The Obama administration will declare greenhouse gases a threat to public health today, sources said, marking a major step — both practically and symbolically — toward federal limits on the carbon dioxide emissions scientists blame for global warming.
The move by the Environmental Protection Agency is prompted by a two-year-old Supreme Court decision. It paves the way for the White House to regulate emissions from vehicles and effectively force the U.S. auto fleet to be cleaner and more efficient – a plan the administration is expected to put in place soon.
It also opens the door to broad emissions limits in all other parts of the economy, including power plants and construction sites, which critics say could further chill an already recessionary economy. Administration officials insist they’d prefer to let Congress set those limits, and that they will help spur millions of clean-energy jobs in the years to come.
Too bad it’s based on a lot of out-dated science ([i]e.g.[/i] Antarctic ice cores from the 1980s instead of much more recent ones with an order of magnitude better resolution — and [i]opposite[/i] conclusion), emotionalism, and politically-agendised efforts bearing all the hallmarks of a religion rather than formerly-typical scientific skepticism.
[i]World [/i] magazine has a VERY interetsting sidebar on this subject. Link here
http://www.worldmag.com/articles/15274
and then scroll down.
Greenhouse gases and global warming are another stylish but unproven theory, like evolution/Darwinism…that have been adopted on faith and reached enough of a fervent unquestioning following to become an actual religion.
Pollution, however, of air and rivers and soil and of the body and mind are a real and present danger to humanity.
Tts 1:15 To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and consciences are corrupted.
To those whose minds and consciences are corrupted, all else is corrupted – air, water, land, sea, ……climate.
I sit at my desk while I ponder such eternal thoughts – the Sun is shining brilliantly, the air is moderate and fresh, the grass is beginning to green, and a voluminous(?) number of buds swell and will bring forth a bevy of beautiful flowers and brilliant green leaves. I see it all from my desk! God has done well. I do not know how to thank Him enough……
Don
Maybe the Administration can do something about emissions from the Presiding Bishop.
The report is pure, unadulterated, fully organic bovine scatology. Climate changes principally because the Sun’s output of energy varies slightly over time as a consequence of its thermodynamic activity. God gave our planet the ability to compensate somewhat for the Sun’s output changes. Man will work to circumvent God’s creation to the same end history has proven. Man will be frustrated and worse off for the misplaced effort.
It strikes me that the underlying motive in this obsession with global warming is a pathological need for control. Since we can’t control the climate, we declare it all about human behavior (aren’t humans the center and source of all that happens anyway?) and then begin political moves to control people.
It should also be noted that “green” has become a lucrative marketing tool.
And so it begins.
And here I’ve been exhaling pollutants for lo these last 49 years. I’m so ashamed.
To keep the populace behind them, leaders often conjure up a great evil that threatens the well being of all. Facts be damned – we need a common enemy.
Millions of clean-energy jobs? Phah, what about the millions of high paying engineering and operator jobs that will be lost when nearly all of the chemical plants in the US shutdown, and move to China and India, where GHG controls are not required?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/27/catholicism.religion
I can only say that in this, the Holy Father, is truly being a shepherd to his flock. The Episcopal Church too often uses vocabulary that makes it sound like Creation is supplanting Christ in our worship. With that said, however, we will answer before God if we cannot urge our fellow man to curb excesses that degrade creation. This is a threat and it is a threat that is brought on by our own sinfulness. I am sorry that some of you apply a hermeneutic of suspicion to overwhelming scientific evidence, but if you are wrong, the consequences will be catastrophic. If I, and the Holy Father are wrong, the consequences are simply that we have acted in good conscience rather than resigned ourselves to skepticism and obscurantism. A culture of life is broad-based and requires a broad commitment. I am sorry to seem harsh, but it pains me to see this issue dismissed and associated with people we might disagree with on other issues.
I remain,
a Brother in Christ!
#13, the problem is that the scientific evidence is NOT overwhelming, and that there are significant and increasingly numerous scientific voices who dispute anthropogenic warming. To name CO2 as a pollutant and suppress its emission, to the exclusion of focus on real pollutants, will damage the poor far more severely than it will others.
