climate change

Hundreds of thousands of taxpayers swarmed the nation's capital Saturday to deliver a message to their elected officials: Don't turn our American Dream into a nightmare. A nightmare is exactly what America will be living if "cap and trade" legislation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions becomes law. That global warming tax would kill millions of jobs, bring an end to cheap energy and cripple the economy.

Even the Obama administration knows that taxpayers will feel the pain in their wallets -- though it admitted so only grudgingly last week after a Freedom of Information Act request by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. By the Treasury Department's estimate, Americans would pay up to $1,761 a year because of cap-and-trade.

The economically depressing facts calculated by the Heritage Foundation include more than 2 million lost jobs, $9.4 trillion in economic losses, and a jump of $829 per family for utility costs.  Cap-and-trade is nothing more than a stimulus bill for high-pollution China, which will get American jobs and keep emitting carbon regardless of what America does.

 The worst part of it is that the legislation is completely unnecessary. The push for cap-and-trade is driven by factually flawed fantasies of manmade global warming.  Environmentalists love to tell lies about an ice-free Arctic, and senators like John Kerry, D-Mass., repeat the lies even after they have been exposed.

Al Gore mastered the scare tactics in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth -- a film so riddled with flawed science and political spin that the British High Court won't let schoolchildren watch without a warning. Unfortunately, American students are still being force fed nonsense about global warming all the time.

We expose the devastating costs of global warming hysteria in our film Not Evil Just Wrong, but Gore and Hollywood don't want America to see it. That's why we're organizing a cinematic tea party, a natural outgrowth of rallies like the one in Washington last weekend.

Our movie will premiere in homes and on campuses across the country on Oct. 18. We hope it will be the start of a long-needed resistance movement against radical environmentalism.

Albany Times Union,  December 14, 2008

Obama left with little time to curb global warming

When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, global warming was a slow-moving environmental problem that was easy to ignore. Now it is a ticking time bomb that President-elect Barack Obama can't avoid.

Albany Times Union, July 20, 2009

Cool, clouds, rain, repeat

During what some are calling "the year without a summer," farmers, gardeners and nurseries are dealing with a steady drumbeat of cool, rainy days. People looking forward to outdoor parties and barbecues are putting on warmer clothes and dodging deluges..........

The result of all this? So far, the warmest day of the year in Albany was April 28, when the temperature hit 90  degrees . There have been just nine days with temperatures above 80 since June, which Johnson called "pretty pathetic."

In New York City, temperatures failed to top 85  degrees in June -- one of only three times on record when the mercury didn't hit that mark.

By, the way, I'm not taking Nate Silver's sucker bet over @ 538.com. He's willing to bet on global warming for the next thirty days. Since he's a baseball number junkie, he knows exactly what he is doing. And so do I.

Let's say Johnny Damon is a career .300 hitter who in is the midst of "career cooling" dropping his sustainable long term average to .250. I catch Damon at the tail end of a 10 for 60 slump and then take a bet that over the next 100 at-bats Damon won't hit .300 over this period. I'd be pretty dumb. But Silver's set this up to goad people to bet on the basis of recent unusually cool weather and pick their pockets on the uptick. 

The concept as Nate well knows is "regression towards the mean". Damon's prior .167 performance had to adjust back to .250.  So let's say he hits .310 over the next 100 at-bats, and "proves" he is a .300 hitter in the Silver theory? Say what? He's gotten back to .256. which is about his new "sustainable" level and well under the old .300 level.

Silver's 30 day time line is just long enough to catch the uptick of the regression and not long enough to ascertain if the mean actually moved.  Nice try, Nate.

I can recall sweltering on hot day in midtown Manhattan pre-Rudy trying to meander around the various three-card monte artists on the sidewalk.  They are now long gone, and so far in 2009, so is the sweltering heat. 

Jon Henke is obviously a more astute analyst than moi, so I post this with some angst. But I think he is thinking along the lines of French military strategists after World War I,

As historians recall, France was bled dry from fighting a trench war deep in its own terrain. So apres guerre the French decided to build high tech fortifications-- the Maginot Line--along their frontier to cause the war to be fought on the German side of the border and on  French terms.

