“Green” Hoax-Mongers Dupe Major Media (Again)

Charlatans posing as representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a press release, sent out emails, and held a press conference at the Washington, D.C. National Press Club today, announcing the Chamber’s new “Free Enterprise Climate Policy” pushing for “strong climate legislation.”

One mystery is how Reuters and other news agencies could have been taken in by a statement (also posted on a fake webpage, here) peppered with such fractured logic and head-scratchers as:

The Chamber believes that if we do not help to prepare a strong climate change bill for the President, we will face a new foreclosure crisis, due once again to the shortsightedness of a few, and their quest for immediate lamb at the expense of long-term wool.

Presumably it’s because the media—and teachers, students, and the general public—have been trained to accept without question endlessly repeated but unsubstantiated proclamations, such as:

Climatologists tell us that if we don’t enact dramatic reductions in carbon emissions today, within 5 years we could begin facing the propagating feedback loops of runaway climate change. That would mean a disruption of food and water supplies worldwide, with the result of mass migrations, famines, and death on a scale never witnessed before.

The release fails, however, to disclose the predicted disruptions to a continuation of current historically high life expectancy rates and global food production that enacting Al Gore-enriching “cap and trade” legislation and the China-enriching Copenhagen treaty would result in.

Instead of facts that might actually feed informed decision-making—including temperature data from the government’s own National Space Science and Technology Center showing that global temperatures peaked with 1998’s el Nino and have been falling ever since; the squelched internal EPA report skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government; and evidence that polar bear populations are rising—anti-human “environmentalists” can only resort to ever-more bold campaigns of disinformation and outright lies to further their one-world-government, Copenhagen treaty agenda.

As the historical record shows, the Malthusian activists’ solution—more control of the world’s resources by governments—has resulted in far greater environmental degradation than the “business” interests they villify. Alternatively, when individuals have been free, they have, time and again, devised innovative solutions that no central planner could ever imagine.

Yet lies continue to sell, and facts continue to be buried and apparently largely unread in musty tomes as the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, such as this easily-accessible and readable article, “Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” —a virtual goldmine of data, detailing everything from the correlation between solar activity and global temperatures, to actual data on severe storms in the 20th century, sea levels, and CO2 levels, to analyses of the IPCC computer models underlying the hypothesis of anthropomorphic global warming, to the increase in U.S. forests in the past 50 years, the relative costs and benefits of alternative energy forms, and much more. As the scientist authors point out:

Across the globe, billions of people in poorer nations are struggling to improve their lives. These people need abundant low-cost energy, which is the currency of technological progress.

In newly developing countries, that energy must come largely from the less technologically complicated hydrocarbon sources. It is a moral imperative that this energy be available. Otherwise, the efforts of these peoples will be in vain, and they will slip backwards into lives of poverty, suffering, and early death.

Energy is the foundation of wealth. Inexpensive energy allows people to do wonderful things. For example, there is concern that it may become difficult to grow sufficient food on the available land. …

Energy provides … an even better food insurance plan. Energy-intensive hydroponic greenhouses are 2,000 times more productive per unit land area than are modern American farming methods. Therefore, if energy is abundant and inexpensive, there is no practical limit to world food production.

Fresh water is also believed to be in short supply. With plentiful inexpensive energy, sea water desalination can provide essentially unlimited supplies of fresh water.

During the past 200 years, human ingenuity in the use of energy has produced many technological miracles. These advances have markedly increased the quality, quantity, and length of human life. …

Were this bright future to be prevented by world energy rationing, the result would be tragic indeed. In addition to human loss, the Earth’s environment would be a major victim of such a mistake.

The Copenhagen treaty—which today’s merry pranksters hope to foist upon their duped audience—would directly result in such world energy rationing, making victims of the environment, and especially the world’s poor. So why, if the Truth will set us free, are we so eager to instead be enslaved by lies?

Source: The Beacon

Global warming alarmists out in cold

IT'S snowing in April. Ice is spreading in Antarctica. The Great Barrier Reef is as healthy as ever.

And that's just the news of the past week. Truly, it never rains but it pours - and all over our global warming alarmists.

Time's up for this absurd scaremongering. The fears are being contradicted by the facts, and more so by the week.

Doubt it? Then here's a test.

