The collapsing climate consensus
· Article rank
· 27 Jun 2009
· National Post
· KIMBERLY A. STRASSEL The Wall Street Journal
· Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation.
· If you haven’t heard of this politician, it’s because he’s a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives passed a climate-change bill yesterday, the Australian Parliament was preparing to kill its own country’s carbonemissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.
· Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as “deniers.” The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the United States.
· In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago, Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about manmade global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country’s weeks-old cap-and-trade program.
· The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the UN — 13 times the number who authored the UN’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a PhD in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a UN climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)
· The collapse of the “consensus” has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the Earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.
· Credit for Australia’s own era of renewed enlightenment goes to Dr. Ian Plimer, a well-known Australian geologist. Earlier this year he published Heaven and Earth, a damning critique of the “evidence” underpinning man-made global warming. The book is already in its fifth printing. So compelling is it that Paul Sheehan, a noted Australian columnist — and ardent global-warming believer — in April humbly pronounced it “an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence.” Australian polls have shown a sharp uptick in public skepticism; the press is back to questioning scientific dogma; blogs are having a field day.
· The rise in skepticism also came as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, elected like Mr. Obama on promises to combat global warming, was attempting his own emissions-reduction scheme. His administration was forced to delay the implementation of the program until at least 2011, just to get the legislation through Australia’s House. The Senate was not so easily swayed.
· Mr. Fielding, a crucial vote on the bill, was so alarmed by the renewed science debate that he made a fact-finding trip to the United States, attending the Heartland Institute’s annual conference for climate skeptics. He also visited with Joseph Aldy, Mr. Obama’s special assistant on energy and the environment, where he challenged the Obama team to address his doubts. They apparently didn’t.
· This week Mr. Fielding issued a statement: He would not be voting for the bill. He would not risk job losses on “unconvincing green science.” The bill is set to founder as the Australian parliament breaks for the winter.
· Republicans in the United States have, in recent years, turned ever more to the cost arguments against climate legislation. That’s made sense in light of the economic crisis. If Speaker Nancy Pelosi fails to push through her bill, it will be because rural and Blue Dog Democrats fret about the economic ramifications. Yet if the rest of the world is any indication, now might be the time for U.S. politicians to re-engage on the science. One thing for sure: They won’t be alone.
· © 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission
http://enews.core-online.us/mail/util.cfm?gpiv=2100041936.15518.285&gen=1For Immediate Release: June 25, 2009
Media Contact: Niger Innis, National Spokesman, CORE, (702) 633-4464
HOUSE CLIMATE BILL CALLED "IMMORAL" BY MAJOR CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER
Washington, D.C. (June 25, 2009) -- The Waxman-Markey climate bill is "an immoral assault on poor Americans" because it is designed to purposely raise the cost of energy in order to force the working poor to reduce their standard of living, according to one of the nation's leading civil rights champions.
Roy Innis, Chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality -- one of America's oldest civil rights organizations -- made the allegation in a letter to all members of Congress on Wednesday. CORE has been heavily engaged in the national energy policy debate since the publication of Innis' 2007 book, "Energy Keepers, Energy Killers." The book was a Washington Post non-fiction best seller.
"In my 40-plus years as the Chairman of CORE, I have seen few federal bills that would do more harm to America’s working class and low-income citizens and families than the Waxman-Markey climate tax bill," Innis wrote to Members of Congress.
"The Waxman-Markey bill is designed specifically to make the use of fossil fuels more costly," Innis said. "That will have a disproportionate and negative impact on those who now benefit most from the affordable and reliable power that fossil fuels provide: poor and working-class families."
"In fact, an underlying goal of this legislation is the morally repugnant concept that constricting sources of domestic energy and raising energy costs is a good thing because it will force conservation by consumers," Innis said. "That elitist view assumes that poor, working class families have the ability to bear that 'social cost.'"
"The plain truth is this: the poor and working families we represent cannot bear that luxury," Innis told Congress.
"Americans don’t want 'energy welfare' payments from the government to help ease the sting of these government-driven cost increases," Innis wrote. "They want continued affordable and reliable energy, which this bill will constrict."
Innis concluded: "This is an explicitly anti-consumer package that will have huge impacts – both direct and indirect – on the struggling families we represent."
CORE said it plans to launch a national public education campaign against the Waxman-Markey legislation. CORE has more than 100,000 members nationwide.
ALLAN12
27 June 2009
05:09
Earth is cooling, not warming. Global temperatures have been falling for about a decade, after a quarter-century of natural, cyclical warming. Earth also cooled from about 1945 to 1975. There is nothing new here, and humans play no role in this natural warming and cooling cycle.
Still, this does not stop phony environmentalists and other rent-seekers from trying to pick your pocket with scares of global warming.
Now, however, the science is truly settled. Even though many humans buy into the global warming myth, including our undereducated politicians, trillions of plants just aren't buying.
Crop yields in Canada and the USA are 'way down. Wheat is down 20% in Canada and the USA and US corn is down as much as 35%.
The plants have spoken people, and there are more of them than of us. A clear concensus has emerged - there is no global warming crisis, and humans who believe in global warming are dumber than rutabaga.
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thoughtful
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