By 1940, of course, the Me 109 and the Stuka proved to be well able to fly over fortifications and destroy French forces from the air. Oops.

I fear we may be doing to same thing by trying a new and improved strategy to deal with "climate change".  Both the ambient and political climate may not be what we expect.

First, there are two central flaws with the Republicans becoming the champions of carbon taxation. First, it muddles the party's anti-tax message. It's easily trumped politically by the advocacy of economically delusional class warfare.  Instead of arguing taxes in general ought to be reduced or kept from rising, we are left bargaining over what taxes to raise. Is that an argument that is going to win elections?   

Secondly, if the carbon tax works it will generate progressively less revenue. Since I think the "starve the beast" strategy has pretty well been proved to be a failure in practice (expecting a long term libertarian control for Congress is daft) the result will be progressively higher deficits and demands to raise other taxes. While payroll or sales taxes do penalize "good" activity, they also tend to mirror the overall economy. A carbon tax intended to readjust the economy to lower carbon use will inevtiably reduce its own revenue and plants the seed to bring back other taxes.

That said, I'd rather have the efficient mechanism of a carbon tax than the crony capitalism of cap & trade. But I think we ought to reconsider whether either is inevitble.

I'm a skeptic on global warming, not a denier, but the empirical observable information in the northern US this year puts a real dent in the alarmist camp.  We have yet to see 90 degree weather in CT all summer, and this seems to be the case as well in MN. 

I'm not sure hitching our political wagon to getting huge heat waves in populated areas is so wise.   It's "An Inconvenient Truth" the salience of this issue depends on observable episodes of warm weather.

I also think the based on my read, the salience of the "climate change" issue is focused on a) younger and b) better educated voters.  I suppose a long run argument can be made to address this issue, but in 2010 we are going to be dealing with an electorate which is going to skew older.  Are we better off using limited time and resources talking to 50 year old people who are highly likely to vote than 20 year old voters who may have simply cast an Obama-mania  vote in '08? 

It may be true that the "chattering classes" may think a response on this issue is essential ( see David Cameron, UK) but the cold hard truth is we've already lost virtually every one of the high end House seats where this issue matters (WA 8 and IL 10 the visible exceptions). The low hanging fruit for Republicans in 2010 is likely to be in blue collar places like IN 9 and OH 16 where the cost is obvious and the reward speculative for enviromental legislation.

Now how are the Democrats reponding? And doesn't that say something.

My Congressman, Chris Murphy, who holds a swing seat in a blue state, voted for Waxman-Markey. And how did he justify his vote? Based on the alleged argument the bill would wean America from foreign sources of energy and the cost of inaction was too high. (hmm, open up ANWR, naw!)

As the CT Republican State Chairman pointed out in his weekly e-newsletter.     

But here is the kicker - no where in this entire letter is global warming mentioned or the need to save the polar bears or the quality of our air. In it he simply says, we must rush to placing the development of a new whole technology in the hands of the government, to decide, through taxes, who can use what fuel for what purpose. If it doesn't work out, well, at least Uncle Sam tried.

(IM: Guess it's now not so much fun being Henry Waxman's towel boy, Chris.)

  I think that Democrats have decided that the Global Warming issue is a stone dead loser in the face of the Great Recession. (Yes, the salience of the environmental issue moves in lockstep with the economic cycle).Much like the antiwar movement, this was a useful cudgel against the eveeeel Republicans, but now they are quickly losing their desire to actually have to walk the walk on taxing the crap out of everyone to "save the planet".  Looking at the climate issue through the prism of: a) the 2006 election when the economy was prosperous; or b): the 2008 election with its unusually high youth vote, may just cause us to fight the "last war"; now that we are going to be dealing with the grim economic conditions expected for 2010 and 2012.  Given our opponents were astute enough to win the last two elections, why would we benefit from picking up an unpopular issue they are now either walking or running away from? 

The sudden disappearance of GPP Pirhabbits under Obama is as mysterious as their first appearance on the scene, as this report from 2006 illustrates:

Giant Panamanian Polar Pihrabbits Strip Flesh From Helpless Carrots

Mai Hoo reporting from Garbonzo, Panama

Feb 12, 2006

As dawn broke in this usually peaceful jungle village, sobs were heard coming from the humble garden plots of the local residents.

