The Guardian Slams Funding of Anti-Global Warming Groups

 

 

By Alan Caruba

The Guardian, a London-based daily newspaper, has been a leading advocate of the global warming theory—now called climate change—and its December 20 edition published an article by Susanne Goldenberg, “Conservative groups spend up to $1bn a year to fight action on climate change.”

The article focused on a study by Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle that had been published in the journal Climate Change asserting that “The anti-climate effort has been largely underwritten by conservative billionaires, often working through secretive funding networks. They have displaced corporations as the prime supporters of 91 think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations which have worked to block action on climate change.”

What action these organizations or even entire governments could take to have any affect whatever on “climate change” defies common sense. Nothing they could do, for example, would have any effect on the action of the Sun, the primary determinant of climate. For the past seventeen years the Sun has been in a natural cycle of reduced radiation, less warmth for the Earth. The result has been a cooling cycle on Earth that has crushed decades of lies about “global warming.”

It’s not that the Earth hasn’t had previous cycles of warmer climate, but they had nothing to do with anything humans do. There was warming before the Industrial Revolution introduced the use of coal, oil and natural gas to provide the energy that has marked the development and use of technologies that have improved human life in countless ways. “Global warming” is blamed on the emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other so-called greenhouse gases. The most prominent of these gases in the Earth’s atmosphere is nothing more than water vapor.

Apparently, if Brulle and The Guardian are to be believed, anyone or any organization that donates to any group that doubts the claims of Big Green are the enemies of “global warming”, but this conveniently ignored estimates that the U.S. government, according to an October article in The New American “will spend more money on fighting global warming than it will on tightening border security.” The spending is estimated to cost approximately $22.2 billion this year, twice as much as the $12 billion estimated for customs and border enforcement.”

There are, according to the White House, “currently 18 federal agencies engaged in activities related to global warming. These agencies fund programs that include scientific research, international climate assistance, renewable energy technology, and subsidies for renewable energy producers.” 

The Guardian article caught my eye because, among the organizations that have been active in debunking the “global warming” theory has been The Heartland Institute. I have been an advisor to the Institute which, since 2008, has organized eight international conferences on global warming that have featured some of the world’s leading skeptics.

If you want to know how the Institute is funded, you can go to their website where you will find, for example, that it does not solicit or accept grants from any of those government agencies using billions of taxpayer dollars to convince Americans that “global warming” is real or that anything the government does about “climate change” can have any effect on it. In 2012, Heartland received 50% of its income from foundations, 28% from individuals, and 18% from corporations. No corporate donor contributes more than 5% of its annual budget.

In contrast, a recent article by Ron Arnold, a Washington Examiner columnist and executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, noted that over the past decade environmental organizations received 345,052 foundation grants totaling $20,826,664,000—over twenty billion dollars—largely from a 200-plus member Environmental Grantmakers Association and the smaller, farther-left National Network of Grantmakers. Arnold said that “Today, foundations are the backbone of Big Green.”

On a recent CNN television program, Marc Morano, the communications director of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) took on the Sierra Club director, noting that this major environmental organization has received $26 million from natural gas corporations to support its attacks on the coal industry. So “fossil fuels” industries are okay if they are giving the Sierra Club money.

“So record cold,” said Morano, “is now evidence of man-made global warming.”

While the Koch-affiliated foundations that provide grants to conservative groups were singled out, along with Exxon Mobil, in The Guardian article, no mention was made of multi-billionaire George Soros who is famed for funding all manner of liberal groups and who reportedly has invested heavily in “clean energy” companies—solar and wind—whose products do not produce the so-called greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the more recent articles in The Guardian was titled “Global warming will intensify drought, says new study.”  The problem, of course, is that there is NO global warming.

By contrast, a July Fox News article, “Billions spent in Obama climate plan may be virtually useless, study says” was not also reported in the mainstream media. Suffice to say that those billions came from taxpayer’s pockets.

I am happy to know that the Heartland Institute, a 29 year old non-profit research organization, CFACT, and other free market research and activist groups receive foundation and other support. Without them, the lies about “climate change” from the Obama administration and the many environmental organizations would not be debunked.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

The Supreme Court is Undermining Science and Society

By Alan Caruba

The Supreme Court has taken up another case based on the Environmental Protection Agency’s campaign of lies that carbon dioxide is the cause of “climate change” and claims about the quality of air in the United States. The Court is composed of lawyers, not scientists.

