By James Pethokoukis, US News and World Report
Climate change is never going to rise to the status of a top-tier political issue” is how one top climate-policy expert recently described the political lay of the land to me. Just take a look at the results of a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. The top issue for voters (27 percent) was job creation and economic growth. Right behind was the war in Iraq (24 percent). Then came energy and gas prices (18 percent). Far down the list were the environment and global warming, at a minuscule 4 percent. So despite all the media attention on global warming as an existential threat to humanity, it still scores a bit below illegal immigration in the hierarchy of voter concerns. And there lies an opportunity for John McCain to turn the issues of energy and the environment to his advantage in his race against Barack Obama. Here are a few pieces of advice for Team McCain that I have gathered after talking to some political folks in recent days.
1) Stop talking about global warming. Or at least don’t talk about it nearly as much as “energy independence.” The latter has an incredible resonance with voters for national security and economic reasons.
2) Ban the color green. Not only is it a less-than-flattering hue for McCain; but it implies a kinship with an anti-oil, anticoal, antidrilling, antieconomic-growth agenda
3) Propose drilling in ANWR while standing in ANWR. Yes, McCain has come out against drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But with oil seemingly on its way to $150 a barrel or higher, at least if you believe many top energy analysts, surely McCain would be forgiven for a flip-flop.
4) Accuse Obama of wanting to launch a pre-emptive war on the American economy. McCain could attack Obama’s plan on two main fronts: its overreliance on alternative energy vs. fossil fuels and nukes, and Obama’s seeming willingness to go ahead with capping carbon emissions even if India and China-America’s two main economic rivals of the future-take a pass.
5)Stop blaming Big Oil. Why should McCain echo Obama in criticizing the oil companies-a blame game that a Republican can’t win-when he could easily blast the Democrats for a generation of policies that have limited oil drilling and the exploitation of nuclear energy?
Read more here.
By Nathan Burchfiel, BMI
Gas has finally hit $4 a gallon. Most Americans are upset about the cost, but to some journalists, environmental activists and politicians, high gas prices are good news. Even though the media have complained about “sky-high” gas prices, reporting the pain caused at the pump, they have declared energy conservation the “clear winner” from rising prices and have even called for higher prices to boost the “green” movement, as The New York Times did as early as 2005.
Not very long ago, CNNMoney.com Managing Editor Allen Wastler called for “a tax to make it $4 a gallon right now.” At the time - April 30, 2007 - gas averaged $2.95 a gallon, meaning Wastler called for more than $1 in extra gasoline taxes “because when you saw us flirting with $3, all the sudden we got a burst in hybrid production, we got a burst in ethanol production.” And environmental activists overtly praise pain at the pump and lobby for more federal taxes on fuel.
The media have had it both ways, bashing Big Oil for allegedly making prices high while praising the same high prices for the effect they may have on warming-related emissions. “It’s time to pay a price to curb global warming,” the Christian Science Monitor declared in a May 12 editorial. “Rather than prevent $4-a-gallon gas now, legislators should welcome it.” In his 2000 book “Earth in the Balance,” former Vice President Al Gore advocated increasing energy taxes on consumers to decrease the incentive to pollute. Seven years earlier, in 1993, Gore cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to increase the federal gas tax to 18.4 cents, where it stands today. Elected officials in Congress are still working to harness the power of federal taxes to fund the “green” agenda and have been working to raise the price of gas even as it rises due to market forces.
In October 2005, when gas was around $2.85 a gallon, The New York Times called expensive gas “the best solution” to terrorist, environmental and economic threats. “The best solution is to increase the federal gasoline tax, in order to keep the price of gas near its post-Katrina high of $3-plus a gallon,” the newspaper’s editors wrote in an editorial.