Name just three clear signs the planet is warming as the alarmists claim it should. Just three. Chances are your "proofs" are in fact on my list of 10 Top Myths about global warming.

And if your "proofs" indeed turn out to be false, don't get angry with me.

Just ask yourself: Why do you still believe that man is heating the planet to hell? What evidence do you have?

So let's see if facts matter more to you than faith, and observations more than predictions.

MYTH 1

THE WORLD IS WARMING

Wrong. It is true the world did warm between 1975 and 1998, but even Professor David Karoly, one of our leading alarmists, admitted this week "temperatures have dropped" since - "both in surface temperatures and in atmospheric temperatures measured from satellites". In fact, the fall in temperatures from just 2002 has already wiped out half the warming our planet experienced last century. (Check data from Britain's Hadley Centre, NASA's Aqua satellite and the US National Climatic Data Centre.)

Some experts, such as Karoly, claim this proves nothing and the world will soon start warming again. Others, such as Professor Ian Plimer of Adelaide University, point out that so many years of cooling already contradict the theory that man's rapidly increasing gases must drive up temperatures ever faster.

But that's all theory. The question I've asked is: What signs can you actually see of the man-made warming that the alarmists predicted?

MYTH 2

THE POLAR CAPS ARE MELTING

Wrong. The British Antarctic Survey, working with NASA, last week confirmed ice around Antarctica has grown 100,000 sq km each decade for the past 30 years.

Long-term monitoring by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports the same: southern hemisphere ice has been expanding for decades.

As for the Arctic, wrong again.

The Arctic ice cap shrank badly two summers ago after years of steady decline, but has since largely recovered. Satellite data from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Centre this week shows the Arctic hasn't had this much April ice for at least seven years.

Norway's Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre says the ice is now within the standard deviation range for 1979 to 2007.

MYTH 3

WE'VE NEVER HAD SUCH A BAD DROUGHT

Wrong. A study released this month by the University of NSW Climate Change Research Centre confirms not only that we've had worse droughts, but this Big Dry is not caused by "global warming", whether man-made or not.

As the university's press release says: "The causes of southeastern Australia's longest, most severe and damaging droughts have been discovered, with the surprise finding that they originate far away in the Indian Ocean.

"A team of Australian scientists has detailed for the first time how a phenomenon known as the Indian Ocean Dipole - a variable and irregular cycle of warming and cooling of ocean water - dictates whether moisture-bearing winds are carried across the southern half of Australia."

MYTH 4

OUR CITIES HAVE NEVER BEEN HOTTER

Wrong. The alleged "record" temperature Melbourne set in January - 46.4 degrees - was in fact topped by the 47.2 degrees the city recorded in 1851. (See the Argus newspaper of February 8, 1851.)

And here's another curious thing: Despite all this warming we're alleged to have caused, Victoria's highest temperature on record remains the 50.7 degrees that hit Mildura 103 years ago.

South Australia's hottest day is still the 50.7 degrees Oodnadatta suffered 37 years ago. NSW's high is still the 50 degrees recorded 70 years ago.

What's more, not one of the world's seven continents has set a record high temperature since 1974. Europe's high remains the 50 degrees measured in Spain 128 years ago, before the invention of the first true car.

MYTH 5

THE SEAS ARE GETTING HOTTER

Wrong. If anything, the seas are getting colder. For five years, a network of 3175 automated bathythermographs has been deployed in the oceans by the Argo program, a collaboration between 50 agencies from 26 countries.

Warming believer Josh Willis, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, reluctantly concluded: "There has been a very slight cooling . . ."

MYTH 6

THE SEAS ARE RISING

Wrong. For almost three years, the seas have stopped rising, according to the Jason-1 satellite mission monitored by the University of Colorado.

That said, the seas have risen steadily and slowly for the past 10,000 years through natural warming, and will almost certainly resume soon.

But there is little sign of any accelerated rises, even off Tuvalu or the Maldives, islands often said to be most threatened with drowning.

Professor Nils-Axel Moerner, one of the world's most famous experts on sea levels, has studied the Maldives in particular and concluded there has been no net rise there for 1250 years.

Venice is still above water.

MYTH 7

CYCLONES ARE GETTING WORSE

Wrong. Ryan Maue of Florida State University recently measured the frequency, intensity and duration of all hurricanes and cyclones to compile an Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index.