At this point in the present era, the Court has made rulings that run contrary to the original, clear intent of the U.S. Constitution and has wrought havoc on our society.

In 1973 it ruled that the killing of unborn babies was protected and millions since then have been deliberately killed. It extended protection to sodomy and same-sex marriage. It is destroying the fabric of our society that has served Americans well for more than two hundred years.

It ruled that the Affordable Health Care Act was a “tax”, enabling the Obamacare to be unleashed with the subsequent loss of health care plans by millions of Americans, often the loss of their personal physician, and the requirement that deeply-held religious opposition to contraception and abortion be negated by a law that requires their beliefs be overruled and denied.

In 2007, I wrote a commentary that was published in The Washington Times. I criticized a Supreme Court ruling that carbon dioxide (CO2) was a “pollutant”, opening the door to the EPA’s rapacious intent to control all aspects of our lives based on this lie that is used to justify its war on coal-fired plants that provide nearly half of all the electrical energy we use daily.  “CO2 is not a pollutant,” I wrote, “It exists in the Earth’s atmosphere and every blade of grass and every tree depends on it.” It plays no role whatever in the Earth’s climate.

The Clean Air Act and revisions passed in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1990s. The original regulation of air pollution was a good idea, as were the laws affecting clean water, but the EPA has since used pollution to impose a vast matrix of regulations that do not reflect the fact that the nation’s air and water is now as clean as it ever can be.

Carbon monoxide emissions have fallen from 197 million tons to 89 million tons. Nitrogen oxide emissions fell from 27 million tons to 19 million tons. Sulfur dioxide emissions fell from 3l million tons to 15 million tons. Lead emissions fell by more than 98%.  Particulate emissions (soot) fell by 80%. The air in the U.S. is considerably cleaner, but the EPA’s assertions continue to be made to expand its regulatory power and to attack the sovereignty of the states.

A case that was recently argued before the Court is another EPA effort to rewrite the Clean Air Act, asserting that it be given authority to regulate the flow of alleged “pollution” between “upwind” states and those who receive particulates and gases under its control. Some 27 states are considered “upwind” and those states along with all others have their own air control laws. In states that are more heavily industrialized and which have a large number of coal-fired plants on which the EPA wants to impose expensive standards that have no basis in fact.

A coalition led by Texas of more than a dozen other states brought a case, Environmental Protection Agency v. EME Homer City Generation, opposing the EPA’s regulatory re-write of the Clean Air Act. In August 2012, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the EPA which appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Wall Street Journal noted that “The D.C. Circuit only rarely overturns EPA rules, which shows how out of bounds the cross-state regulation is. The Supreme Court should overturn it for violating the federalist intentions of Congress, but there is also the added judicial incentive to show this increasingly rogue agency that it can’t rewrite the law as it pleases.”

The U.S. has been harmed by the many laws whose justification is based on the totally unscientific hoax regarding CO2. During the 101^st and 111^th Congresses, there were 692 laws introduced containing the term “greenhouse gas” when, in fact, CO2 is NOT such a gas, playing no role whatever in trapping warmth to affect the weather and/or climate of the Earth.

Stringent domestic laws and regulations, moreover, do not take into consideration the role of many other nations whose emissions are far greater than those produced here. However, reducing their emissions will have no effect on the Earth’s climate. The Earth is in what will likely be a lengthy cycle of cooling based on reduced solar radiation. It recently snowed in Egypt and in Israel where snow has long been a rarity.

The Obama administration’s “war on coal” has used the EPA to inflict an attack on the nation’s capacity to provide energy and the EPA has not ceased from using every ruling it has imposed to degrade the nation’s ability to maintain and expand the industrial base it needs to provide for economic growth, an increase in jobs, and the sovereign right of states to determine their own response to the need for clean air. The U.S. is a republic composed of separate republics.