NBC’s Anne Thompson noted on the March 12 “Nightly News” that higher energy prices would be good for alternative forms of energy like solar and wind power, which can cost two to four times as much as coal and oil. In May 2006, Earth Policy Institute president Lester Brown proposed a gasoline tax hike of 30 cents per gallon every year for the next 10 years. He said higher prices would spur investment in alternative energy and public transportation and decrease dependence on foreign oil. In March 2008, as gas prices rose closer and closer to $4, Brown maintained that an increased tax was a good idea, telling Fox News that “a tax on gas is a way to reduce dependence on import oil, reduce traffic congestion and reduce carbon emissions.” Read full report here.
By Dr. Tim Ball in the Canada Free Press
The first qualification on my resume now is “Environmentalist”. Actually, it is a title everyone can put after their name. We are all environmentalists to greater or lesser degrees. It is an outrage that certain people and groups have usurped this title and implied that only they care about the environment. While this series of articles has shown the role the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in manipulating climate science it has succeeded within the dominance of environmentalism over the western view of the world.
The message the IPCC pushed suited the environmentalists so it was able to hide its activities amid the usurped moral high ground. They could isolate those who dared to question the science as anti-environment or paid by the oil companies who were the cause of the major problem of climate change. While this was happening politicians were being convinced of the need for action, in most cases by the bureaucrats who were members of the IPCC representing their country. Politicians didn’t understand the science and were easily bullied--besides they all wanted to be green.
What is wrong with the CO2 argument? Well most people have no understanding of climate science overall or the facts about CO2. The IPCC have also effectively made it the sole cause of climate change. AGW advocates and governments talk about reducing greenhouse gases, but they mean CO2. Few know it is less than 4% of all the greenhouse gases and the human portion is just a fraction of the 4%. Indeed, the amount we produce is within the error factor of the estimates of three natural sources. The table shows the range of estimates of natural CO2 and human production in 2005 (Gt C/year is Gigatons of Carbon per year). Accuracy has not improved since. Notice the human contribution is within the error range of three (1, 2, & 4) of the natural sources. The total error range is almost 5 times the amount of total human production. If we play the carbon tax game we can reduce that by 50 percent to 3.75 Gt C/year net because we remove half of what we produce through agriculture and reforestation.
In other words, if everyone left the planet but one scientist remained to measure the difference in atmospheric CO2 she would not be able to measure any difference. Many problems exist with the AGW theory, but there is one that destroys it completely. The most fundamental assumption of the theory is that an increase in CO2 will cause an increase in temperature. In fact, every record for any time period and any duration shows that exactly the opposite happens - temperature increases before CO2. This assumption is still programmed into the computer models so they continue to show that a CO2 increase causes a temperature increase. They dare not change this because it will take the focus away from CO2. Read more and see links to Dr. Ball’s series here.
By Scott Whitlock , Newsbusters
In order to promote a new climate change special airing this fall, Thursday’s “Good Morning America” hyped terrifying future predictions of “more floods, more droughts, more wildfires” and, bizarrely, invited viewers to somehow morph into prophets and “report back” about what life is like in the year 2100. Featuring a slate of global warming alarmists, reporter Bob Woodruff previewed “Earth 2100” and touted the show as “a countdown through the next century” that “shows what scientists say might very well happen if we do not change our current path.” An online version of this story hyperventilated, “Are we living in the last century of our civilization?”
However, the oddest concept of this upcoming special includes a interactive online game that Woodruff claimed “puts participants in the future and asks them to report back about what it is like to live in this future world.” Certainly Dan Rather and the ethical machinations of other journalists have lowered the bar of journalism in recent years, but how does one “report” on life in the year 2100? Is ABC providing a time machine? Doesn’t “report,” in this instance, just mean “making stuff up?”
The scientist/talking heads featured in the piece weren’t much more calm then the civilians. Featuring a cavalcade of alarmists that included James Hansen, Al Gore’s science advisor and Heidi Cullens, the climate change expert for the Weather Channel, to name a few, the GMA segment preceded to terrify viewers with a apocalyptic future of death and destruction. (It should also be pointed out that ABC failed to identify any of these people and their names/associations were only discerned after matching up quotes from an article on GMA’s website.)
