drinking supplies and leading to a rash of cancers, residents say. In this village, where the air has a distinctive sour odor, the rate of cancer is more than 18 times the national average. In nearby Liukuaizhuang, it's 30 times the national figure..."


AFP discovered that an internal Chinese government report found that nearly half a million persons die per year from pollution. Experts believe that, "China's rapid industrialization is leading to increasing environmental damage, with air pollution likely to rise five-fold in 15 years at the current rate."


Iran is another interesting case. Its pollution problems are visible throughout the capital city of Tehran.


In a single year, 10,000 people have died from pollution-related causes in that city alone.

It begs the question: why "Cap-and-Trade"? Consider the beneficiaries of this massive new tax.

Ms. Boxer expects to scoop up auction revenues of some $3.32 trillion by 2050. Yes, that's trillion. Her friends in Congress are already salivating over this new pot of gold. The way Congress works, the most vicious floor fights won't be over whether this is a useful tax to create, but over who gets what portion of the spoils. In a conference call with reporters last Thursday, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry explained that he was disturbed by the effects of global warming on "crustaceans" and so would be pursuing changes to ensure that New England lobsters benefit from some of the loot.

...$802 billion would go for "relief" for low-income taxpayers... There's also $190 billion to fund training for "green-collar jobs," which are supposed to replace the jobs that will be lost in carbon-emitting industries. Another $288 billion would go to "wildlife adaptation," whatever that means, and another $237 billion to the states for the same goal. Some $342 billion would be spent on international aid, $171 billion for mass transit, and untold billions for alternative energy and research – and we're just starting.

Ms. Boxer would only auction about half of the carbon allowances; she reserves the rest for politically favored supplicants. These groups might be Indian tribes (big campaign donors!), or states rewarded for "taking the lead" on emissions reductions like Ms. Boxer's California. Those lucky winners would be able to sell those allowances for cash. The Senator estimates that the value of the handouts totals $3.42 trillion. For those keeping track, that's more than $6.7 trillion in revenue handouts so far.

The bill also tries to buy off businesses that might otherwise try to defeat the legislation. Thus carbon-heavy manufacturers like steel and cement will get $213 billion "to help them adjust," while fossil-fuel utilities will get $307 billion in "transition assistance." No less than $34 billion is headed to oil refiners. Given that all of these folks have powerful Senate friends, they will probably extract a larger ransom if cap and trade ever does become law.

In these turbulent economic times, Democrats are proposing to increase the price of gas, outsource millions of jobs to overseas providers, and create a massive new bureaucracy funded by your (additional) tax dollars.

The American Consumer summarizes the fatally flawed "Cap-and-Trade" approach.

By creating tradable financial assets worth tens of billions of dollars for governments to distribute among their industries and plants and then monitor, a global cap-and-trade program also introduces powerful incentives to cheat by corrupt and radical governments. Corrupt governments will almost certainly distribute permits in ways that favor their business supporters and understate their actual energy use and emissions.

Meanwhile, the world's worst polluters continue choking the atmosphere with toxic fumes and poisons.

Vote accordingly in 2008.

Friday, May 30, 2008

Quote o' the day


Charles Krauthammer:

If you doubt the arrogance [of the global warming crowd], you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue.

Update: Gore visits Gaia.

Friday, May 16, 2008

Line o' the day: just right


George Will (via Diamond Bullet):

The housing perhaps-not-entirely-a-crisis resembles, in one particular, the curious consensus about the global warming "crisis," concerning which, the assumption is: Although Earth's temperature has risen and fallen through many millennia, the temperature was exactly right when, in the 1960s, Al Gore became interested in the subject.

Saturday, May 03, 2008

Gore, Schumer and Pelosi: Let them eat dirt


It all started out as a simple, money-making scam. In the late 1990's, members of the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were tasked with assessing the scientific validity of the Kyoto Protocol. They subsequently produced the Special Report on Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry. The report found that "carbon offsets" and "carbon trading" were viable ways to barter the right to pollute for new forestry initiatives.


But members of the panel, such as Pedro Moura-Costa (above) and Gareth Philips, had major conflicts-of-interest. They owned or worked for businesses -- such as Ecosecurities and SGS Forestry -- that would benefit from the report's conclusions. But the mainstream media did not report these conflicts and instead piled on the "global warming" and "carbon offset" bandwagons.


The carbon offset market quickly exploded. In fact, $92 billion worth of offsets are expected to change hands in 2008. But wanton profiteering alone appears to be at the very heart of "carbon offsets." Put simply, a wide range of respected scientists, environmentalists, researchers, agriculturalists, and activists believe that carbon offsets are a "scam", "fantasy", "fiction", "nonsense", "fraudulent" and worse. And they've been saying so since 2000, though to read the newspaper you wouldn't know it.