At this point, control of the nation’s air and water quality should be returned in full to the states and the EPA should be eliminated as the threat to the nation it has become. The Supreme Court has played a role in this threat, ruling without any attention to real science, traditional values, and the clear intent of the Constitution.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

The Financial Collapse of America

By Alan Caruba

“The United States is in very deep trouble. First, the concept of repaying $16.7 trillion in debt is not even a remote possibility over the next 100 years, even if the government had small surpluses. Then, because the country is running such large deficits, the national debt is increasing and getting worse…much worse. In addition, the government is approximately $70 trillion in unfunded liabilities that have to be resolved.”

“Pray that the market for the national debt remains open so that the United States can keep borrowing to repay the money is previously borrowed and then will have to re-borrow to repay the money it just borrowed. There is no chance the market will not change its demeanor over the next 100 years.”

That’s Murray Holland’s conclusion in his book, “A Nation in the Red: The Government Debt Crisis and What We Can Do About it” ($28.00, McGraw Hill). As a longtime book reviewer, I have read a growing stack of books warning about a financial collapse, but Holland’s book is not only based in the actual debt, but is written in a manner that even a person who has no knowledge of this issue can understand.

The “market” Holland refers to is the market for America’s treasury notes and bonds, issued to cover our on-going budget and the interest needed to pay prior borrowing. In sum, the nation is spending more and borrowing more than it can afford. It has been doing this for a long time and the warning signs are places like Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and other European nations that, following World War Two, embraced socialism. America did so even earlier during The Great Depression and the decades since the 1930s.

Holland calls it a Debt Trap and conservatives know instinctively that the U.S. government is too large and too based in socialism to survive. “There are over 500 agencies and departments on the list and it does not even include all the agencies and departments created in the states under grant programs from the federal government.”  One can find the list at http://www.usa.gov/directory/federal/index.shtml.

“The list of social programs is long,” writes Holland, “but the four major categories driving America into the Debt Trap are income security (Social Security, welfare, and other related programs), healthcare (Medicaid, Obamacare, and Medicare), education, and housing,” noting that “These programs did not exist until after the Great Depression.” They came about as the result of a Keynesian view that government spending would lift the economy out of its doldrums, but government spending does nothing to improve the economy. It sucks money out of the economy and, more specifically, out of the pockets of individual citizens and the business community.

Americans born during and after the Great Depression have had eighty years living in a nation whose economic system is capitalism, but whose governance is socialism.

 

Despite nearly fifty years of a Cold War with the former Soviet Union (1945-1991), Americans have been blissfully ignored its intention of the communist intention to destroy capitalism and have accepted a vast matrix of social programs that now represent $70 trillion in unfunded financial liabilities. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, their plan “to overwhelm America with debt, welfare, and entitlements—in other words, to bankrupt America has continued unabated.

“This will cause the collapse of America and the government could then turn to pure socialism,” says Holland, noting that “Their scheme has been so well researched it has its own name: the Cloward-Piven strategy,”

It’s worth noting that, in addition to the socialist nations of the European Union, communism is still alive and well in Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba to name just a few nations. And yet, even Russia and China have adopted some capitalistic measures, while ensuring strong, totalitarian central governments.

The level of danger has increased exponentially with the election and reelection of President Barack Obama whose namesake legislation, Obamacare, is already having a catastrophic effect on the economy while putting all Americans at risk for the loss of healthcare from individual physicians and hospitals. The legislation was passed by a party-line vote by Democrats and opposed by every Republican in Congress. Obama spent the years since signing it lying about it. That’s what Communists do.

It is what the vast bulk of the nation’s print and broadcast media is doing are doing as well. They are little more than echo chambers for the torrent of lies that Obama administration is telling Americans about the economy.

“During the first few years of the Great Depression, almost 2,300 banks were closed, manufacturing fell 46 percent, and wholesale prices fell 32 percent. Today, the United States has a reported unemployment rate of around 8 percent. During the Great Depression, the unemployment rate hit 25 percent.” With ninety million Americans unemployed, the figures cited by the federal government are a fiction.

The only thing that can save America is an increase in our Gross Domestic Product (GDP), selling more goods and services, enabling an increase in employment, coupled with a vast reduction in the enormous governmental regulation of business. The vast taxation of Americans needs to be reduced in order to permit them to retain and spend their earnings, make investments, start new businesses. The annual GDP is now less than what the nation earns.