As an example, in the news currently is [url=http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25348657-401,00.html]this report[/url] which shows that Antarctic ice is expanding overall, not melting.
#13, to the contrary. Such an overemphasis on the fraud that is GCC or GC or GW is to worship the creation over the creator. You may as well just cut to the chase and pray directly to Gaia. There is no science behind GCC/GW/GC. There are only flawed mathematical models that cannot replicate the known history when actual climate data is entered into them. Man’s role in GCC/GW/GC is insignificant.
By the way, if you are so concerned about Carbon Dioxide levels, you may want to stop exhaling. Our bodies (every one of them) creates lots of CO2 as a waste byproduct of life which we excrete in our exhaled breath.
At the cost of repeating myself – I read somewhere in our blog that 80% of the worlds CO2 is being generated by non-USA sources. Now how do we work on this one? The heat these people use for cooking is generated by wood, coal and other non-green sources.
Harvey, amend your statement to: “80% of the worlds CO2 is being generated by non-USA sources, but 98% of the blame is being placed on the US” and we have agreement. 🙂
I am concerned by the effect this will have on the poor, who will be hardest hit by rising fuel, heating and electricity costs. That money will have to come from some where…clothing and food budgets, to be sure. And for what…
#13 – I follow all of this as part of my profession. The only way to realistically reduce GHGs in the US is to do what France did – go nuclear with electricity production. France gets 80% of its electricity from nuclear power. Problem is, the same NGOs (Sierra Club, Earth Resources Defense Fund, etc) will block that as well. Further, it doesn’t really matter what we do or don’t do – China has now surpassed as in GHG emissions – they are bringing one coal fired power plant on-line per week.
The science of GHG and climate change is not settled, and is not fixed, and there are many prominent scientists that do not believe that man-made GHGs are contributing to “global warming”. The climatologists that do, where do you think their income and research dollars are based on? Without the fear-mongering, they might lose some $$. The “best” models can not account for the past 10 years in which the average temperature has essentially remained steady. The models predict steadily rising temperatures. To increase the “accuracy” of the models, the same climatologists needed data on sea currents, water temperatures, and sea surface temperatures. Guess what? The data that came back from the research buoys showed temperatures lower than expected – initially they said the data had to be wrong – it did not fit their models!! Whenever I ask someone how was it that just several hundred years ago, Greenland was really “green land” and early Viking settlers could actually grow wheat, also, England was full of vinyards. As the climate entered into a cooling phase, this changed. I remember watching a Discovery channel show about climate change, and they used these early farmsites to show that the climate is getting warmer (!!!!), since Greenland farmers are starting to be able to grow wheat again. Not that they ever addressed the fact that they used to several hundred years ago.
So, what is a normal climate? What is a normal temperature? Climate is not static, climate changes all the time, whether or not we do anything. Let us have another massive volcanic eruption anywhere in the world, spewing several hundres of tons of SO2 and PM into the air, and we’ll have another “Little Ice Age”.
Many sources carried this story, including [url=http://story.australianherald.com/index.php/ct/9/cid/88f7d0d02bea1b33/id/491183/cs/1/]The Australian Herald[/url]:
[blockquote]SYDNEY: New analysis has indicated that contrary to the belief that there is large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, ice is actually expanding in a large portion of the continent.
Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth’s ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water. Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially, and ice is melting in parts of west Antarctica.
The destabilization of the Wilkins ice shelf generated international headlines this month.
However, according to a report in the Australian, the picture is very different in east Antarctica, which includes the territory claimed by Australia.
East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report noted that the South Pole had shown “significant cooling in recent decades”.
According to Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison, sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica.
“Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally,” Dr Allison said.
The melting of sea ice – fast ice and pack ice – does not cause sea levels to rise because the ice is in the water.
Sea levels may rise with losses from freshwater ice sheets on the polar caps.
In Antarctica, these losses are in the form of icebergs calved from ice shelves formed by glacial movements on the mainland.
Dr Allison said there was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting.
“The only significant calvings in Antarctica have been in the west,” he said.
Ice core drilling in the fast ice off Australia’s Davis Station in East Antarctica by the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-Operative Research Centre shows that last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m, its densest in 10 years.