Professor John Holdren of Harvard University darkly announced that the future would bring “more floods, more droughts, more wildfires.” The segment featured movie-style footage of flames, rioting and general destruction. Added to this were unidentified “reporters” who scarily proclaimed such things as “Flames cover hundreds of square miles.” Of course, these predictions were provided with no context and generally just seemed designed to induce panic. Read more here.
Icecap Note: ABC has now joined the list of networks I will not watch. Maybe if enough of us stop watching and ratings for this special are abysmal and GMA drop they will stop this nonsense.
By Dr Ron Smith
Science does not proceed on the basis of consensus. The history of science is full of cases where a minority (or even single individuals) turn out to be right and the majority turns out to be wrong. The German scientist, Wegener, provides a Twentieth Century example, through the response of the scientific community to his notion of continental drift. For some sixty years the theory was derided by the majority of the geophysical community and papers supporting it were declined for publication by leading journals. Minorities, particularly, have a problem where there are strong ideological pressures towards conformity. In these cases, some fortitude is required to maintain what is seen to be a deviant or heretical view. Apart from the obvious example of Galileo the situation of biological scientists in the Soviet Union, subjected to the dominant (and erroneous) dogma of Lysenko about the inheritability of acquired characteristics, might be cited.
In the contemporary world of public financing of intellectual activity, there are also more subtle pressures towards conformity. One of the many baleful consequences of directed or ‘performance’-based research funding is the extent to which it privileges the prejudices and paradigms of those holding power in the system at any time. The result is to favour for research support and publication those who follow the party-line. This characteristic, and the dominating connection between this activity and promotion, ensures the production of vast quantities of mediocre and repetitive material in our universities and like establishments and discourages the long-term and more speculative activity that used to be their academic glory. It is to the continuing shame of all the New Zealand universities that this is so. In this connection it is noteworthy that in the UK the panels making these systemic judgements about academic worth have now been instructed to destroy all the notes on which the judgements were made.
All this has important implications for our contemporary concerns about climate change and about what our response ought to be to claims that a major crisis is looming and, as a consequence, certain social, political and economic steps should be taken. As is well-known, there is serious and persistent scepticism in regard to both the magnitude and the direction of climate change and the degree to which it may be said to be anthropogenic. This might be a largely ‘academic’ question were it not for the fact that measures of taxation and regulation are proposed that have the potential to cause significant harm to the economic well-being of New Zealand. Unlike the Wegener case, the consequence of suppressing the deviant view may not be simply that we remain in ignorance. It may be that we embark on policies that are likely to be very damaging to us and only marginally advantageous (if at all) to the wider global community. Read more here.
By Steven Milloy, FoxNews.com
In Charles Krauthammer’s May 30 must-read column, ”Carbon Chastity,” he rightly lambastes environmentalists as resurrected communists/socialists who have latched on to the environment and climate change as a means to advance their anti-people social agenda. The specific occasion for his justifiable outrage is a recent proposal by a British parliamentary committee to institute a personal carbon ration card for every citizen.
The plan would place limits on food and energy consumption in the form of credits not to be exceeded - except through the potential for heavy-carbon users, often the wealthy, to purchase credits from lower-carbon users, often the less wealthy. In other words, their answer to global warming is wealth redistribution. Though I thoroughly endorse Krauthammer’s condemnation of the plan, I have to take issue with his adoption of loaded terms straight out of the green lexicon to argue his point.
In trying to position his agnosticism on whether man-made CO2 emissions are actually cause for concern, his column begins: “I am not a global warming believer. I am not a global warming denier.” The term “denier” is the environmentalists’ preferred means of tar-and-feathering anyone who dares question climate alarmism - a key tactic in their effort to dupe the nation into consuming the green Kool-Aid.
Environmentalists have convinced many in the mainstream media that skepticism toward the very shaky science behind global warming alarmism is akin to the indescribeably creepy views of anti-Semitics who deny that the Holocaust occurred. One event is an indisputable historical fact of hideous dimensions; the prophesied specter of catastrophic global warming, however, is just a politically driven fear scenario based on unreliable computer models and the wishful bending of the laws of climate physics.