Once again, giant pihrabbits had mercilessly devoured many of the carrots which had been lovingly planted by the gentle jungle-dwelling natives of this highland territory.

"We don't understand why these monsters are coming into our village", said one distrought gardener, as she gazed at several green remainders of devoured carrots. "Look, it is just like those rabbits ate the body, but left the green hair behind. How can we tolerate this? Will our cabbages be next?"

Brazillian investigators have fielded the theory that global warming drove Amazonian bunnies into the Amazon river, where they found relief from sweltering heat. But how those bunnies were impregnated by the vicious, flesh-eating river pihrannas, remains a mystery.

Bush administration officials scoffed at this theory, stating that global warming is as big a myth as giant jungle bunnies who raid carrot gardens in the dark of night.

"Bunnies remain the penultimate archetype of fuzzy cuteness", said a White House spokesman. "The natives of Panama must be mistaking chupacabras for rabbits. Global warming is not a proven theory, unlike Intelligent Design."

Local genetic scientists, working under the handicaps of lack of electric power, clean water, and modern instrumentation, have analyzed samples of the bunny-saliva and have determined that the genes of polar bears has been found, as well as rabbit and pihranna fish. "Hey, we may live in a jungle, but we watch CSI too, you know", they said. "Modern genetics is now our primary tool, in our quest to abolish superstition and bring Panama into the 21st century".

Peruvian scientists have theorized that due to global warming and the breakup of arctic polar ice, polar bears stranded on icebergs have drifted south, and have been sighted swimming in the Amazon river. But US Government officials, on condition of anonymity, revealed that recent satellite photos do not show any polar bears south of northern California. "Polar bears do not mate with pirhannas, they eat them."

Argentinian psychiatrists have expressed alarm at the mood of polar bears sampled thus far, and fear that global warming has changed the chemistry of the bears brains, causing bipolar disorder. "We have noticed that these polar bears are either very depressed, or inexplicably happy, even ecstatic", said one scientist. "We theorize that these bears, in their understandable desperation for relief from this painful disorder, have resorted to having sex with cute little bunnies, but only when the bears are in their ecstatic mood. Otherwise, they just eat them".

Is it possible that this accounts for the origin of the gigantic, carrot-hungry pihrabbits of the Panamanian jungle highlands? And is this yet more evidence of global warning, or is it yet more hysteria generated by hordes of disenfranchized expatriot liberals, who have chosen to live in foreign jungles, rather than to cruelly carve out a conservative lifestyle from the heart of America?

An interesting guy who offers more arguments to fight global warming alarmists: Professor Kunihiko Takeda

Professor Kunihiko Takeda, Ph.D., is vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University and one of the world's leading authorities on both uranium enrichment and recycling. The 65-year-old is also a bestselling author of books with titles such as “We Should Not Recycle!” “Recycled Illusions” and “Why Are Lies Accepted on Environmental Issues?” Professor Takeda should know why: Although a member of just about every prestigious academic and governmental entity, he has stayed independent and made a career out of challenging the establishment. He has never taken any garbage from anyone, not even during his 27-year tenure at Asahi Chemical Industries, where for five years he was director of the Uranium Enrichment Laboratory. He also kept his record clean as vice deputy president at the Shibaura Institute of Technology before joining Nagoya University in 2002. His fresh and original views are clear in his most recent book, “Hypocritical Ecology,” which has been flying off shelves at the speed of 100,000 a month since being published this June..

His ideas include:

• Recycling is rubbish: It eats more energy and creates more waste than burning our garbage in high-tech incinerators.
• Fear is a very efficient weapon: It produces the desired effect without much waste. Global warming has nothing to do with how much CO2 is produced or what we do here on Earth. For millions of years, solar activity has been controlling temperatures on Earth and even now, the sun controls how high the mercury goes. CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another.
• Look beyond what governments tell you.
• Consumerism marketed as environmental consciousness is the worst.
• The energy crisis is nothing to sweat about.