His findings? The energy index is at its lowest level for more than 30 years.

The World Meteorological Organisation, in its latest statement on cyclones, said it was impossible to say if they were affected by man's gases: "Though there is evidence both for and against the existence of a detectable anthropogenic signal in the tropical cyclone climate record to date, no firm conclusion can be made on this point."

MYTH 8

THE GREAT BARRIER REEF IS DYING

Wrong. Yes, in 1999, Professor Ove Hoegh-Gulberg, our leading reef alarmist and administrator of more than $30 million in warming grants, did claim the reef was threatened by warming, and much had turned white.

But he then had to admit it had made a "surprising" recovery.

Yes, in 2006 he again warned high temperatures meant "between 30 and 40 per cent of coral on Queensland's Great Barrier Reef could die within a month".

But he later admitted this bleaching had "minimal impact". Yes, in 2007 he again warned that temperature changes of the kind caused by global warming were bleaching the reef.

But this month fellow Queensland University researchers admitted in a study that reef coral had once more made a "spectacular recovery", with "abundant corals re-established in a single year". The reef is blooming.

MYTH 9

OUR SNOW SEASONS ARE SHORTER

Wrong. Poor snow falls in 2003 set off a rash of headlines predicting warming doom. The CSIRO typically fed the hysteria by claiming global warming would strip resorts of up to a quarter of their snow by 2018.

Yet the past two years have been bumper seasons for Victoria's snow resorts, and this year could be just as good, with snow already falling in NSW and Victoria this past week.

MYTH 10

TSUNAMIS AND OTHER DISASTERS ARE GETTING WORSE

Are you insane? Tsunamis are in fact caused by earthquakes. Yet there was World Vision boss Tim Costello last week, claiming that Asia was a "region, thanks to climate change, that has far more cyclones, tsunamis, droughts".

Wrong, wrong and wrong, Tim. But what do facts matter now to a warming evangelist when the cause is so just?

And so any disaster is now blamed on man-made warming the way they once were on Satan. See for yourself on www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm the full list, including kidney stones, volcanic eruptions, lousy wine, insomnia, bad tempers, Vampire moths and bubonic plagues. Nothing is too far-fetched to be seized upon by carpetbaggers and wild preachers as signs of a warming we can't actually see.

Not for nothing are polar bears the perfect symbol of this faith - bears said to be threatened by warming, when their numbers have in fact increased.

Bottom line: fewer people now die from extreme weather events, whether cyclones, floods or blinding heatwaves.

Read that in a study by Indur Goklany, who represented the US at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: "There is no signal in the mortality data to indicate increases in the overall frequencies or severities of extreme weather events, despite large increases in the population at risk."

So stop this crazy panic.

First step: check again your list of the signs you thought you saw of global warming. How many are true? What do you think, and why do you think it?

Yes, the world may resume warming in one year or 100. But it hasn't been warming as the alarmists said it must if man were to blame, and certainly not as the media breathlessly keeps claiming.

Best we all just settle down, then, and wait for the proof -- the real proof. After all, panicking over invisible things is so undignified, don't you think?

Source: Herald Sun

E-mails indicate EPA suppressed report skeptical of global warming

The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."

The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message (PDF) to a staff researcher on March 17: "The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward...and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision."

The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be an independent review process inside a federal agency--and echoes criticisms of the EPA under the Bush administration, which was accused of suppressing a pro-climate change document.

Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, said in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. "It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else," Carlin said. "That was obviously coming from higher levels."

E-mail messages released this week show that Carlin was ordered not to "have any direct communication" with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed that his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic.

"I was told for probably the first time in I don't know how many years exactly what I was to work on," said Carlin, a 38-year veteran of the EPA. "And it was not to work on climate change." One e-mail orders him to update a grants database instead.

For its part, the EPA sent an e-mailed statement saying: "Claims that this individual's opinions were not considered or studied are entirely false. This Administration and this EPA Administrator are fully committed to openness, transparency, and science-based decision making. These principles were reflected throughout the development of the proposed endangerment finding, a process in which a broad array of voices were heard and an inter-agency review was conducted." (The endangerment finding is the EPA's decision that carbon dioxide endangers the public health and welfare.)