There is no comparison. Can anyone reasonably equate, say, the 31,000 U.S. scientists, engineers and physicians who recently signed a petition against global warming alarmism - including Princeton theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson and Massachusetts Institute of Technology climatologist Richard Lindzen - with the likes of neo-Nazis and Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who constantly calls for Israel’s destruction? See more here.
By Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post
Predictions of catastrophe depend on models. Models depend on assumptions about complex planetary systems—from ocean currents to cloud formation—that no one fully understands. Which is why the models are inherently flawed and forever changing. The doomsday scenarios posit a cascade of events, each with a certain probability. The multiple improbability of their simultaneous occurrence renders all such predictions entirely speculative.
Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation. “The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity,” warns Czech President Vaclav Klaus, “is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.”
Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe. There’s no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society.
So what does the global warming agnostic propose as an alternative? First, more research—untainted and reliable—to determine (a) whether the carbon footprint of man is or is not lost among the massive natural forces (from sunspot activity to ocean currents) that affect climate, and (b) if the human effect is indeed significant, whether the planetary climate system has the homeostatic mechanisms (like the feedback loops in the human body, for example) with which to compensate.
Second, reduce our carbon footprint in the interim by doing the doable, rather than the economically ruinous and socially destructive. The most obvious step is a major move to nuclear power, which to the atmosphere is the cleanest of the clean. But your would-be masters have foreseen this contingency. The Church of the Environment promulgates secondary dogmas as well. One of these is a strict nuclear taboo. Rather convenient, is it not? Take this major coal-substituting fix off the table, and we will be rationing all the more. Guess who does the rationing. Read more here.
Enos MasanjaMoshi, AllAfrica.com.
A Cabinet minister has allayed fears that ice caps on Mt Kilimanjaro that is a big tourist attraction in the region could disappear permanently. The minister for Natural Resources and Tourism, Ms Shamsa Mwangunga, says contrary to reports that the ice caps were decreasing owing to effects of global warming, indications were that the snow cover on Africa’s highest mountain were now increasing.
“Among the signs of more snow is the decrease in temperatures in areas surrounding the mountain, heavy rainfall this year and increased precipitation and spring water flow on the slopes of the mountain,” she pointed out. The minister toured the mountain last week as part of activities to mark the African Travel Association’s annual meeting held in Arusha. She said reports that the ice caps at the 5,895 metres high mountain would disappear in the next 20 years were overblown because there were signs that the snow cover had increased in recent years.
The minister’s remarks contradicted those of her predecessor, Prof Jumanne Maghembe. He was speaking at a meeting of wildlife scientists last December.Now the minister for Education and Vocational Training, Prof Maghembe quoted data from scientists indicating that the ice cap on Mt Kilimanjaro has dropped by over 80 per cent in the last 100 years. He warned that the snow on Mt Kilimanjaro, one of the leading tourist attractions in the country, could disappear in the next 20 years at the current melting rate.In 2002, Ms Zakhia Meghji, then minister for Natural Resources and Tourism, also rejected reports of fast depreciation of the snow on Mt Kilimanjaro.She said no conclusive data had been arrived at by scientists on the matter. At a meeting of natural resource experts, she said the amount of snow cover fluctuated depending on seasons and cycles of drought in the eastern Africa region. See full story here.
Anthony Watts posted a story on this in February with a time series of pictures including this one from 2008.
Also in this Fox News story in 2007, Brit Hume reported “Al Gore has made the disappearing snows of Mount Kilimanjaro a cornerstone of his crusade against global warming. In his film “An Inconvenient Truth” for example, he says: “Within the decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.” But now researchers from the U.S. and Austria say global warming isn’t the cause, and the fluctuations are nothing new. American Science magazine reports most of the current snow retreat occurred before 1953 - nearly two decades before any conclusive evidence of atmospheric warming was available. One of the scientists writes: “It is certainly possible that the icecap has come and gone many times over hundreds of thousands of years.”