To demonstrate the fraudulence of the carbon offset market, one need only request quotes from various carbon offset sellers.


The price for offseting a flight from London to Toronto and back?
  • $85: from Climate Care (UK), which says 6 tons of CO2 must be offset.
  • $60: Carbon Neutral (UK), which says 4.3 tons of CO2 must be offset.
  • $195: Climate Friendly (Australia) asserts that 11.63 tons of CO2 must be offset.
  • $180: Green Seat (Netherlands) says 8.68 tons of CO2 must be offset.

In other words, they're all basically making it up as they go along.


The result of these frauds, with which the mainstream media has been stunningly complicit, goes well beyond what most of the scammers would ever have anticipated.


For one, food prices haves skyrocketed as biofuel production has eroded the world's ability to produce basic foodstuffs.

"Why are we putting food in our gas tanks instead of our stomachs?" asked Richard Reinwald, owner of Reinwald's Bakery in Huntington, N.Y., and an active member of the Retail Bakers Association...

...Joseph Glauber, the chief economist at the Department of Agriculture, said ethanol production has led to higher prices for corn and soybeans... [and]...George Braley, the vice president of America's Second Harvest, said food banks nationwide are having trouble stocking their shelves...

But biofuel production isn't the only culprit.


The rise in food prices is also due, in part, to high oil prices. Earlier this week, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) described his reluctance to pump oil from the United States' Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

What does the president do? He takes out the old saw of ANWR. ANWR wouldn't produce a drop of oil in ten years...

Unfortunately, that's exactly what Democrat Bill Clinton said fourteen years ago, when he vetoed legislation that would have permitted drilling in ANWR's coastal plain. Had Clinton signed off then, we'd have started producing oil four years ago. And billions of barrels of oil lie untouched, available to U.S. consumers, in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) areas.


The oil lies, patiently waiting for us, in areas around the US. But Democrats have "repeatedly blocked environmentally safe exploration in ANWR... We could produce plenty of oil," said Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). "We could meet our own needs right now if we wanted to."


The red areas in the accompanying maps depict "The No Zone." These are the regions surrounding the United States in which Democrats have forbidden any oil exploration. From the tiny spit of land within the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to the OCS, Democrats have uniformly opposed every form of exploration that would allow us to stop sending our funds overseas and given us the time to transition to clean energy technologies.



In the mean time, Cuba has leased drilling rights to foreign countries, which will permit them to drain the Gulf of Mexico of its oil. For example, Cuba recently granted China drilling rights in the Gulf. And, in fact, China will be drilling within 50 miles of Florida.


Instead of thinking strategically, Democrats have proposed various short-term fixes to address high oil prices.

"We believe there ought to be a gas-tax holiday, but Big Oil ought to pay for it," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

In other words, jack up prices to consumers even more because the oil companies will be forced to raise costs in order to continue their exploration and R&D functions (and pay shareholders like you and I).


Put simply, Democrats want more expensive energy.

All that said, the real problem — and the reason Pelosi really does deserve blame — is that Democrats’ political goal of reducing carbon emissions continues to trump their populist rhetoric on gasoline prices. The two stances are impossible to reconcile. Try as they might to blame oil companies for the pain Americans feel at the pump, the Democrats want higher prices for gasoline — and for all forms of energy that emit carbon. Economic barriers against CO2 emissions are a requirement for environmental progress in the Democrats’ view, and this is the entire purpose of the carbon cap-and-trade system they will put before the House this summer — to create economic disincentives for emitting CO2.

There's that phrase again: carbon trading.

It all comes back to carbon offsets, the "global warming" scam promoted by the UN's IPCC. And now, a group of scientists has formally petitioned the IPCC, asking that they cease and desist marketing the message that CO2 emissions relate to warming temperatures. The scientists go on to renounce the unintended consequences of the UN's position: that the policy of burning food (to produce biofuel) has driven food prices sharply higher and is causing hunger and deforestation in countries around the world (especially the poorer countries).

The net result? In Haiti, for example, citizens have been forced to eat mud patties consisting of dirt, oil and sugar.

Furthermore, scientists are now coming to the conclusion that "green" fuels can't replace oil anytime soon.

* * *

The hunger and high oil prices are certain to continue until we come to grips with reality. That is, fossil fuels are required for the world to survive the next several decades. The transition to green technologies will take significant time.

Unless we wish to see mass starvation and economic ruin, Democrats must allow America to take advantage of its immense storehouse of energy.

Vote accordingly in 2008.

Linked by: Junk Science and Parkway Rest Stop. Thanks!