The “redistribution of wealth” is a totally communist concept and it is the intent of the Obama administration.

The future of the nation depends on the outcome of the 2014 midterm elections and control of Congress by as many conservative candidates and office-holders is essential. The RINOs, Republicans in name only, must be replaced.

In the meantime, I recommend you purchase and read “A Nation in the Red.” 

© Alan Caruba, 2013

The UN Global Warming Hoax is Slowly Dying

 

By Alan Caruba

                                                                                       

In 2007 Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner was interviewed on the subject of sea levels. He is the head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden. He is past president (1999-2003) of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, and leader of the Maldives Sea Level Project. Dr. Mörner has been studying the sea level and its effects on coastal areas for some 35 years.

“You have Vanuatu, and also in the Pacific, north of New Zealand and Fiji— there is the island Tegua. They said they had to evacuate it, because the sea level was rising. But again, you look at the tide-gauge record: There is absolutely no signal that the sea level is rising. If anything, you could say that maybe the tide is lowering a little bit, but absolutely no rising.”

The most recent edition of Bloomberg Businessweek features a cover that says “This entire country is about to be wiped out by climate change. It won’t be the last.”  It is devoted to Kribati, a Pacific island chain, and it is a total lie.

The media has been a co-conspirator to the global warming hoax and I take this latest example as one that reveals its utter desperation to maintain the greatest hoax of the modern era. The facts mean nothing to them. Real science means nothing to them. But reality is intruding on theirs and the United Nations environmental program just wrapped up Conference of Parties-19 in Warsaw, where more nations are now in open revolt.

Writing from the conference was Craig Rucker, the Executive Director of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a think tank that has helped organize the Poles to protest this travesty. “Poland has been bullied for decades and they are not about to cede their energy independence to Russia, the UN or anyone. Nor should they.”

On November 21, Rucker reported that “COP-19 was shocked when China led a block of 132 nations in a walkout over ‘loss and damage.’ Loss and damage is a completely bogus concept that developed nations should be legally liable when natural disasters strike developing nations. There is of course no meaningful scientific or historical link that Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda was abnormal and with no global warming link.”

We owe a debt of gratitude as well to The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based free market think tank, that has sponsored eight international conferences on global warming since 2008 and recently released a report,“Global Warming Reconsidered II.” Like CFACT it has been on the forefront of those seeking to educate the public regarding the phony science claims put forth.

COP-19 was one more UN conference leading up to a new version of the Kyoto Protocol that required nations that signed onto it to reduce their so-called greenhouse gas emissions. The final push will come in 2015 in Paris.

Nations that did sign on—the U.S. Senate unanimously refused to ratify the treaty when the Protocol was initially introduced in 1997—are realizing the economic harm that it imposed on them. The same afternoon of the China-led walkout, Poland announced that it had fired its environmental minister who is also the president of the UN conference, two days before the conference was supposed to end!

The Protocol, as is the entire global warming aka climate change hoax, is based on the lie that carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere is causing it to warm. In recent years CO2 has increased in the atmosphere and the Earth, some fifteen or more years ago, entered a cooling cycle. It is getting colder.

“Never underestimate what a gathering of bureaucrats and carbon profiteers might accomplish when after your money”, warned Rucker.

A November 20 article in The Daily Caller reported that “It’s worth noting that U.S. diplomats were specifically instructed by the Obama administration to oppose any attempts to create an independent fund for climate reparations from rich countries to poor countries.” Three days later the administration announced that it now supports all nations declaring their targets for reducing CO2 emissions before 2015. Rucker warns that this now clears “the path for the UN to adopt a full climate treaty and successor to the Kyoto Protocol in 2015.” If the Senate is not controlled by Republicans at that point, it would permit the administration to sign onto a treaty. The harm to the economy would be incalculable.

Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott, elected recently to undo the damage of a carbon tax, told the Washington Post “Despite a carbon tax of $37 a ton by 2020, Australia’s domestic emissions were going up, not down. The carbon tax was basically socialism masquerading as environmentalism and that’s why it’s going to get abolished.” Australia did not send a representative to COP-19. Canada dropped out of the Protocol in recent years. Japan is abandoning the UN’s greenhouse gas emission reduction levels by allowing them to grow by three percent.