Carlin has an undergraduate degree in physics from CalTech and a PhD in economics from MIT. His Web site lists papers about the environment and public policy dating back to 1964, spanning topics from pollution control to environmentally-responsible energy pricing.

After reviewing the scientific literature that the EPA is relying on, Carlin said, he concluded that it was at least three years out of date and did not reflect the latest research. "My personal view is that there is not currently any reason to regulate (carbon dioxide)," he said. "There may be in the future. But global temperatures are roughly where they were in the mid-20th century. They're not going up, and if anything they're going down."

Carlin's report listed a number of recent developments he said the EPA did not consider, including that global temperatures have declined for 11 years; that new research predicts Atlantic hurricanes will be unaffected; that there's "little evidence" that Greenland is shedding ice at expected levels; and that solar radiation has the largest single effect on the earth's temperature.

If there is a need for the government to lower planetary temperatures, Carlin believes, other mechanisms would be cheaper and more effective than regulation of carbon dioxide. One paper he wrote says managing sea level rise or reducing solar radiation reaching the earth would be more cost-effective alternatives.

The EPA's possible suppression of Carlin's report, which lists the EPA's John Davidson as a co-author, could endanger any carbon dioxide regulations if they are eventually challenged in court.

"The big question is: there is this general rule that when an agency puts something out for public evidence and comment, it's supposed to have the evidence supporting it and the evidence the other way," said Sam Kazman, general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., that has been skeptical of new laws or regulations relating to global warming.

Kazman's group obtained the documents--both CEI and Carlin say he was not the source--and released the e-mails on Tuesday and the report on Friday. As a result of the disclosure, CEI has asked the EPA to reopen the comment period on the greenhouse gas regulatory proceeding, which ended on Tuesday.

The EPA also said in its statement: "The individual in question is not a scientist and was not part of the working group dealing with this issue. Nevertheless, the document he submitted was reviewed by his peers and agency scientists, and information from that report was submitted by his manager to those responsible for developing the proposed endangerment finding. In fact, some ideas from that document are included and addressed in the endangerment finding."

That appears to conflict with an e-mail from McGartland in March, who said to Carlin: "I decided not to forward your comments... I can see only one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office." He also wrote to Carlin: "Please do not have any direct communication with anyone outside of (our group) on endangerment. There should be no meetings, e-mails, written statements, phone calls, etc."

One reason why the process might have been highly charged politically is the unusual speed of the regulatory process. Lisa Jackson, the new EPA administrator, had said that she wanted her agency to reach a decision about regulating carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act by April 2--the second anniversary of a related U.S. Supreme Court decision.

"All this goes back to a decision at a higher level that this was very urgent to get out, if possible, yesterday," Carlin said. "In the case of an ordinary regulation, these things normally take a year or two. In this case, it was a few weeks to get it out for public comment." (Carlin said that he and other EPA staff members who were asked to respond to a draft only had four and a half days to do so.)

In the last few days, Republicans have begun to raise questions about the report and e-mail messages, but it was insufficient to derail the so-called cap and trade bill from being approved by the U.S. House of Representatives.

Rep. Joe Barton, the senior Republican on the Energy and Commerce committee, invoked Carlin's report in a floor speech during the debate on Friday. "The science is not there to back it up," Barton said. "An EPA report that has been suppressed...raises grave doubts about the endangerment finding. If you don't have an endangerment finding, you don't need this bill. We don't need this bill. And for some reason, the EPA saw fit not to include that in its decision."

"I'm sure it was very inconvenient for the EPA to consider a study that contradicted the findings it wanted to reach," Rep. James Sensenbrenner, the senior Republican on the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, said in a statement. "But the EPA is supposed to reach its findings based on evidence, not on political goals. The repression of this important study casts doubts on the EPA's finding, and frankly, on other analysis the EPA has conducted on climate issues."

The revelations could prove embarrassing to Jackson, the EPA administrator, who said in January: "I will ensure the EPA's efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and programs, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency." Similarly, President Barack Obama claimed that "the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over... To undermine scientific integrity is to undermine our democracy. It is contrary to our way of life."

"All this talk from the president and (EPA administrator) Lisa Jackson about integrity, transparency, and increased EPA protection for whistleblowers--you've got a bouquet of ironies here," said Kazman, the CEI attorney.

Source: Cnet News