The average thickness of the ice at Davis since the 1950s is 1.67m.
A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded.[/blockquote]
From [url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5067351/Rise-of-sea-levels-is-the-greatest-lie-ever-told.html]The Telegraph[/url]
[blockquote]if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.
Despite fluctuations down as well as up, “the sea is not rising,” he says. “It hasn’t risen in 50 years.” If there is any rise this century it will “not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm”. And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by
Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.
The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on “going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world”.
When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.
One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC’s favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a “corrective factor” of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they “needed to show a trend”.
When I spoke to Dr Mörner last week, he expressed his continuing dismay at how the IPCC has fed the scare on this crucial issue. When asked to act as an “expert reviewer” on the IPCC’s last two reports, he was “astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one”. Yet the results of all this “deliberate ignorance” and reliance on rigged computer models have become the most powerful single driver of the entire warmist hysteria.
For more information, see Dr Mörner on YouTube (Google Mörner, Maldives and YouTube); or read on the net his 2007 EIR interview “Claim that sea level is rising is a total fraud”[/blockquote]
[url=http://www.suntimes.com/news/nation/1533001,CST-NWS-swarming19.article]Chicago Sun Times[/url]
[blockquote][b]Ex-WLS weatherman calls warming ‘greatest scam in history’ [/b]
April 18, 2009
John Coleman is best known in Chicago for being a popular part of WLS Channel 7’s Eyewitness News Team from the late 1960s through the 1970s. He would later serve as the weatherman on “Good Morning America” and create the Weather Channel.
But in some circles, Coleman is known for challenging the idea of global warming, calling it “the greatest scam in history.”
“It is a hoax. It is bad science. It is hijacking public policy,” says Coleman, now a forecaster in San Diego.
At a recent congressional subcommittee hearing on the “Impacts of Climate Change on America’s National Parks” held at Twentynine Palms, Calif., near Joshua Tree, Coleman testified that “these scientists know that if they do research and the results are in no way alarming, their research will gather dust on the shelf and their research careers will languish.”
Coleman says the global warming movement was sparked by scientist Roger Revelle, who was seeking increased funding for the Scripps Institute of Oceanography.
“Other researchers with environmental motivations and a hunger for funding saw this developing and climbed aboard as well. The research grants flowed and alarming hypotheses began to show up everywhere,” Coleman says on his Web site — http://www.kusi.com/weather /colemanscorner.
At the hearing, Coleman said activities of man do alter the weather and climate, but not significantly.
“People with the anti-fossil fuel agenda [have] jumped on the global warming bandwagon and just won’t let go,” Coleman said.
Committee chairman Rep. Raul M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) shrugged over Coleman’s testimony.
“You’ve got to hear the other side of this argument, no matter how overwhelming the evidence is to the contrary,” Grijalva said. [/blockquote]
100 Scientists write to President saying he’s ‘Simply Incorrect’ on Global Warming
[blockquote]Over 100 prominent scientists from more than a dozen countries — including a Nobel Prize winner — have signed a letter to President Barack Obama charging that his views on climate change are “simply incorrect.â€
The letter — sponsored by the Cato Institute — cites a statement Obama made in November: “Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear.â€
Under the headline, “With all due respect, Mr. President, that is not true,†the scientists state:
“We, the undersigned scientists, maintain that the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated. Surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now…
“The computer models forecasting rapid temperature change abjectly fail to explain recent climate behavior. Mr. President, your characterization of the scientific facts regarding climate change and the degree of certainty informing the scientific debate is simply incorrect.â€
The 115 signatories include Ivar Giaever, Ph.D., who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1973 for his work with superconductors at General Electric; John Blaylock, formerly with the Los Alamos National Laboratory; Richard Lindzen, Ph.D., at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and William Gray, Ph.D., the respected hurricane expert at Colorado State University.
The signers include scientists at Princeton University, U.S. Naval Academy, University of Kansas, University of Oklahoma, University of Colorado, and University of Missouri.
Among the countries represented by the signers are Britain, Canada, Italy, Norway, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Argentina and South Africa.
A number of the scientists are current or former reviewers with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with climate change crusader Al Gore — and have since reversed their views on man-made global warming.[/blockquote]