Nation by nation the UN global warming hoax is being abandoned for the obvious reason that it is a lie perpetrated to transfer wealth from the developed nations to those less developed. It was never about saving the Earth from a global warming; that was a lie from start to finish.

Some journalists are trying to tell the truth, but magazines like BusinessWeek and newspapers like The New York Times continue to keep the hoax alive. An informed population, not just in the United States, but increasingly worldwide, will ensure that it dies a long overdue death.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

It's Not Just Winter, It's a New Ice Age

By Alan Caruba

When you consider that a bunch of global warming propagandists, the 19^th Conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions has been meeting in Warsaw this month are still claiming that we are in the midst of global warming, you have a demonstration of how great a hoax has been perpetrated on the peoples of the world. These people and the scientists who supplied the falsified and inaccurate climate models to support the global warming claims have committed a criminal fraud.

Bit by bit, the truth in the form of increasingly cold weather is causing people to wonder whether they are being duped. The media has either buried the stories of extraordinary cold events or continues to tip-toe around the truth.

An example is a recent Wall Street Journal article by Robert Lee Hotz,“Strange Doings on the Sun”, Hotz reported that “Researchers are puzzled. They can’t tell if the lull is temporary or the onset of a decades-long decline, which might ease global warming a bit by altering the sun’s brightness or the wavelengths of its light.”

After describing the fact that the Sun has entered a period of reduced sunspot activity, always a precursor to a cooling cycle and even an ice age, Dr. David Hathaway, head of the solar physics group at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, is quoted as saying “It may give us a brief respite from global warming, but it is not going to stop it.”

Plainly said, you cannot trust what government scientists have to say about global warming. The government’s policy since the late 1980s has been that global warming is real and poses a great threat to the Earth. What Dr. Hathaway and other “warmists” are desperately trying to ignore is the fact that the Earth entered a natural and predictable cooling cycle around 1997 or 1998. It has been cooling ever since!

In 1997 Robert W. Felix authored the definitive book on the coming ice age in his book, “Not by Fire, but by Ice.” It is still widely available. His website, IceAgeNow.info provides updated information on the many weather events around the world that demonstrate an ice age—whether it is a mini-ice age or a full-scale one—is occurring. Felix says that a major Ice Age, when it begins, will come on very swiftly.

One post on Felix’s website is about Victor Emanuel Velasco Herrera, a geophysicist at the University of Mexico, who predicts that the “Earth will enter a ‘Little Ice Age’ which will last from 60 to 80 years and may be caused by the decrease in solar activity.”  You don’t have to be a geophysicist to figure out that less solar activity adds up to a colder Earth.

2014 is the year many scientists believe an ice age, “mini” or full-scale will begin. Herrera hedged his prediction saying that “with the mass production of current carbon dioxide (CO2) it is unlikely that we will see a major ice age like the one experienced 12,000 years ago.”  Carbon Dioxide plays no role in warming the Earth. It is a very minor element of the Earth’s atmosphere.

The implications of an ice age, no matter how long or short, is its impact on the growing of crops to feed everyone. Dr. Tim Patterson of Canada’s Carleton University’s Department of Earth Sciences, in a May 18, 2007 article in the Calgary Times, wrote that satellite data “shows that by the year 2020 the next solar cycle is going to be solar cycle 25—the weakest one since the Little Ice Age (that started in the 13^th century and ended around 1860)…should be a great strategic concern in Canada because nobody is farming north of us. In other words, Canada—the great breadbasket of the world—might not be able to grow grains in much of the prairies.”  This prediction applies as well, of course, to the U.S. production of grains.

Other scientists have been sounding the alarm, predicting dramatic cooling to begin in the current decade. Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, a Fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, has noted that “Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012, real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.”  While the years cited by scientists may differ, they are in agreement that we are looking at decades of cold.

In the years since the late 1980s when “global warming” was unleashed on the world as the greatest hoax of the modern era, billions have come to believe the Earth was threatened by greater warming cause by man-made “greenhouse gases” resulting from industrial and all other uses of fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas. While carbon dioxide has, indeed, increased in the atmosphere, the truth is that the Earth has entered a cooling cycle and that it is on the cusp of very cold weather for decades. We could even cross over into a full-fledged Ice Age because one is overdue at this point in time.

You cannot depend on what the mass media tells you. They are hardwired to continue the global warming hoax. You can, however, educate yourself with books such as Robert Felix’s. You can use Google to find out more about ice ages. You can and should prepare yourself for changes in the Earth’s climate that will have vast impacts on the global economy and on the ability to grow enough crops to feed the world’s population.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

The Climate Charlatans Gather in Warsaw

 

By Alan Caruba

 

Back in 1997, the United Nations held a convention in Kyoto, Japan, that put together the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. It was a treaty that required the nations that agreed to it to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions, principally carbon dioxide (CO2) in order to save Earth from the perils of “global warming.” There were 192 parties to the convention and, although the U.S. “signed” the treaty, the U.S. Senate unanimously defeated participation. By 2011, our neighbor, Canada, withdrew from it.

In Warsaw, Poland, for two weeks starting on November 11, the usual group of climate change charlatans have gathered for the 19^th Conference of the Parties (COP-19) to try to breathe life into this greatest of all hoaxes. In 2009, COP-15, they had gathered in Copenhagen, but failed to come to any agreement on a successor to Kyoto whose mandatory reductions were initially applied to 37 developed nations,

Suffice to say that, as the years went along, the nations that signed have grown increasingly disenchanted with the deal.

First, there’s the little, itty-bitty problem of the actual climate.

It began to cool around the same time the alarmists were shouting that we were all doomed if we didn’t stop using coal, oil, and natural gas because energy was the enemy. The Earth entered a perfectly natural and predictable cooling cycle as the sun grew less active. In Copenhagen, the delegates had to beat it out of town to avoid being stuck there by a huge snowstorm. When Obama’s plane arrived in Washington, D.C., it was just as a blizzard hit the city.

Obama is credited with “saving” the Copenhagen conference by coming up with an agreement to create an annual fund of $100 billion that would begin in 2020 to help poor countries deal with climate change. Since the “Warmists” attribute every kind of climate disturbance to climate change and Obama loves spending U.S. billion we do not have, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Why none of these numbskulls ever asks themselves why they think nations can actually do anything about the climate other than to undermine and make more costly their own energy needs defies an answer. Meanwhile, part of the climate change hoax includes having the developed nations throw billions at undeveloped nations. Indeed, that may be the main reason.

Happily, there are observers at the Warsaw conference who make it their business to expose the global warming lies and monitor the climate change movement at home and abroad. As this is being written, former Apollo VII astronaut, Walter Cunningham, is leading a delegation from CFACT—the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow—a think tank that maintains the award-winning website, ClimateDepot.com. Its editor, Marc Morano, is among the group watching the machinations of COP-19.

CFACT’s Executive Director, Craig Rucker, has joined with Poland’s Globalization Institute, Instytut Piotra Skargi, the European Institute for Climate and Energy, and others to produce three climate forums for Polish citizens and policy makers.

This all may seem a bit esoteric. What does a conference in Warsaw have to do with the many other problems facing Americans these days? As Rucker points out, President Obama is looking to shift the public debate from Obamacare to climate change, announcing “a huge new emphasis on global warming at Georgetown (University) in June. In early November, he unleashed an executive order “directly federal bureaucrats to dramatically expand his global warming agenda.” Obama is moving on from health care to “the next legacy of his radical administration—namely, climate alarmism.”

We have been living with climate alarmism since the late 1980s and the years that led up to the Kyoto Protocol. Presently, the result has been an Environmental Protection Agency that has been unleashed on the coal industry and all others, the waste of billions in loans to so-called clean energy companies that promptly went bankrupt, and the scare-mongering that passes for education in the nation’s schools.

The failure of recent COPs to come to any agreement is likely a good sign, suggesting that the climate change hoax is running out of steam, even among the nations that initially supported it.

 

As Andrew Restuccia reported in Politico, shortly before the Warsaw conference began, “The two-week talks are a key step toward reaching a new global pact by 2015 that would take five years later. No groundbreaking agreements are likely in Warsaw, where, experts say, the main focus will be laying the groundwork for next year’s negotiations in Lima, Peru, and final talks in Paris in 2015.”

Ah! To be in Paris in 2015!

© Alan Caruba, 2013

Obama's Executive Order on Climate

By Alan Caruba

On the surface, it might seem to make sense for the President to want to “do something” about climate events such as hurricanes, but there have always been hurricanes and blaming them and everything from droughts to wildfires on “climate change” is not just absurd, it is a deliberate lie that blames a rise in the amount of carbon dioxide, a so-called but incorrectly named “greenhouse gas”, as the cause of these natural events.

 

The President has issued an Executive Order to ramp up efforts to address "climate change."

At the heart of the global warming hoax has been this carbon dioxide lie, but there has been no warming for over 17 years and the many computer models that predicted it were wrong; many were deliberately false.

When one looks at the actual facts about climate related events, we find that in recent years there have been fewer tornados with a decline of severe tornadoes over the past forty years. There has been more than eight years without a major hurricane strike in the U.S. and the nation has had the fewest number of forest fires for the past three decades.

President Obama has made it known that one of his goals—other than the destruction of the U.S. economy—has been to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions by 17% by 2020. His Environmental Protection Agency has been feverishly producing regulations that reflect his “war on coal”, imposing rules on coal-fired plants that have already forced many to close. All this is based on a lie. Even the Supreme Court has taken notice and will hear a case that challenges the EPA. (It previously ruled carbon dioxide was a “pollutant”, a baseless error.)

In general, Congress has refused to take up most of Obama’s “climate change” agenda, especially his wish for a carbon tax. So it comes as no surprise that he has issued an executive order on November 1^st allegedly to get states and local communities to prepare for “the impact of global warming.”

Perhaps the most curious aspect of this is that states have long had emergency response protocols and other laws in effect that are intended to respond to various climate-related problems. Many communities have plans in place. About the only thing the executive order would achieve would be to layer on more rules that would doubtless come with a higher cost.

In a recent edition of Human Events, three prominent climate scientists, experts on forecasting Dr. Kesten C. Green, on the faculty of the University of South Australia; Prof. J. Scott Armstrong of the University of Pennsylvania, and Dr. Willie Soon, got together to write “The Science Fiction of IPCC Climate Change”, reviewing the latest announcement by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“Global warming alarmists nevertheless claim that the ‘nearly all’ climate scientists believe dangerous global warming will occur. This is a strange claim in view of the fact more than 30,000 American scientists signed the Oregon Petition, stating that there is no basis for dangerous manmade global warming forecasts, and ‘no convincing evidence’ that carbon dioxide is dangerously warming the planet or disrupting the climate.”

Forgive me if I ask you who you believe; three experts on climate forecasting or Barack Obama?

The forecast experts debunked the IPCC assertion (and by extension Obama’s) noting that carbon dioxide is “a colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas that is a byproduct of growing prosperity. It is also a product of all animal respiration and is also essential for most life on Earth, yet in total it makes up only 0.0004 of the atmosphere.”

In May 2012, The Economist took note of The Heartland Institute, calling it “the most prominent think tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate change.” The Economist has long been an advocate of global warming so this represents significant recognition of the Chicago-based, free market think tank that has sponsored several international conferences on the subject over the years.

Anyone who wants to get the facts about the IPCC’s continued and relentless promotion of the greatest hoax of the modern era can visit http://climatechangereconsidered.org/ and read “Climate Change Reconsidered II”, a Heartland Institute project whose latest edition is a thorough review that debunks the IPCC’s misleading “science.”

As the Human Events article notes, “Other scientists contest the IPCC assumptions on the grounds that the climatological effect of increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide is trivial—and that the climate is so complex and insufficiently understood that the net effect of human emissions on global temperatures cannot be forecasted.”

Obama’s latest executive order, however, is not trivial. It continues the UN’s effort to deny access to the benefits of the use of energy worldwide to increase development, provide employment, and enhance the lives of the Earth’s population.

Obama is gearing up “climate change” as an issue to divert our attention from the many scandals and failures of his administration.

© Alan Caruba, 2013